A hidden stash of telegrams and old letters sets Sam Cooper off on a transatlantic journey to see the crumbling family home and meet the infirm grandmother her mother never even mentioned while she was alive, only for her to discover that much darker family skeletons have also been kept hidden away. Winter 1954, and in a dilapidated apartment in…
Curated by book squirrels
Book reviews
Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s debut novel introduces us to relatable singleton and career girl, Yinka, and the gaggle of modern-day Mrs Bennets that are her Nigerian mother and associated Aunties, intent on matchmaking and publicly praying for her to find a man in Yinka, Where is Your Huzband? The Nigerian Accent DictionaryHuzband (pronounced auz-band) noun1. A male partner in a marriage e.g. Yinka’s younger…
Annie Ward mixes together a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and alcohol with all the suspicion, gossip and lies circulating among the pushy soccer moms, its charismatic sports coach, and staff at an elite private school in the Colorado mountains to great effect in The Lying Club. At an elite private school nestled in the Colorado mountains, a tangled web…
When six friends book a weekend stay at a remote barn on the Northumberland moors, a violent overnight storm exposes the cracks in their relationships, some of which could prove fatal in Gilly Macmillan’s The Long Weekend. In an isolated retreat, deep in the Northumbria moors, three women arrive for a weekend getaway. Their husbands will be joining them in…
Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s The Newcomer is a crime novel with a difference: for here, as the title suggests, the victim doesn’t cede the story to the perpetrators or those investigating, but instead remains the main focus of our attention throughout. When her 29-year-old daughter Paulina goes missing on a sleepy pacific island, Judy Novak suspects the worst. Her fears are…
Caroline Smailes’ novel, The Unwrapping of Theodora Quirke, could be exactly the read you need this festive season, whether you string fairy lights everywhere at the earliest opportunity or curse when you hear the opening bars of a Christmas song. And now’s the perfect time to tell you all about it. Here’s why: Yesterday (6 December) was the feast day…
In A Ghost in the Throat Doireann Ní Ghríofa chronicles her personal response to a famous eighteenth-century poem in captivating prose and lays bare her own life while discovering that of the poet who wrote it. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem that…
Government clerk and reluctant spy Laurence Jago has good reason to conceal his French language prowess on gaining promotion and leaving the Foreign Office attics for the corridors of power in Leonora Nattrass’s debut novel Black Drop. July 1794, and the streets of London are filled with rumours of revolution. Political radical Thomas Hardy is to go on trial for…
Mary Beth Keane’s novel The Walking People is a mesmerising family story spanning more than fifty years. It crosses the Atlantic from west coast Ireland to New York on the Eastern Seaboard, where what starts out as a reluctant immigrant’s journey ultimately becomes a real voyage of self-discovery for one young woman. 1960s Rural Ireland. Greta Cahill must abandon her…
Deputy Coroner Clay Edison returns for a case which puts his loyalties and limits of endurance to the test in The Burning, the latest collaboration from father and son writing team, Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman. When a wealthy man is found murdered in his hilltop home, Deputy Coroner Clay Edison is shocked to discover a link to his own brother…