The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller
Reviewed by Annabel What do you do when you seriously lose your reading mojo? I tend to retreat into a palate-cleansing thriller to get mine back, but I’ve never had…
The Year of Reading Dangerously (and Seven Years of Living with the Consequences).
By Andy Miller About ten years ago, I had a bright idea. It involved reading a baker’s dozen of books I had always meant to read but had never got…
Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
Reviewed by Annabel Faber & Faber is one of my favourite publishers; in recent years with Faber Finds they’ve started to make the most of their impressive backlist – we’ve…
The Case of the Hail Mary Celeste by Malcolm Pryce
Reviewed by Victoria It is such a delightful surprise when a book you knew nothing about turns out to be a corker. I had never read any of Malcolm Pryce’s…
The Ghost Fields by Elly Griffiths
Reviewed by Harriet Ruth Galloway’s five-year-old daughter Kate is off to her first day at school. ‘Say goodbye to Daddy’, says Ruth.‘Bye, Daddy’.‘Bye, sweetheart’. Nelson takes a last picture of…
The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson
Reviewed by Harriet “Okay,” she said, and thought a moment. “Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference…
The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov
Translated by Andrew Bromfield Reviewed by Karen Langley We all believe in the transformative power of literature; however, what would happen if books really did change us in dramatic ways, bringing strength…
Tregian’s Ground by Anne Cuneo
Translated from the French by Roland Glasser and Louise Rogers Lalaurie. Reviewed by Jean Morris The year is 1649 or thereabouts. In a verdant Swiss valley, a tall, bearded old…
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Reviewed by Max Dunbar There’s an episode of the classic US prison show Oz where a new governor brings back the death penalty and sentences Jefferson Keane, a gangster serving life, as the…
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
Reviewed by Victoria In 2013, Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, to put on the mantlepiece alongside her 2009 Man Booker International award, the National Book Critics…
Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance by Patricia Duncker
Reviewed by Helen Parry It is 1872 and Max Duncker, handsome, young and irresponsible, is blessed with a not-too-onerous role in the publishing company he shares with his elder brother…
Sweetland by Michael Crummey
Reviewed by Victoria Moses Sweetland is an ornery, tough-skinned, self-sufficient, stubborn old man and he’s also a remarkably tenacious and vital force of life in Michael Crummey’s Robinson Crusoe-esque novel….
Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig
Reviewed by Victoria If I ever get to meet Matt Haig, the first thing I would like to do, now I’ve read his book, is give him a hug. I’m…
The Whirlpool by George Gissing
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton No matter how many classics I read it never fails to surprise me how little people, or even society, seem to change. The realism of The Whirlpool reminded…
Neverhome by Laird Hunt
Reviewed by Harriet I was strong and he was not so it was me went to war to defend the Republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into…
The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black (YA)
Reviewed by Bookgazing Holly Black is one of the reigning queens of modern gothic. Her novel The Coldest Girl in Coldtown presented an original, nightmarish vampire world that mixed garish tourist stops,…
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Reviewed by Stefanie Hollmichel I first read Orlando by Virginia Woolf many years ago. Fresh in love with Woolf’s writing and having just learned about her romance with Vita Sackville-West, I read…
Weathering by Lucy Wood
Reviewed by Judith Wilson I began reading Weathering whilst staying on a Cornish estuary within sight of the sea, on a cold, damp day. This was fortuitous as the book is set…
Reading the World: Confessions of a Literary Explorer by Ann Morgan
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Ann Morgan is a freelance writer for the Guardian, among other publications, and also part of a dedicated tribe of book bloggers. She spent 2011 on a…
The River by Rumer Godden
Reviewed by Kate Gardner This novel (novella really – even bulked out with short stories, an introduction and a preface it’s still barely 200 pages) explores childhood, and specifically that…
Naked at the Albert Hall by Tracey Thorn
Reviewed by Annabel After the success of her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen (which I reviewed here) in which she told us how she joined a band and had a brilliant…
Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman
Reviewed by Gill Davies This is a very enjoyable novel, in the American crime genre but with lots of other things going on too. It has a lively style, some…
Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller
Reviewed by Victoria Writing a family memoir can be a tricky business in these days of ever more sensitively judgemental readers. There’s a subset who disapproves of anything that smacks…
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris
Reviewed by Victoria In this outstanding work of cinema history, Mark Harris follows the fortunes of five big name Hollywood directors who enlisted in the wake of Pearl Harbour to…