Mother Mother by Annie Macmanus
Review by Annabel You may know Annie Macmanus as ‘Annie Mac’, the fomer Radio 1 DJ. She left the station last year to pursue other avenues, which have included publishing…
Review by Annabel You may know Annie Macmanus as ‘Annie Mac’, the fomer Radio 1 DJ. She left the station last year to pursue other avenues, which have included publishing…
Review by Annabel Gaskell Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, her novel conceived during that momentous trip to Geneva in 1816 during ‘the year without a summer’, is supremely concerned with the subject…
Review by Annabel Over recent years, I have been much enjoying the current vogue for the retelling of ancient myths and ancient history, especially those told from different perspectives, primarily…
Review by Annabel Those of you who’ve read journalist and author Lucy Mangan’s ‘memoir of childhood reading’, Bookworm, (which Liz reviewed here) will rejoice that she has now written a…
Review by Annabel I watched an awful lot of telly in the 1970s, my formative teenage years. It was thus inevitable that between the early evening slots occupied by Top…
Review by Annabel Amor Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility, was published in 2011 when he was in his mid-forties. It was such a success he was able to retire…
Translated by Katy Derbyshire Review by Annabel It’s been exciting to see the variety of German books in translation coming from V&Q Books who launched in the UK last autumn….
Review by Annabel Tim Walker’s name may ring a bell, particularly with broadsheet readers. During his career as a journalist, he has written for The Observer and The Daily Telegraph,…
Review by Annabel Who hasn’t been enthralled by the idea of there being ‘Life on Mars’ even if said life ends up as the first humans to visit the red…
Translated by Rebecca Copeland Review by Annabel Japanese author Natsuo Kirino is primarily known for her crime novels, of which Out is the most widely known. However, she also contributed…
Reviewed by Annabel If I searched, I could probably fill a small shelf full of novels that have a sub-niche of their own that is the ‘queue’. Within that we…
Reviewed by Annabel You may know Cathy Rentzenbrink through her heart-breaking memoir published a few years ago. In The Last Act of Love, she tells the story of her family…
Review by Annabel There are still people who doubtless haven’t heard of Richard Thompson. To those of us in the know though, he is one of the most influential guitarists…
Compiled by Annabel The Royal Society of Literature is celebrating ‘Dalloway Day‘ today – a Wednesday in the middle of June – when Virginia Woolf’s novel in a day is…
Review by Annabel As I sat down to start reading this book, a tweet pinged on my phone and I glanced over – someone had commented on a post of…
Translated by Jessica Moore Reviewed by Annabel Maylis de Kerangal is a novelist whose primary focus is not the characters that people her books, but the subject they’re involved with….
Review by Annabel There is a particular sub-genre of memoir that almost goes into biography but fundamentally remains a memoir. I’m talking about memoirs of friendships like Tracey Thorn’s latest…
Translated by Don Bartlett Reviewed by Annabel Kjell Ola Dahl is one of Norway’s foremost crime writers, especially known for his ‘Oslo detectives’ series, several of which are available in…
Reviewed by Annabel Lucy Holland’s impeccably researched novel combines the story of a 19th Century murder ballad, ‘The Two Sisters’ with Dark Ages post-Arthurian history, mixing in a good dose…
Reviewed by Annabel I first discovered the mad world of Chester Himes’s Harlem in an old Allison & Busby paperback of The Crazy Kill, the third novel of his Harlem…
Reviewed by Annabel Diary of a Film follows a few days in the life of an auteur film director who is in Italy with his two lead actors to promote…
Reviewed by Annabel With The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers brings her Wayfarers series to a close. The quartet began in 2015 with The Long Way to a…
Reviewed by Annabel A novel about the increasingly toxic relationship between an old art historian and his young acolyte set in Florence was always going to be a book I…
Translated by Rachel Ward Reviewed by Annabel I’ve come late to German ‘Queen of Krimi’ Simone Buchholz’s novels. Hotel Cartagena is the ninth of her books featuring the Hamburg-based State…