Review by Liz Dexter Miranda Aldhouse-Green is a specialist in Romano-British studies and Iron Age archaeology and has written other books on myth and religion in this period, so you…
Translated by Sam Taylor Review by Gill Davies Having become rather jaded with the predictability of the crime fiction genre and wearied by the sheer number published, I’ve been interested…
Who will win in 2018? Do share your longlist predictions… Report by Annabel When I booked my ticket for this event a couple of months ago, I was lucky enough…
It’s not always the case (or often?) that judges and readers are all in agreement on longlists, let alone the shortlists or eventual winners of literary prizes. Here we look…
And finally, this fifth decade brings us up to date with previous winners of the Man Booker Prize. In 2010, the organisation decided to create “The Lost Booker” to celebrate…
The prize’s fourth decade marked the first time, in 2001, that the longlist was revealed to the world at large. It decade also marked two second wins for previous winners,…
During the prize’s third decade, for the second time in its history, two books tied for top spot in 1992. Then, in 1993, the prize turned twenty-five. To celebrate, three…
The second decade of the prize, apart from producing the “Booker of Bookers” in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, was enlivened by some tight judging decisions. In 1980, it was William Golding…
When the Booker Prize was inaugurated, prizes for literature were rather looked down upon, they just didn’t make much impact. Tom Maschler looked at the huge success of the French…
Dear Readers, The Booker Prize will be 50 years old this year. The longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize will be announced on the 24th of July, the shortlist will…
Paperback review by Annabel When I first started reading this book, I hadn’t appreciated it was by ‘John’ Connolly of the Charlie Parker crime novels, I mis-read the author’s forename,…
Review by Liz Dexter “I hate autobiographies. They’re so fake”. That’s an astounding opening sentence but one that doesn’t really surprise, given that it’s written by a man who’s spent…
Review by Julie Barham This is a book that in many ways reads like a novel. That said, it is also a non- fiction history book, well presented with at…
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Alright’ I said, ‘I’ll try’…’But I’ve never done this kind of thing before’ is what I would have said next, I’m sure, as it still seems a…
Reviewed by Julie Barham There are some books which are so good that I struggle to find words to suggest how much I appreciate them, and this is one of…
Review by Peter Reason This is a novel about the place of humans in the living world. Too serious, too philosophical, you might say? But this is also a gripping…
Reviewed by David Harris Trying to sum up this book, and North’s writing, in a discussion with a friend on Twitter recently, I said that she is a remarkable writer,…
Reviewed by Max Dunbar Why Everything Old Is New Again If I had to recommend a historian on the twentieth century terrors to someone who was coming new to it,…
Reviewed by Harriet This little treasure of a book tells the story, in his own words, of the last survivor of the last, illegal, cargo of enslaved Africans to be…
Reviewed by Julie Barham This Irish novel, originally published in 1921, reprinted by Handheld Press, is a tremendously engaging read. Dealing with the fates of two girls in Catholic Ireland,…
Reviewed by Lucy Unwin I can’t remember seeing a more perfect cover for a book in a while. Everything you need to know about The Water Cure is there. The obscure water…
Translated by Margaret Bettauer Dembo Reviewed by Gill Davies The novel is set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and was first published in German in 1942. Seghers was a…
Reviewed by Annabel Very few westerners get to visit North Korea, and DB John is one of them – he’s seen the public face of this secretive country from the…
Review by Helen Parry I have been a fan of Lucy Wood’s writing since reading her début collection of short stories, Diving Belles, and so I was thrilled to see…
