A Spotlight on the Wellcome Book Prize
By Rebecca Foster Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, the Wellcome Book Prize is an annual award sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation founded by Sir Henry…
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Biography & Memoir, Diaries
Non Fiction
Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus by Fiona MacCarthy
Review by Rob Spence It probably doesn’t occur to many people as they struggle to fix bolt B to batten F of the Ikea flatpack wardrobe that the exercise in…
Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art & Artists by Marina Warner
Review by Helen Parry Although Marina Warner is perhaps best known (and deservedly) for her magnificent work on fairy tales, she has long been writing about other aspects of culture:…
What Not by Rose Macaulay
Introduced by Sarah Lonsdale with notes by Kate Macdonald Review by Karen Langley The name of Rose Macaulay is not one that will necessarily be well known to the casual…
Little Faith by Nickolas Butler
Reviewed by Harriet This is Nickolas Butler’s third novel. He was widely praised for his first, Shotgun Lovesongs, which was published in 2014, and equally so for his second, The…
War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line by David Nott
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Looking out from my inconsequential life, I’m often envious of people who save lives on a regular basis – doctors, surgeons, EMTs, firefighters, and those everyday…
The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
Review by Peter Reason I am approaching my seventy fifth birthday. As I look back, I see my life has been overshadowed by the gathering ecological catastrophe. I have a…
Happy Little Bluebirds by Louise Levene
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Louise Levene’s last novel, The Following Girls, was a pitch-perfect satire on ‘70s schoolgirl life whose period detail rang more than a few bells for me….
Music Love Drugs War by Geraldine Quigley
Review by Anna Hollingsworth The Troubles are exploding – in the best possible sense – onto the literary scene: two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, Anna Burns’s masterfully haunting…
The Sect Of Angels by Andrea Camilleri
Translated by Stephen Sartarelli Reviewed by Gill Davies In addition to the Inspector Montalbano novels, best known to English readers from the TV adaptations in the BBC4 Saturday night crime…
Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya
Translated by Asa Yoneda Review by Anna Hollingsworth The title of Yukiko Motoya’s short story collection Picnic in the Storm could easily be a description of the author’s literary life….
The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
Review by Rob Spence English-language fiction set in colonial Malaya tended in the past to focus on the lives of the Empire types who ruled the roost back then: Somerset…
Girl Balancing by Helen Dunmore
Review by Harriet It was a great loss to the world of fiction when Helen Dunmore sadly died in 2017. Fortunately for her admirers, of which I am happy to…
Let Her Fly: A Father’s Journey and the Fight for Equality by Ziauddin Yousafzai with Louise Carpenter
Review by Liz Dexter I received a copy of this book by Malala Yousafzai’s father from NetGalley and then managed to find a copy of her own “I Am Malala”,…
Alice by Elizabeth Eliot
Reviewed by Simon Hurrah to Dean Street Press and their continued Furrowed Middlebrow series, bringing back underrated women writers that most of us haven’t heard of before. Elizabeth Eliot certainly…
All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison
Reviewed by Susan Osborne Both Melissa Harrison’s previous novels are notable for their vividly evocative descriptions of the English countryside, the kind of thing readers are treated to in the…
Winterman by Alex Walters
Review by Rob Spence East Anglia has quite a lot of previous when it comes to crime fiction: Colin Watson’s chronicles of Flaxborough, James Runcie’s Grantchester mysteries, and Nicola Upson’s…
Graceland by Bethan Roberts
Reviewed by Annabel When I saw that Bethan Roberts’s new book had Elvis on the cover, I was instantly intrigued. Having followed Bethan’s career for some years, as she hails…
The Death of Murat Idrissi by Tommy Weiringa
Translated by Sam Garrett Review by Alice Farrant Two venturesome women on a journey through the land of their fathers and mothers. A wrong turn. A bad decision.[1] The Death…
To Kill the Truth by Sam Bourne
Review by Rob Spence We live in an age of fake news, propagated by politicians, celebrities and media organisations. Perhaps we always have – from the tricks of Elizabethan propaganda…
Europe: A Natural History by Tim Flannery
Review by Peter Reason A natural history, Tim Flannery tells us, encompasses both the natural and the human worlds. This book attends to three big questions: How was Europe formed?…
With the End in Mind by Kathryn Mannix
Reviewed by Annabel Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize in 2018 this book, which is full of wisdom and compassion, was one of the highlights of a strong shortlist. Although…
The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes
Review by Rob Spence This remarkably compelling memoir is, surprisingly, the first prose publication of George Szirtes, one of our most distinguished poets. At its centre is the disquieting life…
I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux
Review by Max Dunbar Alpha males in print tend to be omega males in real life. Friedrich Nietzsche was not rich during his lifetime. He had one job, at the…