Guest post: Author Evonne Wareham on Researching Locations in Lockdown

Authors, Writing By Oct 20, 2020 2 Comments

A big thank you to Kath – and Squizzey – for inviting me onto the blog today to mark the publication of my fifth book, A Wedding on the Riviera. One of my trademarks as a writer is my fondness for glamorous locations. Kath suggested I might talk about the complexities of researching locations when in lockdown – so that’s…

Book Review: The Ninth Child by Sally Magnusson

Book reviews By Oct 02, 2020 No Comments

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…

Book Review: Your Still Beating Heart by Tyler Keevil

Book reviews By Sep 30, 2020 No Comments

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…

Book Review: Atomic Love by Jennie Fields

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…

Book Review: Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink

Book reviews By Sep 17, 2020 5 Comments

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…

Book Review: A Girl Made of Air by Nydia Hetherington

Book reviews By Sep 04, 2020 No Comments

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…

Book Review: Cow Girl by Kirsty Eyre

Book reviews By Sep 03, 2020 4 Comments

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…

Book Review: Dear Child by Romy Hausmann, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

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…

Book Review: The Woods by Vanessa Savage

Book reviews By Aug 27, 2020 6 Comments

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…

Book Review: We Germans by Alexander Starritt

Book reviews By Aug 12, 2020 No Comments

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…