Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily van Duyne
Written by Victoria Best There’s a lot going on in Emily van Duyne’s intriguingly hybrid work on Sylvia Plath, a book that has its feet in scholarship and its head…
Murder on the Pilgrims Way by Julie Wassmer
Reviewed by Victoria If you are like me and enjoy the format of traditional cosy crime – an atmospheric setting, a great cast of possible suspects, a second body that…
Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty
Reviewed by Victoria Apple Tree Yard, (now a series from the BBC), may be billed as a thriller, but like all of Louise Doughty’s novels, it’s a story with more…
How Sarah Waters Won Over the Reading World
By Victoria Best The press release for Sarah Waters’ new novel, The Paying Guests, describes it as ‘the most anticipated book of 2014’ and for once, this feels more like fact…
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
Reviewed by Victoria You might think that writing a chronicle of a modern family might be a step down in terms of drama for Ann Patchett from opera singers held…
Confidence by Rowland Manthorpe and Kirstin Smith
Reviewed by Victoria Confidence has to be one of the funniest novels that I’ve read this year. It’s a welcome return to the campus novel but so fresh and contemporary…
Two Gentlemen on the Beach by Michael Köhlmeier
Translated by Ruth Martin Reviewed by Victoria Who knew that Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill were great friends? I had no idea before reading this thoughtful and moving fictional account…
Black Water by Louise Doughty
Reviewed by Victoria Louise Doughty is probably best known for her novel, Apple Tree Yard, which was a huge hit back in 2013. It told the story of a scientist brought…
The Middlepause; On Turning Fifty by Marina Benjamin
Reviewed by Victoria When you think of all the great defining events of an ordinary life and how often they feature as the focus of a novel – growing up,…
Brexit Reading
Written by Victoria In the aftermath of the historic referendum vote on 23rd June, and before we really learn what it means for all of us, what can we read…
Negroland by Margo Jefferson
Reviewed by Victoria ‘I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about race,’ writes Margot Jefferson, as a refrain repeated several times across the course of…
Metamorphosis; How and Why We Change by Polly Morland
Reviewed by Victoria ‘Our culture is one in which,’ Polly Morland writes, ‘more than ever before, we feel entitled to change our experiences and ourselves to fit with our dreams…
The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders
Reviewed by Victoria I do love a good cozy crime mystery and so I had high hopes for the new series by Kate Saunders, concerning her Victorian lady detective, Laetitia…
The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney
Reviewed by Victoria This is the story of a regeneration, though one of the strangest and yet most serene that I have ever read. Samuel Browne is a grieving man;…
Shiny New Author: Susan Beale
Questions by Victoria Has writing been a long-held ambition for you or is this novel something that you happened to fall into? How I wish I were the type of…
The Good Guy by Susan Beale
Reviewed by Victoria It’s a hot early autumn in 1964 small-town America, in the up-and-coming Elm Grove estate (featuring house types named Charmer, Enchantress and El Dorado, in order to…
Love, or Nearest Offer by Adèle Geras
Reviewed by Victoria I don’t know about you, but the past month of UK politics has given me a pressing need to bury my head in soothing and reassuring fiction….
Sergio Y. by Alexandre Vidal Porto
Translated by Alex Ladd Reviewed by Victoria I really love shrink lit. There’s something about the lucid and detailed focus on the interaction between patient and psychotherapist that is somehow…
A Way Through the Wood by Nigel Balchin
Reviewed by Victoria Clive James called Nigel Balchin ‘the missing writer of the Forties’, a remark that notes the period in which he was highly acclaimed as a brilliant popular…
Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
Translated by Helen Constantine, Editor Patrick Coleman Reviewed by Victoria If you’ve read a book by the 19th century French novelist, Gustave Flaubert, the chances are that it was Madame Bovary,…
Girl in Profile by Zillah Bethel
Reviewed by Victoria There are some novels that are all about the language, and Girl in Profile is one of them. How much you enjoy it will depend to a certain extent…
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
Reviewed by Victoria To add to a long list of lines I wish I’d written, I read somewhere that Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was ‘Harlequin romance meets…
The Prison Book Club by Ann Walmsley
Reviewed by Victoria The Prison Book Club was one of those books that I had high hopes for, being mildly fascinated by what goes on in your average book club, let…
A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy Gavron
Reviewed by Victoria In 1965, shortly before Christmas, a young, ambitious mother of two children on the brink of publishing her first book of sociology let herself into a friend’s…