The third outing for Sarah Hilary’s D. I. Marnie Rome is a gripping read: if it hadn’t been for the pesky day job and equally pesky family demanding meals, I could quite easily have finished this in one glorious binge-reading session. It’s a terrific story set in present-day London which, as with the author’s other books, not only deals with…
It’s a rare book that can immerse me in another world and time when I’m teaching homestay students but Anna Mazzola’s debut novel, The Unseeing, managed to do just that. And it kept me up far too late while doing so! Out today from Tinder Press, The Unseeing takes a real historical crime as its inspiration for this story of a…
If you liked the atmospheric writing of The Loney, you’ll enjoy this haunting novel set just up the coast around Morecambe Bay with its seeping, shifting sands, creeping decay and sinister Sycamores full of starlings. These last two are helping nature to reclaim the abandoned family home Annette Clifford inherits. She’s an unwilling beneficiary, reluctantly returning to deal with the…
Clover Quinn was a surprise. She used to imagine she was the good kind, now she’s not sure. She’d like to ask Dad about it, but growing up in the saddest chapter of someone else’s story is difficult. She tries not to skate on the thin ice of his memories. Darren has done his best. He’s studied his daughter like…
I initially wanted to read The House at the Edge of Night for the title alone but when I read the blurb, I definitely knew I had to read it. I’ve always had a weakness for island stories, perhaps because I come from an island nation, and this one had the added attraction of being set on an island off the…
With her seventh novel, This Must Be The Place, Maggie O’Farrell quickly and skilfully wraps you up in story and takes you on an emotional journey through place and time. This novel is wide in scope and ambition, a story of and for our times, but it’s also forensic in its detail, focusing in on one modern family, and ultimately, two people and…
When Leo Plumb drives off drunk from a party in a sports car with a nineteen-year-old waitress in tow, to the moral and legal fallout must be added the horrible inconvenience to his brother and sisters. Leo’s rehab costs have severely depleted ‘the nest’ – the family’s joint trust fund that would have cut them loose from their myriad financial…
Fever at Dawn is based on letters sent between Péter Gárdos’ parents shortly after the end of the Second World War. When I saw it described as “whimsical, poignant and completely charming” in a review posted on Twitter, I knew it sounded like my kind of read. I didn’t know much more about Fever at Dawn except that its author is Hungarian and,…
At the beginning of February, I was lucky enough to be at a Rooftop Book Club event run by Headline Publishing where Monica Wood read us a couple of extracts from The One-in-a-Million Boy*, and also answered questions about how she came to write it. I knew then that I’d enjoy the book; what I didn’t realise at the time was how much…
Adam Baron’s novel Blackheath is blackly comic and almost forensic in its detail: he lifts the roof on middle class urbanites who appear to have it all, examining the lives of two families in particular and fully exposing them to the reader. You see their thought processes take shape as they (often silently) voice their daily concerns; watch them manoeuvre…