The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes
Reviewed by Annabel Natalie Haynes may be most familiar to you as a journalist and broadcaster, popping up on various shows and with her own series Natalie Haynes Stands Up…
A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
Reviewed by Harriet The subtitle of this book is ‘The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf’, which sounds very promising. I’ll start by saying that I found some…
The Zoo by Christopher Wilson
Reviewed by Basil Ransome Davies Christopher Wilson’s new novel takes us back in time while signalling contemporary concerns. It recalls the Cold War epoch, focussing on the ‘court’ of Josef…
Listening In by Jenny Eclair
Review by Laura Marriott Listening In is a collection of 24 short stories from comedian and writer Jenny Eclair. Her last literary outing was the well-received novel Moving, reviewed on Shiny New…
Can You Hear Me? by Elena Varvello
Translated by Alex Valente Review by Annabel Can you hear me? is no ordinary psychological thriller – to pigeonhole it into that sub-genre would be to ignore large parts of…
Five Fascinating Facts about… Anthony Burgess
Compiled by Annabel Researching Burgess for this article, I found so many nuggets, I could easily have compiled a list of fifty facts – or even more! It was difficult…
Anthony Burgess Centenary – a Reading List
By Rob Spence Anthony Burgess, whose centenary is celebrated this year, remarked ruefully on more than one occasion that he produced as many novels in a year as E.M. Forster…
Questions for Louise Welsh about Plague Times Trilogy
Questions by Annabel Annabel: When you began writing these books, had you already planned a trilogy? Had you ever thought that A Lovely Way to Burn could be a standalone novel, ending on…
No Dominion by Louise Welsh
Reviewed by Annabel No Dominion is the concluding part of Louise Welsh’s Plague Times Trilogy – a dystopian tale of a pandemic and its aftermath. Although Welsh asserts in the…
Holding by Graham Norton
Paperback review by Laura Marriott The first thing one does after finishing Holding is breathe a sigh of relief. When a well-known personality branches into fiction there is always the fear that…
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Paperback review by Lucy Unwin This is not a historical novel. Not just because the facts of slavery in pre-Civil War America are strained through the wonderful, allegorical, imagination of…
These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath by Gail Crowther and Peter K. Steinberg
Review by Karen Langley You could be forgiven for thinking that the last thing the world needs is yet another book about the poet, writer and artist Sylvia Plath. She’s…
The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin
Review by Harriet Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by, I found myself quite distracted by…
Excessively Diverted: Austen Books into Movies
By Diana Cheng To wrap up a week of Jane Austen celebration, here’s an annotated list of adaptations of her works on both the small and big screens, productions that…
Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley
Reviewed by Harriet If you’re a watcher of historical TV documentaries, you won’t need introducing to Lucy Worsley, who presents history programmes for the BBC, in which she often dresses…
Austen-ish – A Reading List of Austen-inspired fiction
Compiled by Annabel and Elaine Perhaps more than any other author, including Dickens and the Brontës, Jane Austen has inspired other writers to use her characters and settings to write…
The Watsons – Two Endings
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long I have recently read two finished versions of Austen’s The Watsons, a novel fragment which, they say, she abandoned after her father’s death in 1805. I have found it…
The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton The Incredible Crime and its author are something of a literary curiosity, Lois Austen-Leigh was the great great grand niece of Jane Austen. She almost certainly…
Teenage Writings by Jane Austen
Reviewed by Karen Langley 2017 is turning out to be something of a year of anniversaries: as well as being 100 years since the Russian Revolution took place, it’s also…
Introducing Jane Austen Week
By Harriet Jane Austen died two hundred years ago, on 18 July 1817, at the age of just 41. She had anonymously published four novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811),…
The Portrait by Antoine Laurain
Translated by Jane Aitken and Emily Boyce Review by Annabel French author Antoine Laurain has already got himself an army of fans (or should that be ‘armée’!) thanks to Gallic…
ReWild: The Art of Returning to Nature by Nick Baker
Review by Liz Dexter Nick Baker is a well-known naturalist, writer and broadcaster, whose work here, described by the publisher as “a memoir of sorts” but really very different from…
Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba
Reviewed by Helen Parry Among the many people Anne Sebba interviewed for this book was the playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg. During the German occupation of France, Grumberg’s Jewish mother paid a…
A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor
Reviewed by Gill Davies When you were a child did you ever hunt for a lost ball among ferns and leaves and parting them quick to look … come suddenly…