Facial Justice by LP Hartley
Reviewed by Harriet Devine The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. So, famously, wrote LP Hartley at the beginning of his most famous novel, The Go Between. But what…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. So, famously, wrote LP Hartley at the beginning of his most famous novel, The Go Between. But what…
Reviewed by Harriet I had not heard of Ariana Franklin until a few months ago, when I was given her Mistress of the Art of Death as an early birthday present. Seeing…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine “A lace handkerchief without even a monogram on it and a bloodstained knife without fingerprints or marks of any kind”, McCarthy said. “There’s nothing whatever in…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine The Book of Life is indeed a mighty tome, as Dan Brown would say. I read it with great delight, but was seriously wondering all the time…
Compiled by Harriet Devine 1. Frances was born near Manchester, in England. Her father was a successful ironmonger, but her family fell on hard times after his death when she…
Translated by Laurie Thompson Reviewed by Harriet Devine This book is a bit of a curiosity. When it arrived and I realised what it was, I wondered if it was…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine I’m not one of those people who rush out and buy all the Booker longlisted books on principle, or even the shortlisted ones, or even the…
Reviewed by Harriet Let me say at once that I absolutely loved this book. I’ve read all the previous seven of Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailler series with pleasure, though I…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine How can I best describe to you this wonderful, powerful book? If I tell you that it’s about a man who falls desperately in love with…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Strike hated paddling on the periphery of a case, forced to watch as others dived for clues, leads and information. He sat up late with the…
Translated by Sorcha McDonagh Reviewed by Harriet Devine Hooray for Hesperus, who sent me this book for review back in the early spring. I picked it up straight away and…
Questions by Harriet Devine Harriet: I really enjoyed reading Mr Campion’s Farewell, and, as a lifetime fan of Allingham, I wasn’t sure if I would. But I’m full of curiosity as…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine I think I was about eleven when my mother, responding to my cry that I had nothing to read, gave me a copy of Margery Allingham’s Sweet…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine If I were to make a list of things I probably wouldn’t want to read a book about, aeroplanes, cars, baseball and finance would be somewhere near…
Reviewed by Susan Osborne. If you spend any time at all perusing reviews, on the internet or otherwise, you can’t have failed to notice the plethora of novels about the…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Mavis Doriel Hay (1894-1979) wrote only three crime novels, all published in the 1930s. They slipped completely under the radar until the British Library decided to…
Written by Harriet Devine. She will love deeply – suffer terribly – she will have glorious moments to compensate. Emily Byrd Starr, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s most autobiographical heroine, remembered these…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine No author of the present day has been at once so much read, so much admired and so much abused. So wrote the New Monthly Review…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a messy, bloody conflict in which Spanish Republicans fought to save their country from the forces of Fascism, foreshadowed the Second…
Translated by Helen Constantine Reviewed by Harriet Devine In issue 1 of SNB, I reviewed Zola’s Money, and Victoria wrote a fascinating article about his “racy, sordid books” for the BookBuzz section. Money was the…
Review by Harriet Have you ever had the experience of finishing a book and feeling as if you will never find another one that remotely measures up? That’s how I…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine People who know and love Nicci French will know at once that this is the fourth outing into the world of Frieda Klein, that troubled, insomniac…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine. “The world is ending,” she said. “The message has come from child to adult, child to adult, passed back down the generations from a thousand years…
Reviewed by Harriet Devine She was her father’s daughter. It was said of her from the beginning. For one thing, Alma Whittaker looked precisely like Henry: ginger of hair, florid…