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!…
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…
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…
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…
One of the fun things about being a reader today is sometimes getting the opportunity to meet a favourite author at a book event or getting to chat to them on their blog or through social networking sites. But if they’ve been dead for almost 200 years, this is sadly – and clearly! – no longer an option. You can only…
Judith Kinghorn’s beautifully-written and evocative debut novel The Last Summer was one of my favourite reads of 2012. Which might help to explain why, on the eve of her second novel coming out, I’m only now getting around to trying to do it justice in a review. The Last Summer has been marketed as a book that viewers of Downton Abbey would…
The Penny Bangle is the last in a trilogy of books following the lives and loves of various members of the Denham family. It’s a series I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading and a family who I’m sorry to have to leave behind, no matter how fitting an end The Penny Bangle is to the series. In The Penny Bangle, it’s the turn…
I must admit to having a bit of an aversion to pink. With the notable exception of the singer, P!NK, I try and avoid the colour, especially when it liberally covers a book. But I was only too happy to overcome this irrational dislike if it meant I could read another Kate Johnson novel. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Kate’s…
Having already read and enjoyed Christina Courtenay’s previous two novels, Trade Winds and The Scarlet Kimono, you’d think that I would have learned my lesson and left Highland Storms for a weekend when I had some uninterrupted reading time. But no, despite knowing that I find it incredibly hard to put one of her books down, I picked it up on…
If I tell you that Jane Austen is one of my favourite authors and has been since I was a teenager; that Persuasion is not only my favourite of all her books but one of my all-time favourite books; and that Captain Wentworth is my favourite literary hero, then you’ll probably understand why I might have been slow to flick open…