The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
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…
Five Fascinating Facts about… Frances Hodgson Burnett
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…
An Event in Autumn by Henning Mankel
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…
How to be Both by Ali Smith
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…
The Soul of Discretion by Susan Hill
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…
The Death of the Poet by N. Quentin Woolf
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…
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith
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…
Death in Pont-Aven by Jean-Luc Bannalec
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…
Q&A with Mike Ripley
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…
Mr Campion’s Farewell by Mike Ripley
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…
One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
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…
The Lie by Helen Dunmore
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…
Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay
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…
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) – A Biographical Note
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…
Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope
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…
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill
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…
The Conquest of Plassans by Émile Zola
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…
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
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…
Thursday’s Children by Nicci French
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…
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
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…
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
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…
The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Mom liked to celebrate the little things. Like finding a forgotten wrinkled dollar in a lint-ridden coat pocket, or when there was no line in the…
The Dead Beat by Doug Johnstone
Reviewed by Harriet Devine At the beginning of the The Dead Beat, Martha Fluke is visiting her father’s grave in an Edinburgh cemetery. There was a bunch of yellow carnations at…
The Telling Error by Sophie Hannah
Reviewed by Harriet Devine Well, Sophie Hannah has done it again. Did anyone ever have such a fiendishly fertile and convoluted imagination? This is her ninth crime novel, and she…