The One Plus One by Jojo Moyes
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Commercial women’s fiction, you know – what we used to call ‘Chick-lit’, some still do, is alive and well, and the top titles are still selling…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Commercial women’s fiction, you know – what we used to call ‘Chick-lit’, some still do, is alive and well, and the top titles are still selling…
Written by Victoria Best Gertrude Stein said rather pithily of Hemingway, ‘Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn’t learned much.’ In Naomi Wood’s brilliant account of all four of…
Reviewed by Rachel Fenn Hesperus Press, known for their very attractive reprints of minor works by major authors, has recently launched a new arm of their business called Hesperus Minor,…
Written by Victoria Best It’s a brave woman who steps into Hilary Mantel’s territory these days. Comparisons are bound to be rife, but Queen’s Gambit can stand up to them. The one…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine ‘That’s just where I must part company with you, Inspector’, said the Vicar with a gentle smile. ‘I’m rather a voracious reader of mystery stories, and…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell When Iain Banks’ last novel The Quarry was published posthumously, a couple of weeks after his death from gall bladder cancer last year, as a fan of his…
Reviewed by Simon Thomas The vagaries of reputation are curious. If you ask a hundred people to name a novel by Muriel Spark, then most – well, most might cross…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Though it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award this year (but didn’t win the prize), it has taken me a while after reading The Adjacent by…
Reviewed by Jodie One of the children’s classics I didn’t read when I was a child was Pollyanna. It had been described to me as a story about a pious little girl who…
Reviewed by Falaise Robert Harris’ An Officer and A Spy is a tour de force of historical fiction, an account of what Harris himself has described as, “perhaps the greatest political scandal…
Review by Simon Thomas I toyed with trying to write this entire review of Miss Lonelyhearts (originally published in 1933, now reissued in a beautiful edition by Daunt Books) without giving the…
Reviewed by Karen Heenan-Davies …. rain or shine, the earth abides, the land endures, the soil will persevere for ever and a day. Taken in isolation that quote from Harvest might lull…
Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite Open Kirsty Logan’s debut collection, and you’ll be met first with the title story, which broadly sets the tone for what is to come. The Rental Heart takes…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine I don’t have much time for endorsements on book covers, and generally they tend to irritate me, especially when they say, ‘if you like x you’ll…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine She stinks. It has to be said. Stinks to high heaven. No, worse, stinks like death. This is not just a smell, an unpleasant odour to…
Reviewed by Karen Howlett Plain Ruth Swain is bed-bound in her attic room beneath the skylight and the ever-present rain, for this is the west of Ireland, Faha, County Clare,…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine I’ve been a fan of Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series since the first novel, Crossing Places, appeared in 2009. The Outcast Dead is the sixth in the series, and…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell Set in a seaside village in Victorian Somerset, The Madness is the story of fourteen-year-old Marnie, who is biding her time until she becomes a ‘dipper’, one of…
Reviewed by David Hebblethwaite The North Yorkshire writer Ray Robinson is not one to stand still. His first novel, 2006’s Electricity (which has been adapted into a forthcoming film starring Agness Deyn), concerned a…
Reviewed by Simon Thomas You can more or less divide readers’ familiarity with Shirley Jackson’s works into separate levels. Of course, the broadest (particularly here in the UK) are those…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell New York is a melting pot, nearly everyone has come from somewhere else to be there, and Hoffman’s new novel is the tale of two young…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell It is lovely to be able to heartily recommend a début novel published by a smaller independent publisher – American Sycamore is exactly that and it deserves a…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell When I read that Val McDermid, writer of many a gory crime novel, was penning the second book in ‘The Austen Project’, publisher Harper Collins’s series…
Reviewed by Annabel Gaskell I have always fiercely maintained that good writing transcends genre; it also transcends age. Meg Rosoff’s latest novel for young adults, recently out in paperback, is…