Mapp and Lucia by E.F. Benson
Reviewed by Karen Langley In his time, E.F. Benson was a prolific writer of many different types of fiction, but nowadays he is best remember for his much-loved stories about…
Reviewed by Karen Langley In his time, E.F. Benson was a prolific writer of many different types of fiction, but nowadays he is best remember for his much-loved stories about…
Reviewed by Helen Parry Is it fair to claim that Marina Warner is the reigning British queen of fairy tales? I believe so. Her best-known book on the subject, From the…
Reviewed by Jodie Robson I think I may have have mentioned before that I’m a fan of Neil Gaiman’s writing. A pretty unabashed fan, actually, a bit like Hayley Campbell,…
SNB: By way of introduction would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? Barbara: I was born and brought up in the east end of London. Back then, in…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine I’d never read anything by Peter May when this book was sent me for review. The first thing that struck me was that Peter May must…
Reviewed by Simon Thomas It’s fun occasionally to read a book that doesn’t take itself remotely seriously. And it would be impossible for Love Insurance (1914) by Earl Derr Biggers to take…
Reviewed by Danielle Simpson In PI Lee Arnold and his assistant Mumtaz Hakim Barbara Nadel has created two of the most unusual and intriguing characters to populate a crime novel…
Review by Victoria Best I’ve been a huge fan of Janet Malcolm since reading her brilliant biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Silent Woman. What she could do –…
Reviewed by Ann Little Dorrit has always been amongst my favourite Dickens’ novels and so I approached Antonia Hodgson’s first novel, The Devil in the Marshalsea, with a mixture of caution and anticipation. I didn’t…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine When I started reading Fall From Grace, I hadn’t realised it was part of a series – the fifth part, to be exact. This is always risky…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Phew! Well, the term unputdownable is often bandied around – I’ve done some bandying myself – but there were times when Sarah Waters’ latest novel actually…
Mark Watson’s project, Hotel Alpha, the novel of which we review in our fiction section here, is more than just a book. The Hotel Alpha website had 100 short stories to read, one…
Review by Annabel I always find accounts of lives worked in medicine absolutely fascinating, especially those of surgeons, who live on the cutting edge (sorry!) of medical science. It takes…
1. Can you tell us a little bit about how the imprint was started? We launched Buried River Press in spring of this year, and have published seven titles to…
Reviewed by Jenny. Mary Renault has a genius for the past. It’s in all her historical books: the stony, fated world of the Greeks, rushed forward to our softer and…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. So, famously, wrote LP Hartley at the beginning of his most famous novel, The Go Between. But what…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Perfect Tenn: A Life of Tennessee Williams An inconvenience of biography is that before the interesting stuff is revealed, one first has to wade through chapter…
Reviewed by Barb Scharf. “It comes as something of a surprise to most people to consider Ruskin the Gardener. Ruskin has been much written about as an art critic and…
Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite A hotel is a confluence of stories: a mixture of public and private space; a places where chance encounters are routine; somewhere that plays host to…
Reviewed by Victoria Best. Lying in bed, 14-year-old Sylvie Mason hears a telephone call summoning her parents out into the middle of a snowy Baltimore night. This isn’t unusual; her…
Reviewed by Harriet I had not heard of Ariana Franklin until a few months ago, when I was given her Mistress of the Art of Death as an early birthday present. Seeing…
Translated by Bryan Karetnyk Reviewed by Karen Langley Following the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, many of that country’s beleaguered citizens escaped abroad, setting up émigré communities in cities…
Reviewed by Victoria Best What do they do to writers down in Mississippi? Is there a school, I wonder, where prospective writers go in order to be marinaded in a bath of…
Reviewed by Andrew Blackman Pick up a book set in World War Two, and you have certain expectations. These expectations are largely frustrated by First Time Solo, and that’s a good…