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…
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…
When Pete and Maddie discover that the child they brought home from hospital two years ago is not the same one as Maddie gave birth to, an already fraught situation rapidly blows up into something altogether more dangerous and frightening in JP Delaney’s latest novel Playing Nice. Pete Riley answers the door one morning to a parent’s worst nightmare. On…
Tom Vowler’s second novel, That Dark Remembered Day, opens with what could be a recurring nightmare: a boy on the cusp of young adulthood gets off the school bus in Spring 1983, full of hope and fuzzy expectations and, on his way home, walks into something that quickly shatters that child’s happy innocence forever. The book then fast-forwards to Autumn…
On the day that Isabel Ashdown’s third and latest novel launched, London enjoyed the first real heat of the year. For a lot of people at the event, it seemed as if the weather had been specially ordered. There we all were, sweltering away, while celebrating the launch of Summer of ’76, a book set in the summer of record…
Book review: Tony Hogan bought me an Ice Cream Float before he stole my Ma by Kerry Hudson
Book reviewsAs unusual book titles go, Tony Hogan bought me an Ice Cream Float before he stole my Ma is right up there. Team that with a distinctive cover showing the silhouette of a jumping girl holding a red balloon on a blue background and I knew I wanted to read this debut novel even before its author, Kerry Hudson, dropped by here…