The Long Way Home by Louise Penny
Reviewed by Ann In many respects, How the Light Gets In, Louise Penny’s previous novel about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, tied up a plethora of loose ends. Throughout the earlier books in…
Reviewed by Ann In many respects, How the Light Gets In, Louise Penny’s previous novel about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, tied up a plethora of loose ends. Throughout the earlier books in…
Reviewed by Simon If you’ve ever wondered what sort of prose Catherine Morland might have read before she ventured to Northanger Abbey, then look no further than Horace Walpole’s The Castle of…
Reviewed by Jane Carter My mother, when she was a very small girl, was given a beautiful copy of The Happy Prince and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde. She loved that book,…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne This is the first year that the Man Booker Prize has been opened up to include entries from the U.S.A. Out of a longlist of thirteen,…
Translated by Adriana Hunter Reviewed by Bookgazing. At the beginning of Under the Tripoli Sky, the book’s young narrator, Hadachinou, is subject to a bris; a ritual Jewish circumcision. The bris…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine There is one characteristic which may be safely said to belong to nearly all happily married couples – that of desiring to see equally happy marriages…
Reviewed by Kim Forrester Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas hit the big time with his best-selling novel The Slap in 2008. It won the ALS Gold Medal (2008), the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best…
Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson Sometimes it seems like so such WWII fiction has been published that even stories set during the London Blitz all start to feel too familiar….
Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson Catherine Hall has a skilful power for building a story around people hampered by emotionally turbulent pasts in her novels. She did this with beautiful…
Reviewed by Victoria Best I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes of being alive – knowing oneself intimately and also not at…
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 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…
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…
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 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…
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…