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…
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…
In her latest novel, The Couple at No.9, Claire Douglas explores the nightmare scenario of what happens when building work unearths human remains in the back garden of a young couple’s new home. When pregnant Saffron Cutler moves into 9 Skelton Place with boyfriend Tom and sets about renovations, the last thing she expects is builders uncovering a body. Two bodies, in…
Someone might be getting away with murder in Romy Hausmann’s novel, Sleepless, an ambitious cat-and-mouse thriller, about guilt, coercive control, social inequality, retribution and justice. It’s over, my angel. Today I’m going to die. Just like her. He’s won.It’s been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she’s wanted nothing more than…
Tammye Huf’s debut novel A More Perfect Union is a remarkable love story—one inspired by that of her great great grandparents—between an Irish immigrant and a household slave he encounters on a Virginian plantation, and their attempt to overcome every obstacle and prejudice to be together. Henry O’Toole sails to America in 1848 to escape poverty and famine in Ireland,…
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…
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…
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…
Book Review: Dear Child by Romy Hausmann, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
Book reviews, German booksRomy 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…