Laura Sims’ debut novel, Looker, and her narrator, the Professor, may look slight but it’d be wrong to underestimate their impact. Both are pretty intense and equally capable of causing a stir. The Professor lives in Brooklyn; her partner Nathan left her when she couldn’t have a baby. All she has now is her dead-end teaching job, her ramshackle apartment,…
There’s an insistent pull to the rhythm of its opening pages that drew me into Guy Gunaratne’s debut In Our Mad and Furious City, a novel which gives voice to “London’s scowling youth” and “those of us who had an elsewhere in our blood.” For Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf, growing up under the towers of Stones Estate, summer means what…
If you’re looking for something a little different, something quirky, say, or even geeky, with a superhero for our times, where there’s quiet courage and genuine pathos, a tragic backstory, the hope of a hesitant heart, romance, kindness and humour, then you need to read The Unlikely Heroics of Sam Holloway by Rhys Thomas. Sam Holloway has survived the worst…
Anna Mazzola captivated me with her tense and atmospheric, early Victorian London crime debut The Unseeing and I was keen to see where she went next. The period is once again Victorian for her second novel but, crucially, The Story Keeper* is set twenty years later for reasons which become apparent towards the end of the book. And for this book we escape London…
Hannah Tinti’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley reminds me of adventure books I read as a child, but is the modern-day, grown-up version of them. It’s exactly the kind of book I search for on bookshop shelves. Which probably explains why I loved it. After years spent living on the run, Samuel Hawley moves with his teenage daughter Loo…
The third outing for Sarah Hilary’s D. I. Marnie Rome is a gripping read: if it hadn’t been for the pesky day job and equally pesky family demanding meals, I could quite easily have finished this in one glorious binge-reading session. It’s a terrific story set in present-day London which, as with the author’s other books, not only deals with…
At the beginning of February, I was lucky enough to be at a Rooftop Book Club event run by Headline Publishing where Monica Wood read us a couple of extracts from The One-in-a-Million Boy*, and also answered questions about how she came to write it. I knew then that I’d enjoy the book; what I didn’t realise at the time was how much…
One family, one town, devastated by one tragic event. Can you ever know what those closest to you are really capable of? When Stephen gets a phone call to say his mother isn’t well, he knows he must go to her straight away. But he dreads going back. He has never been able to understand why his mother chose to…
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…