Today’s Independent Bookshop Week post features Griffin Books in Penarth. It takes its name from its lovely, calm and gentle owner, Mel Griffin, and is a cool haven on the busy high street of this seaside town just south of Cardiff. At the front of the shop, there are carousels of pretty greeting cards and postcards which are as hard to resist…
Eligible is the fourth retelling of a Jane Austen novel in the Austen Project series and arguably the hardest to do because of how well known and loved Pride and Prejudice, the source novel, is but I think Curtis Sittenfeld has pulled it off with aplomb. The Bennet sisters have been summoned from New York City. Liz and Jane are good…
A darker, more addictive read, Susie Steiner’s brilliantly written Manon Bradshaw series gets personal when a murder case threatens characters and relationships so well established in Missing, Presumed, which I reviewed here. As dusk falls a young man staggers through a park, far from home, bleeding heavily from a stab wound. He dies where he falls; cradled by a stranger,…
My second post this Independent Bookshop Week (IBW) is a bittersweet one because the bookshop in question is closing this Saturday, 1 July, and my squirrel sidekick and I will miss our trips there very much. Run by Sarah Rees and her friendly staff, who always give us a warm welcome and sound book suggestions no matter how busy they are,…
Having read and enjoyed Susie Steiner’s debut novel Homecoming, I was excited to read her second, Missing, Presumed, and the first in a new crime series introducing police detective Manon Bradshaw. Mid-December, and Cambridgeshire is blanketed with snow. Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw tries to sleep after yet another soul-destroying Internet date – the low murmuring of her police radio her only solace….
It’s Independent Bookshop Week this week, so I’m posting about some favourites in my part of Wales, starting today with Book-ish in Crickhowell, run by the energetic and lovely Emma and Andrew. It’s not exactly my local but as it’s only about 45 minutes away by car and close to where my in-laws live, I often wangle a bookish stop…
Juliet West’s timely second novel The Faithful has Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts pitch their summer camp near a sidelined and restless teenager’s seaside home, forever changing her life, if not the course of history as is their wider intention. July 1935. In the village of Aldwick on the Sussex coast, sixteen-year-old Hazel faces a long, dull summer with just her self-centred mother Francine for…
Cesca Major’s debut historical novel The Silent Hours takes as its inspiration a truly shocking event which happened during World War II, the anniversary of which fell on 10th June. Set in wartime France, The Silent Hours follows three people whose lives are bound together, before war tears them apart: Adeline, a mute who takes refuge in a convent, haunted by…
I know from personal experience how intense a week’s writing retreat can be; they forge lasting friendships and can be as life-changing for the individual as they are for their writing. But I’m incredibly relieved they’ve never proved to be as devastating as the one which sparks off the central female relationship in Sarah Stovell’s Exquisite. Bo Luxton has it all…
I happened upon Alison Jameson’s novel This family of things towards the end of April on Twitter. It must have been the feathers on its striking cover which caught my eye and once I’d read the blurb, I was left in no doubt. This was a book written for me. On his way back up from the yard Bird had…