Horizon by Barry Lopez
Review by Peter Reason Barry Lopez is one of the greats of ‘nature writing’ (although he dislikes the term, as it seems do most ‘nature writers’!). He is most widely…
The Other Americans by Laila Lalami
Review by Gill Davies The cover illustration for the book is an aerial view of a suburban street. A pattern of identical houses with green lawns and tidy spaces symbolises…
So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Ingvild Burkey Reviewed by Jean Morris This is a book for fans of Karl Ove Knausgaard who also love the work of his native Norway’s greatest painter, Edvard…
Crossing by Pajtim Statovci
Translated by David Hackston Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Crossing is perhaps one of the vaguest book titles I have come across recently, especially given the trend towards sentence-length titles (think Eleanor Oliphant…
The Office of Gardens and Ponds by Didier Decoin
Translated by Euan Cameron Reviewed by Harriet In this magical novel, we are in Japan, many many years ago. The small, unremarkable village of Shimae lies on the banks of…
The Strange Case of Harriet Hall by Moray Dalton
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long More and more unknown or unfamiliar writers of the Golden Age of detective fiction are being unearthed and reprinted and this pleases me mightily. Having read…
The Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel
Reviewed by Lizzy Siddal There are times when an autobiography by someone you’ve never heard of just slots into your current reading stream. Such was the case when New York…
The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun
Translated by Kathie von Ankum Reviewed by Harriet If a young woman from money marries an old man because of money and nothing else and makes love to him for…
Metropolis by Philip Kerr
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Swan Song (For A City) Stephen King once wrote of the ‘Grey Havens’ as a kind of afterlife where fictional characters can relax after their authors…
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Reviewed by Annabel There was a lot of pre-publishing buzz about Daisy Jones and The Six – it was instantly signed up by Amazon for a TV series with Reese Witherspoon producing….
A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself by William Boyle
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies Some novels strike such an authentic note in the beginning that they give you the immediate assurance — the eagerness — to read on. You can’t…
Adèle by Leïla Slimani
Translated by Sam Taylor Review by Annabel Slimani’s first novel to be translated into English, Lullaby, took the English-speaking publishing world by storm. It was a literary thriller telling the…
Cocoa An Exploration of Chocolate, With Recipes, by Sue Quinn
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton There are all sorts of reasons I pick up cookbooks to look at: I like the cover, I like the author, the subject grabs me, someone…
Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li
Reviewed by Annabel For some, this debut novel was a surprise inclusion on the longlist for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction this year – for a start, it’s a…
Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Translated by Sondra Silverston Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth If you asked me about the time I first discovered Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, I could tell you this was when I read the…
The Art of Life Admin: How to do Less, do it Better, and Live More, by Elizabeth Emens
Review by Liz Dexter Emens is a professor of Law who made the discovery a while back that there was something invisible and other than “chores”, the stuff that goes…
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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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….