Mary Beth Keane’s novel The Half Moon tells the story of a marriage breakdown and a bar in crisis and it takes place over one week of winter storms where things come to a head. Malcolm, bartender at the Half Moon, has always dreamed of owning a bar, and when his boss finally retires, he seizes his chance. His wife,…
Nut Press
Curated by book squirrels
Dive into the waves off Dungeness If only Alexandra Cupidi had turned south instead of north, she would have found the dead woman.Instead it is her vulnerable daughter Zoë who stumbles across Mimi Greene’s lifeless body on the shoreline. A regular wild swimmer with a group of close friends, it’s out of character for Mimi to have been swimming alone,…
Gethan Dick’s novel Water in the Desert Fire in the Night is a story of hope and resilience which sees disparate neighbours band together after most of London (and the world’s population) is wiped out. Here is a novel about hope, wolves, companionship and resilience, hunger and gold. It’s about an underachieving millennial, a retired midwife and a charismatic Dubliner…
1 March is St David’s Day here in Wales and heralds the start of Dewithon or the Reading Wales Challenge, started by Paula at Book Jotter and now handed over to Karen at BookerTalk. Karen asked me to write about my favourite fiction from Welsh authors, so here’s my top twelve, in alphabetical order of author, because it was hard…
Dominique dreams of her father’s face in the waters of Angel Falls in Venezuela and shortly after, he contacts her for the first time in 30 years. She travels to Paris for answers in My Hummingbird Father. When artist Dominique receives a letter from her dying father, a reckoning with repressed memories and a pull for romantic and familial love…
Marriage to a London doctor and a new life far from her family in Cheshire is even stranger, and much more dangerous than Madeleine Brewster ever could have imagined in Jody Cooksley’s The Small Museum. London, 1873. Madeleine Brewster’s marriage to Dr Lucius Everley was meant to be the solution to her family’s sullied reputation. After all, Lucius is a…
Maggie Armstrong’s linked collection of short stories, Old Romantics, explores a young Dublin woman’s life through from her early adulthood to a fractious blended family life in the pandemic. Whether a catastrophic road trip, an ill-advised career move or a sinister encounter on the beach, these stories dig at the heart of what it is to be alone and alienated…
Maman by F E Birch is a tense and bruising encounter when one of the police’s own finds herself on the receiving end of their procedures and processes. DS Joanna Armstrong, a top child protection detective, becomes the accused when one of her twin babies develops facial bruising – sending her into a spiralling post-natal psychosis. Her life falls apart…
I’m the closing ceremony, if you will, on the blog tour for Stephen Clarke’s Merde at the Paris Olympics. This seventh book in Clarke’s bestselling series finds Englishman Paul West living in Paris, while it is gearing up for the 2024 Olympics. Paul accepts a job translating for a French group, who are campaigning to get pétanque accepted as an…
Disgraced Laurence Jago decamps to his Cornish hometown in Scarlet Town, the third book in the series by Leonora Nattrass. Arriving in the midst of a chaotic election week, he encounters some familiar faces from his former life and soon after when a body is discovered, Laurence will be tasked with investigating. 1796. Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago…