Eve Chase’s second novel The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde is a dual timeline story about mothers and daughters, sisters, secrets and grief, which switches between 1959 and some fifty years later when new owners move in to the house at the centre of a tragic local mystery. In the heatwave of 1959, four sisters arrive at Applecote Manor to relive…
Fredrick Backman’s Beartown was a firm favourite* among the books I read last year, so I was very happy to see him return to that ice hockey town in a large Swedish forest in Us Against You. Can a broken town survive a second tragedy? By the time the last goal is scored, someone in Beartown will be dead ….
Isabelle Broom’s latest novel, One Thousand Stars and You, is set in Sri Lanka, not somewhere I know at all. However, I was confident that I could vicariously travel there because Isabelle Broom writes about place so very well. She took me to Prague in A Year and a Day and that’s still tiding me over until I actually go. Alice is settling…
What better way to kick off 2018 than by spending some time with my favourite Dutch pensioner and rebel Hendrik Groen? I am so happy to see him pen a sequel to his first Secret Diary which I reviewed here. I’ve missed him and his friends and wondered how they were getting on in their care home in North Amsterdam….
Ali Land’s debut novel Good Me, Bad Me has as its narrator a distinctive female voice, one that grabbed this reader from the very beginning as she tells her story of escape and survival. This is a perspective which is fast becoming a trend going by my recent reads: victim lit or, perhaps more appropriately, survivor lit. I have a feeling…
Even before meeting those winning and winsome literary silver arctic foxes Harold Fry* and Allan Karlsson**, I’ve long held a special place in my heart for older men with a bit of a twinkle in their eye and a penchant for roguish mischief and storytelling, thanks to a much-loved and missed uncle, and a godfather who wrote the best letters…
Prague is high on my list of places to visit but not somewhere I’ve managed to get to, unfortunately, and with my love of European Christmas markets and wandering medieval towns with cobbled streets and stories and legends at every turn, I’ve always imagined that it’s especially magical this time of year. Happily, one of the joys of reading is being…