July 27, 2017 Holding by Graham Norton Paperback review by Laura Marriott The first thing one does after finishing Holding is breathe a sigh of relief. When a well-known personality branches into fiction…
July 27, 2017 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Paperback review by Lucy Unwin This is not a historical novel. Not just because the facts of slavery in pre-Civil War America are strained…
July 25, 2017 These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath by Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg Review by Karen Langley You could be forgiven for thinking that the last thing the world needs is yet another book about the poet,…
July 25, 2017 The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin Review by Harriet Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by,…
July 21, 2017 Excessively Diverted: Austen Books into Movies By Diana Cheng To wrap up a week of Jane Austen celebration, here’s an annotated list of adaptations of her works on both the…
July 20, 2017 Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley Reviewed by Harriet If you’re a watcher of historical TV documentaries, you won’t need introducing to Lucy Worsley, who presents history programmes for the…
July 19, 2017 Austen-ish – A Reading List of Austen-inspired fiction Compiled by Annabel and Elaine Perhaps more than any other author, including Dickens and the Brontës, Jane Austen has inspired other writers to use…
July 19, 2017 The Watsons – Two Endings Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long I have recently read two finished versions of Austen’s The Watsons, a novel fragment which, they say, she abandoned after her father’s death…
July 18, 2017 The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh Reviewed by Hayley Anderton The Incredible Crime and its author are something of a literary curiosity, Lois Austen-Leigh was the great great grand niece…
July 17, 2017 Teenage Writings by Jane Austen Reviewed by Karen Langley 2017 is turning out to be something of a year of anniversaries: as well as being 100 years since the…
July 17, 2017 Introducing Jane Austen Week By Harriet Jane Austen died two hundred years ago, on 18 July 1817, at the age of just 41. She had anonymously published four…
July 13, 2017 The Portrait by Antoine Laurain Translated by Jane Aitken and Emily Boyce Review by Annabel French author Antoine Laurain has already got himself an army of fans (or should…
July 13, 2017 ReWild: The Art of Returning to Nature by Nick Baker Review by Liz Dexter Nick Baker is a well-known naturalist, writer and broadcaster, whose work here, described by the publisher as “a memoir of…
July 11, 2017 Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba Reviewed by Helen Parry Among the many people Anne Sebba interviewed for this book was the playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg. During the German occupation of…
July 6, 2017 A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor Reviewed by Gill Davies When you were a child did you ever hunt for a lost ball among ferns and leaves and parting them…
July 6, 2017 The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy Reviewed by Lucy Unwin Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize winning debut The God Of Small Things was a sensuous, atmospheric, emotionally powerful book. India’s caste system was…
July 4, 2017 Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy Reviewed by Harriet It’s every parent’s nightmare – one minute your child is there, next minute they’re gone. My own three-year-old daughter once wandered…
July 4, 2017 DIS MEM BER by Joyce Carol Oates Reviewed by Karen Langley American author Joyce Carol Oates is an astonishingly prolific writer: since the publication of her first book in 1963, she’s…
July 4, 2017 Hot Milk by Deborah Levy Review by Annabel This novel was my first encounter with Levy and I’ll confess, I found Hot Milk a difficult book to read. Levy has an…
