Robert Dinsdale’s The Toymakers has as its setting Papa Jack’s Emporium, a strange and magical toyshop that opens with the first frost of winter, and closes again when snowdrops appear. Do you remember when you believed in magic? It is 1917, and while war wages across Europe, in the heart of London, there is a place of hope and enchantment….
Amy Lloyd’s second novel One More Lie takes a look at the human stories behind those evil monsters and animals people are dubbed by sensational newspaper headlines and in the public outrage voiced via social media comments. It makes for a gripping read. Charlotte wants a fresh start. She wants to forget her past, forget her childhood crime – and,…
I might not have discovered Kings of the Yukon so soon if Adam Weymouth’s book hadn’t been shortlisted for the PFD/Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Last year, I was lucky enough to be invited to a bloggers’ event in London where we met the authors, who read excerpts and answered questions, before copies of each book were…
Jasper Jones has been sitting on my bookshelf for a long time. I can’t even remember when or where I bought it, although I have a feeling that I wanted to read more Australian fiction while I waited for a new Tim Winton book to come out. I still didn’t read it back then but it leapt out at me…
In Daisy Jones & The Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid charts the trajectory of a young woman who goes from hard-partying groupie to ubiquitous band’s frontwoman in 1970s LA. For a while, Daisy Jones & The Six were everywhere. Their albums were on every turntable, they sold out arenas from coast to coast, their sound defined an era. And then, on…
Hame is a book I happened upon thanks to the publisher Vintage tweeting about it on St Andrew’s Day last year. The Scottish island setting and a literary trail in search of a mysterious poet really appealed to me and it seems only fitting to post my review of it on St Andrew’s Day, one year on. Here’s what it’s about: Hame,…
Tom Gregory’s channel swim memoir A Boy in the Water couldn’t be more timely, published as it is the day after Lewis Pugh successfully completed The Long Swim by swimming the length of the English Channel from Cornwall to Dover. Eltham, South London. 1984: the hot fug of the swimming pool and the slow splashing of a boy learning to…
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…
I’ve had three of Fredrik Backman’s books waiting patiently on my bookshelves for a while now. Not one of those was Beartown but when one of the book groups I’m in chose it as this month’s read, Beartown became my first Backman. In a large Swedish forest Beartown hides a dark secret . . . Cut-off from everywhere else it experiences the kind…