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…
Curated by book squirrels
Book reviews
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…
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…
Ann-Marie MacDonald lures you into Fayne‘s liminal spaces and disputed borderlands alongside Charlotte, a character who will hold you captivated in this deliciously gothic, queer coming-of-age story. In the late 19th century, Charlotte Bell is growing up at Fayne, a vast and lonely estate straddling the border between England and Scotland, where she has been kept from the world by…
Anne Worthington’s debut novel The Unheard takes us through three key moments in Tom Pullan’s life, the reverse chronology of which making what is an already deeply affecting story all the more impactful. Tom Pullan knows that the people who visit him are trying to tell him something, but he cannot remember what. He knows the faces in his memory,…
Chris Parker gathers together those moments that go to make up Emma and Madryn’s friendship over the years, splicing them together with anecdotes about a Toronto couple who post videos on YouTube and everyday happenings from Emma’s family life, all the while making frequent switches in time and place, to create his kaleidoscopic debut novel, Nameless Lake. Emma and Madryn…
As a storm heads towards the city, a midwife in Reykavik finds a stash of letters and manuscripts left behind by her grandaunt, and in going through them rediscovers the woman she remembers in Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s Animal Life. In the days leading up to Christmas, Dómhildur delivers her 1,922nd baby. Beginnings and endings are her family trade; she comes…
Twenty years ago, three young friends vanished from the scene of an accident, which left another badly injured. Now in Claire Douglas’ The Girls Who Disappeared, journalist Jenna Halliday arrives in town to cover the milestone anniversary, only to discover that loss, secrets and local lore still haunt the place and its inhabitants. Twenty years ago: One rainy night, Olivia Rutherford…