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Book reviews

Book review: JAM by Jake Wallis Simons

Book reviews By Apr 02, 2014 2 Comments

As darkness falls on the M25, the flow of traffic comes to a halt. Time passes. More time passes. Then more. Drivers switch off their engines, then get out of their cars. And so the story begins . . . In this bold, state-of-the-nation novel, Jake Wallis Simons brings together characters from all walks of life and explores what happens…

Liz de Jager’s Banished: Book launch and review

Last Thursday, Squizz and I boarded our trusty steed, megabus, and headed to London for our first book launch of 2014. It was for Liz de Jager’s debut YA novel, Banished, the first book in The Blackhart Legacy trilogy, and was held at one of our favourite bookshops, Foyles, on Charing Cross Road. I took full advantage of that and…

Book review: The Gallery of Vanished Husbands by Natasha Solomons

Book reviews By Dec 23, 2013 2 Comments

One of the best things about reading novels is how they can take you into new worlds. The world of any book is, of course, always its author’s creation, whether it be rooted in truth, or based on a skewed version of the world we know, or one entirely of the author’s own imagining but what I mean here is…

Book review: Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës

Book reviews By Dec 19, 2013 No Comments

Any poem by Simon Armitage gets my attention (note to publishers?) and one opens this new short story collection. And what a wonderful poem about Emily Brontë it is, right from its opening lines of Too much rain in the blood, Too much cloud in the lungs to how, after having read Wuthering Heights for the first time, I had…

Book review: The Bookstore by Deborah Meyler

Book reviews By Nov 21, 2013 No Comments

If books generally are hard to resist for this book squirrel, then you can only begin to imagine how excited I get about books featuring those treasure troves called bookshops (or bookstores, if you’re from across the Atlantic). I mean, what book lover doesn’t spend a lot of their time in them, browsing, and yes, okay, buying, when they’re not…

Book review: Project Darcy by Jane Odiwe

Book reviews By Nov 06, 2013 No Comments

After having enjoyed Jane Odiwe’s Searching for Captain Wentworth, I jumped at the chance to read Project Darcy even before knowing anything more about it other than the title and that the cover promised further Time Travels with Jane Austen. Happily, Project Darcy isn’t about the search for a present-day Darcy or the transformation of a modern-day man into someone’s romantic ideal of…

The dark side of Twitter Towers

One of the most popular blog posts I’ve written to date was a post I wrote in 2010 asking Does Twitter sell books?  I posted a picture of my Twitter Towers (all the books I’d heard about through the social networking site) and categorised them, and generally thought that Twitter was pretty good at selling books. To me, at any rate!…

Book review: The Cornish House by Liz Fenwick

Book reviews By Jul 25, 2013 3 Comments

When my family moved back to the UK from Germany, shortly before my baby brother was born, my Welsh father and Scottish mother couldn’t agree where to live, so they looked to England as a compromise solution. And (for any English people reading this) a very fine compromise it was, too! Dad had always loved Cornwall and would have loved to have…

Book review: Summer of ’76 by Isabel Ashdown

Book reviews By Jul 08, 2013 3 Comments

On the day that Isabel Ashdown’s third and latest novel launched, London enjoyed the first real heat of the year. For a lot of people at the event, it seemed as if the weather had been specially ordered. There we all were, sweltering away, while celebrating the launch of Summer of ’76, a book set in the summer of record…

Book review: Tony Hogan bought me an Ice Cream Float before he stole my Ma by Kerry Hudson

Book reviews By Jul 04, 2013 4 Comments

As unusual book titles go, Tony Hogan bought me an Ice Cream Float before he stole my Ma is right up there. Team that with a distinctive cover showing the silhouette of a jumping girl holding a red balloon on a blue background and I knew I wanted to read this debut novel even before its author, Kerry Hudson, dropped by here…