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…
Pushkin Vertigo – titles by Piero Chiara & Leo Perutz
Reviewed by Victoria Pushkin Vertigo, the new crime imprint from Pushkin Press has got off to a flying start with its first batch of releases. Not surprisingly, perhaps, when you…
Rembrandt’s Mirror by Kim Devereux
Reviewed by Victoria The first thing – inescapable – that you notice about this book is what a beautiful object it is. With gilt-tipped pages, and a midnight blue cover…
Friendship by Emily Gould
Reviewed by Victoria This book broke a late-summer reading slump I was wallowing in, and I am as grateful to it as a reader can be, who has despaired over…
Interview with Pushkin Vertigo series cover designer Jamie Keenan
Questions by Victoria I’ve been looking at book covers you’ve designed and it’s an incredibly impressive range. How did you start working with books – was that always a goal…
An Interview with Joanne Limburg
By Victoria What I absolutely loved about A Want of Kindness was the voice you’ve managed to create. It was so brilliantly of the 17th century without ever losing clarity or…
A Want of Kindness by Joanne Limburg
Reviewed by Victoria Finally! A historical novelist whose wit and insight and glorious prose might threaten to topple Hilary Mantel from her throne. If you are a reader who, like…
Interview with Sam Mills, Editorial Director of Dodo Ink
Interview by Victoria The founders of Dodo Ink are a blogger/reviewer, a novelist and a digital publishing specialist – such an intriguing combination. How did you all come together and decide…
Murder on Sea by Julie Wassmer
Reviewed by Victoria Earlier this year I read the first in the Whitstable Pearl series by Julie Wassmer and enjoyed it. It featured an intriguing new sleuth, Pearl Nolan. A…
Belonging by Umi Sinha
Reviewed by Victoria Not only was this novel one of the most gripping, engrossing, heart-in-mouth novels I’ve read in 2015, it wins hands-down the most beautiful cover of the year,…
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud
Translated by John Cullen Reviewed by Victoria In a bar in Oran, Algeria, a lone man sits drinking. He draws his companion – the reader – into his strange and…
Enchanted August by Brenda Bowen
Reviewed by Victoria When I first heard that an author had produced a rewrite of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, I was extremely eager to read it. I love von…
Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd
Reviewed by Victoria Rear Window is my all-time favourite film and I must have watched it a dozen times or more. I never seem to tire of the spiky relationship between…
Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske by Julia Blackburn
Reviewed by Victoria It was from a friend that Julia Blackburn first heard about John Craske, a Norfolk fisherman who became a painter and an embroiderer when ill health made…
The Crooked House by Christobel Kent
Reviewed by Victoria Hands up who remembers Jeremy Bamber, the White House Farm murderer? This was back in 1985, when I was 16 and the case made a notable impact…
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Reviewed by Victoria Everyone must have a perfect book, and The Enchanted April is mine. Although it was first published way back in 1922, it remains as charming and funny and altogether…
The Artificial Anatomy of Parks by Kat Gordon
Reviewed by Victoria It’s been ages since I read a good, old-fashioned family story, and although Kat Gordon’s debut novel wears the veneer of contemporary culture, set partly in a…
Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins by James Runcie
Reviewed by Victoria Since I last reviewed a volume of Sidney Chambers stories, the first television series of the clerical detective’s cases has aired. This has undoubtedly brought Grantchester and its inmates…
One Life: My Mother’s Story by Kate Grenville
Reviewed by Victoria Sorting through her mother’s things after her death in 2002, Kate Grenville came across an exercise book with her mother’s handwriting in it: ‘I have often thought…
Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg
Reviewed by Victoria Between 1943 and 1964, journalist for The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell, regularly wrote pieces about people who lived on the margins of the city, eccentrics and originals and people…
Paradise City by Elizabeth Day
Reviewed by Victoria The narration of Elizabeth Day’s third novel is woven together from four different perspectives that, when we are first introduced to them, seem utterly disparate. What do…
Sugar and Snails by Anne Goodwin
Reviewed by Victoria Diana Dodsworth is an enigma to the reader, a complicated, prickly person in her 40s who seems imperfectly stitched together over a festering mass of secrets and…
Cyclogeography by Jon Day
Reviewed by Victoria The term ‘psychogeography’ may sound unwieldy but it’s actually rather an intriguing and lovely notion. It ties together the ideas that inform the concept of genius loci, or…
Early Warning by Jane Smiley
Reviewed by Victoria There’s a strong tradition of episodic narrative in the books that clamour for the title of Great American Novel – Faulkner, Kerouac, Salinger, Twain, Henry Miller and…