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 there is always the fear that…
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 through the wonderful, allegorical, imagination of…
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, writer and artist Sylvia Plath. She’s…
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, I found myself quite distracted by…
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 small and big screens, productions that…
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 BBC, in which she often dresses…
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 her characters and settings to write…
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 in 1805. I have found it…
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 of Jane Austen. She almost certainly…
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 Russian Revolution took place, it’s also…
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 novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811),…
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 that be ‘armée’!) thanks to Gallic…
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 sorts” but really very different from…
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 France, Grumberg’s Jewish mother paid a…
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 quick to look … come suddenly…
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 the motivator of the plot, and…
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 off in a busy market in…
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 produced over 40 novels as well…
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 oblique style that doesn’t yield its…