Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky
Review by Peter Reason I am not sure how I came across this book; I think I followed a link on Twitter. It appealed to me immediately appealed and ordered…
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Shiny New Books
Slow Motion Ghosts by Jeff Noon
Reviewed by Annabel I first discovered Jeff Noon’s weird take on our world when his debut novel Vurt was picked up by a major publisher after being an indie original that went…
The Lost Man by Jane Harper
Reviewed by Annabel I’ll say it up front, Jane Harper’s third novel, The Lost Man, was totally unputdownable! Not having read her first two, The Dry and Force of Nature…
The Real Enid Blyton by Nadia Cohen
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long When I was a little girl I used to receive the latest Famous Five book by Enid Blyton every Christmas. I am pretty sure my mum…
No Place to Lay One’s Head by Francoise Frenkel
Translated by Stephanie Smee Reviewed by Harriet When I was first offered this book for review, I turned it down, for reasons that are now not clear to me. Then…
Melmoth by Sarah Perry
Review by Alice Farrant Helen Franklin is self-repressed, restricting herself from all that is pleasurable or happy. She merely exists alongside Prague, parallel to its beauty. When suddenly, she is…
Things We Nearly Knew by Jim Powell
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Jim Powell’s Things We Nearly Knew is a slice of American smalltown life seen through the eyes of an unnamed bartender. I enjoyed Powell’s second novel,…
Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
Reviewed by Harriet Written in just two months while its author was a patient in a psychiatric clinic, Zelda Fitzgerald’s first and only novel found a publisher in 1932. Three…
Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry
Reviewed by Anne Goodwin Twenty-one-year-old Hiram Carver, assistant surgeon on the USS Orbis in 1833, senses something special about William Borden when he first sees him on board. The sailor…
Middle England by Jonathan Coe
Reviewed by Annabel By the time I’d finished reading Coe’s latest novel, it was about a fortnight after publication and by this time he (and his publisher Penguin Viking) could…
The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space by Owen Hatherley
Review by Karen Langley Author Owen Hatherley has carved out a niche for himself as one of the UK’s foremost commentators on matters architectural and political; his work exists at…
Berta Isla by Javier Marías
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa Review by Anna Hollingsworth I’m not one for classic spy stories: I don’t care if the martinis come shaken or stirred, and as much as…
Dramatic Exchanges, selected & edited by Daniel Rosenthal
Reviewed by Harriet When we think of London’s National Theatre, most of us will envisage the great concrete complex on the South Bank of the Thames, designed by Denis Lasdun…
Where Shall We Run To? by Alan Garner
Reviewed by Annabel I’ve been a fan of Alan Garner’s novels ever since my childhood when I first encountered The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath in the 1960s. I…
The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies At times crime fiction seems a genre so powerful that it sucks in and revitalises other forms. At others, literary fiction appears to piggyback expediently on…
Little by Edward Carey
Reviewed by Simon The name Madame Tussaud is familiar to most of us – particularly to anybody who has been a tourist in London, and visited the waxwork museum that…
Childhood by Gerard Reve
Translated by Sam Garrett Reviewed by Harriet Gerard Reve (1923-2006) was a Dutch writer – according to Wikipedia, one of the ‘Great Three’ of Dutch postwar literature. I have to…
The Women’s Atlas by Joni Seager
Review by Liz Dexter On the front of the book there’s a quote from Catherine Mayer, Co-Founder of the Women’s Equality Party: “The most important book that will be published…
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: the Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce by Colm Tóibín
Review by Rob Spence Tóibín’s title, of course, comes from Lady Caroline Lamb’s snap judgement of Byron; it’s not clear whether the author here intends the epithets to be applied…
The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons, edited by Bob Mankoff
Foreword by David Remnick Review by Hayley Anderton I’m old enough to remember encyclopedias, and lucky to have grown up in a house that had a Victorian collection of books….
Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt by Chris Naunton
Reviewed by Harriet The civilisation of Ancient Egypt exerts a seemingly eternal fascination. All those pharaohs and their dynasties, stretching back to three thousand years before the birth of Christ,…
Only To Sleep by Lawrence Osborne
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies A short walk from my ergonomic study chair is my Chandler bookshelf. It includes some Philip Marlowe fiction not by Chandler: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, A…
Love is Blind by William Boyd
Reviewed by Harriet Sebastian Faulks has called William Boyd ‘the finest storyteller of his generation’, and it’s hard to argue with that. The stories he tells are mostly those of…
Nine Pints: A Journey through the Mysterious, Miraculous World of Blood by Rose George
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Rose George is the author of three previous wide-ranging nonfiction books, about refugees, human waste and foreign shipping. In Nine Pints, she dives deep into the…