Reviewed by Simon Thomas The world is probably divided into two people: those who find the idea of a book about flat landscapes appealing and those who don’t. I suspect…
Review by Susan Osborne Beginning in 2010, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds is a beautiful, eloquent exploration of love, loss and finding a place of safety for a person of…
Review by Annabel The longlist for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize is truly eclectic, including poetry and short stories from all over the world alongside novels. After being…
Review by Laura Tisdall In her debut, Boy Parts, Eliza Clark brilliantly demolished the ‘disaster woman’ trope with her portrait of Irina, a deliciously callous young woman who’s on the prowl for…
Review by Rob Spence If you attended a British secondary school at any time from the late nineteen sixties until the present day, at some point you will have encountered…
Review by Annabel For Welsh’s ninth novel, she stays in Glasgow and it is a thriller, but this is not a third outing for her reluctant crime-solving auctioneer Rilke (cf:…
The Futures Series from indie publisher Melville House UK recently launched with four titles that couldn’t be more different from each other: going from Songwriting, to Trust, to War Crimes…
Review by Rob Spence It’s not often that one gets the chance to begin a review with a boast, so I’ll get it over with now: I have read À…
Review by Liz Dexter I have […] tried to highlight how much our understanding of human origins has changed – and continues to change – and how, in some ways,…
Reviewed by Harriet The village was beautiful. It was enfolded in a hollow of the Downs, and wrapped up snugly – first, in a floral shawl of gardens, and then,…
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long There is a plethora of journalists who are labelled Royal Experts and I sometimes wonder how you reach these giddy heights, if that is how you…
Review by Rob Spence This is a curious little book, which shouldn’t really work, but does, offering the reader a delightful series of fresh impressions gleaned from the writer’s engagement…
Reviewed by Harriet If you gave me a choice between a collection of short stories and a novel, I’d choose the novel every time. I suppose it’s something to do…
We have just this one tiny planet to live on, now and for the foreseeable future. We must care for it, and use its resources wisely, sustainability, and fairly. If…
Review by Liz Dexter My hope is that this biography will send readers back to Jan Morris’s books, to either reread them of, for those who have yet to discover…
Review by Gill Davies This is a first novel by a practising barrister and is billed as “a legal thriller with a psychological twist”. It comes with plaudits from –…
Review by Karen Langley The coming of the Internet and the development of blogging at the turn of the 21st century led to a resurgence of the personal essay, which…
Review by Annabel Let me explain. This Thursday, a film called Argylle reaches our cinema screens in the UK; you may even have seen the trailer (IMDB link here). This…
Review by Karen Langley There has been a resurgence of interest in the fiction writing of author Maeve Brennan recently, with her short stories in particular having gained much critical…
Reviewed by Harriet This is the eleventh novel in Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey historical crime series; we’ve reviewed four of them on here as well as her standalone fictional biography…
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long If I had my way every single teacher in the land who is attempting to teach Shakespeare should have a copy of this to hand as,…
Review by Simon A new novel by Michael Cunningham is cause for celebration. I’ve read and loved all his novels – give or take a not-to-my-taste venture into science fiction…
Review by Rob Spence We are in London at its Victorian zenith, a city of imperial majesty, and also a city where the most abject poverty exists side-by-side with the…
Reviewed by Harriet The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand. I was a small child then, soft at the belly. On that night my mother took me…
