The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji
Translated by Ho-Ling Wong Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a very unusual book, and I initially disliked its artificiality – extreme, even by the standards of sealed room murder…
Translated by Ho-Ling Wong Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a very unusual book, and I initially disliked its artificiality – extreme, even by the standards of sealed room murder…
Translated by Philip Boehm Reviewed by Gill Davies This is an important republication of a novel which first appeared eighty years ago under a pen name and in translation as…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Deep time has been a persistent theme in British nonfiction over the last couple of years, showing up in books like Time Song by Julia Blackburn,…
Reviewed by Annabel With The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers brings her Wayfarers series to a close. The quartet began in 2015 with The Long Way to a…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth After a year of daily Covid death reports, death really wasn’t something I wanted to hear any more of, let alone read a whole book about…
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long When I was a little girl I kept a diary. It was pink and fluffy with a lock and a key, easily broken if anybody had…
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth “At a loss for words”, “in awe” and “confused but thrilled” are all phrases that I could use to describe my feelings when I reached the…
Reviewed by Harriet It may not have escaped your attention that 2021 is the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats. Yes, on 23 February 1821, the 25-year-old poet…
Reviewed by Terence Jagger The cathedral, and the difficulties building it, both physical, financial, and aesthetic, dominate the early parts of the book, and brood over the whole story, so…
Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies Joan Didion knows that language is not a windowpane. Clarity, yes; transparency, no. To report a fact requires arranging words. That entails expressing an attitude, a…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton Northus is a new project from Michael Walmer (who’s own reprint series will be familiar to many readers here) and the Shetland born, currently Edinburgh based,…
Reviewed by Annabel A novel about the increasingly toxic relationship between an old art historian and his young acolyte set in Florence was always going to be a book I…
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long There is a scene in Charade, a 1964 film which Cary Grant made with Audrey Hepburn, in which the following exchange takes place: Reggie Lambert (Hepburn)…
Translated by Christina MacSweeney Reviewed by Pete Freeth Havana Year Zero is a delightfully unusual detective story from Karla Suárez and translated into English by Christina MacSweeney. Set in the…
Translated by Rachel Ward Reviewed by Annabel I’ve come late to German ‘Queen of Krimi’ Simone Buchholz’s novels. Hotel Cartagena is the ninth of her books featuring the Hamburg-based State…
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Every millennial woman should have this on her bookshelf’ says Pandora Sykes on the front of Nell Frizzell’s new book. New in the sense that it’s just…
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies Forty years ago I spent some time on the motel strip at Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to do some hiking in the magnificent Smoky Mountains. At…
Translated by Adam King Reviewed by Gill Davies John Kåre Rake is a successful Norwegian screen writer and this is his first novel. It’s a mysterious thriller that uses its…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter Back at the beginning of the first lockdown, Grayson Perry, potter and tapestry maker extraordinaire and no stranger to intimate and challenging TV shows, ran an…