Kate Marshall dives into a new case in Shallow Sands, the second book in this exciting new series from Robert Bryndza, when an initial discovery of hers brings something altogether more disturbing to the surface. When Kate Marshall finds the bloated body of a young man floating in the Shadow Sands reservoir, the authorities label it a tragic accident. But…
Curated by book squirrels
Book reviews
Sally Magnusson’s The Ninth Child is a winning blend of folklore and historical fiction incorporating real people, places and engineering projects, all brought to the shores of Loch Katrine in 1856, where the boundary between our world and the land of faery is in danger of being disturbed. Loch Katrine, 1856. Isabel Aird is aghast when her husband is appointed doctor…
Tyler Keevil’s novel Your Still Beating Heart begins with a random and unimaginable tragedy, which dramatically alters the trajectory of one woman’s life, and those she’ll now encounter along the way. All it takes to change your life is a single moment. A random stabbing on a London bus leaves a young woman widowed and detached from her previous world. Stripped of a…
In Jennie Fields’ Cold War novel Atomic Love, a once brilliant scientist, who was fired from the Manhattan Project, finds herself wrestling with intense and conflicting emotions when an ex-colleague and former lover suddenly comes back into her life and the FBI pressures her to get close to him again. Chicago, 1950. Rosalind Porter has always defied expectations – in…
Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books is Cathy Rentzenbrink’s love letter to the books in her life, and how they’ve influenced and shaped her, while also providing a source of comfort and connection with others. For as long as she can remember, Cathy Rentzenbrink has lost and found herself in stories. Growing up she was rarely seen without…
Nydia Hetherington’s A Girl Made of Air twirled across my Twitter timeline with its stunning cover earlier this summer and, as soon as I saw it, I knew I had to read it. This is the story of The Greatest Funambulist Who Ever Lived… Born into a post-war circus family, our nameless star was unwanted and forgotten, abandoned in the…
Kirsty Eyre’s Cow Girl is the wonderfully warm and witty debut novel from the winner of last year’s inaugural Comedy Women in Print Prize. When her father falls ill, Billie returns home to the Yorkshire farm which she left behind for life in London. The transition back to country lass from city girl isn’t easy, not least because leaving London…
Romy Hausmann’s Dear Child begins where other thrillers often end and takes the breaking news event we might hear about—a young woman escaping from captivity with children in tow—as her starting point, before showing us what life was like for them and how they fare once free. A windowless shack in the woods. Lena’s life and that of her two…
Vanessa Savage’s second book, The Woods, tells the unsettling story of three families, whose lives are intertwined, and two sisters, who need to unearth what happened ten years ago, before they can move on. For Tess, her older sister Bella is her whole world. She’s smart and beautiful and popular – everything Tess isn’t – and since the death of…
In his second novel, We Germans, Alexander Starritt poses an intriguing question to one generation from another and asks what it was like to be on the German side during the Second World War. When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially…