Baxter’s Requiem piqued my interest with its cross-generational friendship and an elderly hero unwilling to give up on life just yet. I’m quite partial to both of these in fiction as much as in real life. Mr Baxter is ninety-four years old when he falls down his staircase and grudgingly finds himself resident at Melrose Gardens Retirement Home. Baxter is…
R. O. Kwon’s stunning debut The Incendiaries is a compact and tightly-written campus novel of obsessive love and religious extremism. And I’m excited to tell you about it as part of the blog tour with it being out in the UK today. Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who…
The Way of All Flesh is Ambrose Parry’s first novel in what is hoped will become a series. And it’s off to a very promising start here, making the most of being set against the backdrop of such an exciting time for medicine in a city known for its medical pioneers. Edinburgh, 1847. City of Medicine, Money, Murder. In the city’s Old…
Tom Gregory’s channel swim memoir A Boy in the Water couldn’t be more timely, published as it is the day after Lewis Pugh successfully completed The Long Swim by swimming the length of the English Channel from Cornwall to Dover. Eltham, South London. 1984: the hot fug of the swimming pool and the slow splashing of a boy learning to…
Despite its title, Rebecca John’s The Haunting of Henry Twist isn’t a ghost story in the traditional sense but it does have an ethereal feel to it, and is likely to haunt you long after finishing it. London, 1926: Henry Twist’s heavily pregnant wife leaves home to meet a friend. On the way, she is hit by a bus and killed,…
You can tell from the gorgeous cover with its mediterranean colours that Evonne Wareham’s Summer in San Remo is an altogether breezier caper then her previous romantic suspense novels. Anything could happen when you spend summer in San Remo … Running her busy concierge service usually keeps Cassie Travers fully occupied. But when a new client offers her the strangest…
I always used to associate Miranda Dickinson with the run up to Christmas because that’s when her previous books have come out. But her latest novel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, bucked this trend, coming out earlier this summer, when it was an absolute joy to escape with her and her characters to the Cornish seaside resort of St Ives. Can…
Isabelle Broom’s latest novel, One Thousand Stars and You, is set in Sri Lanka, not somewhere I know at all. However, I was confident that I could vicariously travel there because Isabelle Broom writes about place so very well. She took me to Prague in A Year and a Day and that’s still tiding me over until I actually go. Alice is settling…
I’ve had three of Fredrik Backman’s books waiting patiently on my bookshelves for a while now. Not one of those was Beartown but when one of the book groups I’m in chose it as this month’s read, Beartown became my first Backman. In a large Swedish forest Beartown hides a dark secret . . . Cut-off from everywhere else it experiences the kind…
In her second novel Elizabeth is Missing author Emma Healey casts her forensic eye on a family dynamic put under strain. How do you rescue someone who has already been found? Jen’s fifteen-year-old daughter goes missing for four agonizing days. When Lana is found, unharmed, in the middle of the desolate countryside, everyone thinks the worst is over. But Lana…