I’m welcoming Tom Vowler to the blog today. Tom is the author of short story collection, The Method, novels What Lies Within and That Dark Remembered Day and is here to talk about his latest story collection, Dazzling the Gods, which I reviewed for Wales Arts Review. Tom, you travel from Ireland to Paris, the Gaza Strip, from London to…
Sometimes all I need to nudge me into reading a book I’ve been meaning to get to… is to discover that there’s a sequel coming out! Which is how I finally came to read Fiona Cummins’ Rattle and its sequel The Collector in such quick succession. Jakey escaped with his life and moved to a new town. His rescue was a miracle but…
Cesca Major’s debut historical novel The Silent Hours takes as its inspiration a truly shocking event which happened during World War II, the anniversary of which fell on 10th June. Set in wartime France, The Silent Hours follows three people whose lives are bound together, before war tears them apart: Adeline, a mute who takes refuge in a convent, haunted by…
Having roamed across its summer meadows with peach juice dribbling down chins, while exploring grief in her evocative debut novel The Night Rainbow, Claire King returns to Southern France for her second, Everything Love Is. The novel shifts between a floating community on the slow-moving waterways just outside Toulouse and into the city itself where the political situation seems altogether more fluid and…
If you’ve always enjoyed the darker side of fairytales, be they Grimm’s original tales or Angela Carter’s delicious interpretations, Claire Fuller’s more modern take on one might be the book for you. Our Endless Numbered Days opens in the stifling summer of the 1976 heatwave, in London, but very soon veers off into the cool dark forest of our nightmares….
The publication date for Judith Kinghorn’s fourth novel, The Echo of Twilight, is fast approaching early next month but, given the season, now seems the perfect time to offer someone a copy of her previous novel, The Snow Globe. Give The Snow Globe a gentle shake and you’ll find a father falling off his pedestal, a mother forced to reassess her life, both…
Kate Hamer’s The Girl in the Red Coat stands out among the growing number of Girls in book titles not simply thanks to its striking red cover. Open that up and you’ll discover not one but two truly engrossing stories, narrated in turn by a mother and her daughter, and blending modern-day anxieties and a nightmare situation with fairytale-like qualities to make…
Hausfrau is the German word for housewife so at first glance this isn’t a book likely to appeal to me. But it’s an English-language novel using the title and that piqued my interest. Besides, ever since almost missing out on Emma Chapman’s excellent How to Be a Good Wife, which is now a firm favourite, I’m wary of discounting wifey books….
Tasha Kavanagh’s Things We Have in Common is an unsettling but riveting novel about loneliness, about being made to feel different but still wanting to belong, about the desperate need for friendship and making human connections and, ultimately, about obsession. If you’ve ever felt outside a clique or the in-crowd, as if you’re one of life’s observers, destined to be a…
For a psychological thriller, Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell is different enough to help it stand out in an increasingly crowded genre. What appealed to me about it in particular is that its about the two survivors of a relatively short-term crime, who tell their stories in alternating chapters throughout the book, but we first meet up with them years after the event…