Reviewed by Annabel There was a lot of pre-publishing buzz about Daisy Jones and The Six – it was instantly signed up by Amazon for a TV series with Reese Witherspoon producing. But, in this case, there was no need to worry about the book not being worth the hype, for this book is a…
Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies Some novels strike such an authentic note in the beginning that they give you the immediate assurance — the eagerness — to read on. You can’t help being hooked by the individual quality of the writing and the distinctive angle of insight. This is Mo Phelan, a retired porn actress stranded…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton There are all sorts of reasons I pick up cookbooks to look at: I like the cover, I like the author, the subject grabs me, someone has recommended it, and so on. The only reason I’ll buy it though is if it passes the flick test – if I don’t want…
Translated by Sam Taylor Reviewed by Annabel Slimani’s first novel to be translated into English, Lullaby, took the English-speaking publishing world by storm. It was a literary thriller telling the story of a murderous nanny and what made her that way, (reviewed by Harriet here). It was the must-read book at the time, an instant…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton I might not have picked this book up if I hadn’t realised I was vaguely squeamish about saying the word vagina, or writing it, publicly. My family and friends are not noticeably prudish yet we talk in euphemisms, or don’t talk at all, about this one part of our bodies. A…
Reviewed by Annabel For some, this debut novel was a surprise inclusion on the longlist for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction this year – for a start, it’s a dark comedy, and comedy rarely features in prize longlists. I, however, was delighted to see it there, for it does have a heart and is…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth If you asked me about the time I first discovered Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, I could tell you this was when I read the author’s much-praised second novel, Waking Lions. I couldn’t give you the full synopsis of the plot, though: I recall the protagonist being an Israeli neurosurgeon who, on one of…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Emens is a professor of Law who made the discovery a while back that there was something invisible and other than “chores”: the stuff that goes before chores (working out meal plans for the week, researching sofas, choosing child care providers, applying for benefits, sorting out insurance, etc., etc.), which is…
By Rebecca Foster Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, the Wellcome Book Prize is an annual award sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation founded by Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936 and dedicated to improving health. Books are put forward by publishers (which can nominate up to three titles each), must have been…
Reviewed by Rob Spence It probably doesn’t occur to many people as they struggle to fix bolt B to batten F of the Ikea flatpack wardrobe that the exercise in which they are engaged had its genesis a century ago in the vision of Walter Gropius, whose commitment to well-designed houses and furniture for the…
Reviewed by Harriet This is Nickolas Butler’s third novel. He was widely praised for his first, Shotgun Lovesongs, which was published in 2014, and equally so for his second, The Hearts of Men. Is Little Faith going to be the third success in a row? I would say yes, without a doubt. ‘Powerful’, ‘tender’ ‘gripping’…
Reviewed by Helen Parry Although Marina Warner is perhaps best known (and deservedly) for her magnificent work on fairy tales, she has long been writing about other aspects of culture: from her exploration of the cult of the Virgin Mary in Alone of All her Sex, to figures of fear and horror in No Go…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Looking out from my inconsequential life, I’m often envious of people who save lives on a regular basis – doctors, surgeons, EMTs, firefighters, and those everyday heroes who dive in to save someone who’s drowning. Maybe I’ve recommended a book that provided some much-needed entertainment or reassurance, or kept overseas scientists…
Introduced by Sarah Lonsdale with notes by Kate Macdonald Reviewed by Karen Langley The name of Rose Macaulay is not one that will necessarily be well known to the casual reader nowadays. Prolific and extremely popular during her day, she’s one of those women writers of the twentieth century who’ve perhaps become marginalized; there are…
Review by Peter Reason I am approaching my seventy fifth birthday. As I look back, I see my life has been overshadowed by the gathering ecological catastrophe. I have a childhood memory, strangely both clear and hazy, that was an intimation of things to come. As a small boy in the 1950s I am sitting…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Louise Levene’s last novel, The Following Girls, was a pitch-perfect satire on ‘70s schoolgirl life whose period detail rang more than a few bells for me. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of that detail in Happy Little Bluebirds, set in Hollywood just over a year before the attack on Pearl…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth The Troubles are exploding – in the best possible sense – onto the literary scene: two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, Anna Burns’s masterfully haunting Milkman was awarded the Booker Prize. However, the novel’s success came with criticisms of its difficulty, with various commentators describing it as everything from ‘impenetrable’…
Translated by Stephen Sartarelli Reviewed by Gill Davies In addition to the Inspector Montalbano novels, best known to English readers from the TV adaptations in the BBC4 Saturday night crime slot, Andrea Camilleri has also written historical crime fiction. The Sect of Angels, first published in Italian in 2011, is set in Sicily in the…
Reviewed by Rob Spence English-language fiction set in colonial Malaya tended in the past to focus on the lives of the Empire types who ruled the roost back then: Somerset Maugham is particularly guilty of this, and even Anthony Burgess’s masterly Malayan Trilogy, peopled as it is with characters drawn from all of the ethnic…
Translated by Asa Yoneda Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth The title of Yukiko Motoya’s short story collection Picnic in the Storm could easily be a description of the author’s literary life. In her native Japan, Motoya is reaping prize after prize, yet the young writer writes about the ordinary and everyday with an ease and a…
Reviewed by Harriet It was a great loss to the world of fiction when Helen Dunmore sadly died in 2017. Fortunately for her admirers, of which I am happy to be one, she left a legacy of short stories, some never before published, which have now appeared in one volume. Her son, who edited this…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter I received a copy of this book by Malala Yousafzai’s father from NetGalley and then managed to find a copy of her own I Am Malala, which I read first. This is actually the right way round to do it, as this current book assumes a bit of knowledge about who…
Reviewed by Simon Hurrah to Dean Street Press and their continued Furrowed Middlebrow series, bringing back underrated women writers that most of us haven’t heard of before. Elizabeth Eliot certainly fits that category for me, but after reading Alice (1949), I’ll be keen to read more Eliot. Despite being called Alice, the narrator is Margaret…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Both Melissa Harrison’s previous novels are notable for their vividly evocative descriptions of the English countryside, the kind of thing readers are treated to in the very best nature writing. All Among the Barley goes several steps further with a powerful piece of storytelling set in the early ‘30s when a…
Reviewed by Rob Spence East Anglia has quite a lot of previous when it comes to crime fiction: Colin Watson’s chronicles of Flaxborough, James Runcie’s Grantchester mysteries, and Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey series all make use of the particular topography of the fen country. Looming over them all of course is Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine…
