Alice and the Fly by James Rice
Reviewed by Meghan Alice and the Fly opens with Greg, a very shy, awkward teen boy who is deathly afraid of Them – spiders. This fear permeates many of his thoughts, and amongst…
Reviewed by Meghan Alice and the Fly opens with Greg, a very shy, awkward teen boy who is deathly afraid of Them – spiders. This fear permeates many of his thoughts, and amongst…
Reviewed by Paul Fishman Why Glass? And, for that matter, why glass? Well, first there’s the protagonist, or hero of sorts, Günther Glass. (Yes, it’s a play on words and a…
Reviewed by Victoria This is a debut novel from a short story writer, and there’s a way in which you can sense the palimpsest of shorter fiction underneath the sweep…
Reviewed by Harriet I hope some children today still read E. Nesbit as avidly as I did, and my own children did. I loved everything of hers, but a particular…
Compiled by Annabel. 1. Born in 1908 in Manchester, the Graham family moved to Perranporth in Cornwall when Winston was seventeen. He stayed there until 1959, eventually settling in East…
Reviewed by Annabel In recent weeks, it seems that the entire female population of the UK (well, at least all those of a certain age!), have been glued to our…
Reviewed by Bookgazing Click HERE for more shininess about The Bees… Flora 717 begins life as a voiceless sanitation worker, set to clean bodies and waste from her hive. She occupies the…
Reviewed by Harriet He offered to show me around, but I said I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to see old people unless somebody was paying me for…
Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite In Sara Taylor’s debut novel, ‘the Shore’ is the name given to a group of three islands off the coast of Virginia. It’s a flat, largely…
Love them or loathe them, we’ve all been in one! The editors discuss the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to book groups. 1. What sort of…
Reviewed by Simon Thomas Devotees of Persephone Books will know that the best thing about this reprint house is bringing to light authors whose work has long lain unjustly neglected….
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Set in 1977, Everything I Never Told You is the story of a family whose oldest daughter disappears one night. A few days later the police arrive with…
Paperback review by Victoria Alice McDermott is one of those writers who make you wonder how on earth they do it. Every sentence in her deceptively simple novel, Someone, is written with…
Reviewed by Anne Goodwin “Nothing to be concerned about” Daniel Paul Schreber reassures himself in the opening paragraph of Alex Pheby’s second novel. Just an ordinary day in a middle-class…
Reviewed by Harriet. ‘The No.1 greatest crime writer’, proclaims The Times on the covers of Virago’s new reprints of some of Patricia Highsmith’s lesser known novels. That’s obviously a claim…
Reviewed by Simon Slightly Foxed Editions often introduce me to books I know nothing about – hidden gems waiting to be unearthed – and that is wonderful. What they’ve done…
Reviewed by Annabel Many of us who are booklovers enjoy nothing more than reading a book about books. I’m familiar with Tim Parks through his novels, many of which I’ve…
Reviewed by Lory Widmer Hess No two readers can really read the same book. The nuances generated by our particular set of experiences, associations, and interests color our reading, making…
In the second of our series where we interview new authors, Annabel talks to Frances Vick, author of Chinaski. A. When did you first realise you wanted to be an author…
An Interview with Notting Hill Editions Written by Victoria Best If you’ve ever seen a book by Notting Hill Editions, you’re not likely to forget it. Elegant hardbacks with embossed…
Written by Victoria Best My abiding memory of Alan Cumming is from the Bond movie, Goldeneye, in which he plays his character of Machiavellian computer programmer like a cheeky and irritating…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter In the mid-1500s, three ships set off from London to seek a passage to the famed untold riches of the Far East through a northern passage…
Reviewed by Stefanie Hollmichel Oxford World Classics has produced a terrific reissue of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves. There are helpful endnotes, biographical information, a selected bibliography and an introduction. But…
Reviewed by Rebecca Hussey Jesmyn Ward’s memoir Men We Reaped is a difficult book, but a necessary and compelling one. As Ward says in the book’s prologue, “telling this story is the hardest…