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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura
Translated by Eric Selland Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Who doesn’t deal with the devil every now and again? Or perhaps a god from your chosen religion, for the more saintly…
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
Reviewed by David Harris This was the first time I’d read a book by Novik. Her Temeraire series and Uprooted (reviewed for Shiny by Sakura here) have received lots of praise so I was pleased…
Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
Reviewed by David Harris Skinny Pete went to sleep, underfed and bonySkinny Pete went to sleep, and died a death so lonely. The enemy aren’t the Villains, nomads, scavengers, insomniacs,…
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth What happens when the walls around someone collapse – in this case, both literally and metaphorically? One take is that when you’re left without shelter under…
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen Review by Rob Spence The strap line chosen by the publishers for the cover of this massive novel is instructive: “None of us…
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Miss Armstrong. You have an unfortunate tendency to do that. Iris isn’t real’. But how can she not be?…
The Second Rider by Alex Beer
Translated by Tim Mohr Review by Gill Davies The Second Rider is the first novel in a projected new series by the Austrian writer, Alex Beer. It is set in…
Hippie by Paulo Coelho
Review by Anna Hollingsworth Hippie is the newest addition to Coelho’s bibliography, but to say that it is something new from Coelho would be lying. Coelho’s previous autobiographical novels are…
Time’s Convert by Deborah Harkness
Reviewed by Harriet Have you ever wondered how the children of a witch and a vampire might turn out? Well, wonder no longer as you can now see them in…
I Am Heathcliff – Stories Inspired by Wuthering Heights, curated by Kate Mosse
Review by Julie Barham It is never easy to review a collection of short stories, especially one by such a diverse selection of authors as this one. It contains stories…
By the Pricking of Her Thumb by Adam Roberts
Reviewed by David Harris Roberts seems to have been very busy lately so I’m glad he managed to include a return to the world of The Real-Town Murders, one of my favourite books…
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
Reviewed by Annabel Having been Man Booker shortlisted in 2011 for her debut novel, Half Blood Blues, set in Berlin during WWII and fifty years later, Edugyan’s second novel, The…