I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with your family and friends, and got everything you wished for. I’m still mid-way through the round of family visits, so here’s a post I prepared earlier. Yes it is a list – I’m going to inflict my Books of the Decade on you – all five Read More
Category: Authors S
An truly original modern fairy tale
The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw This novel is that rare thing – a thoroughly grown-up modern fairy tale that works. It’s also a beautifully designed book with an evocative cover and silver page edging. It is set in a remote cluster of islands around an archipelago called St Hauda’s land which feels Read More
My Season of the Living Dead is over!
My month of vampire reading is over – Ended! Finito! I’ve read six novels back to back, mostly extremely enjoyable until I came to the last. Dracula – the Un-dead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt … Co-written by Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew and a vampire expert, this official sequel tries to shoehorn in every single Read More
Paving the way for the teen vampire sensation
Vampire Diaries by L J Smith Anyone reading this book would be forgiven for thinking that it was rather derivative of a certain other one – Twilight that is. It even has an apple on the black cover … Amazingly, it was published over ten years before Stephanie Meyer had even started hers. Understandingly, the Read More
A true story of the Russian Revolution
Blood Red, Snow White by Marcus Sedgwick There has been renewed interest in the beloved children’s author Arthur Ransome lately due to the publication of a new biography: The Last Englishman by Roland Chambers. What many people don’t know is that years before he wrote the children’s classics, including Swallows and Amazons, for which he Read More
What my Mum is reading
Being between books to review at the moment, I asked my 70-something Mum what she’s reading. She probably reads more books than I do, and every time I see her she borrows a bagful or two. She always returns them with sticky notes on telling me what she thought. She reads widely, and dare I Read More
A young woman’s A to Z
Something Beginning With by Sarah Salway At first glance you might write this book off as chicklit with a gimmick – for it is written in an A to Z format with entries under key words and phrases. The longest entries are no more than a couple of pages, and they’re all cross-referenced with an Read More
“If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?”
The Kiss of Death by Marcus Sedgwick Now this is a proper novel about vampires – and they don’t even make an appearance properly until late in the book, however, they are mentioned in the blurb, so I’m hardly giving the game away. It’s also a proper book about Venice, set in the 18th century Read More
A Cinematic treat for readers of all ages…
The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures by Brian Selznick This book has a fascinating concept. It’s a chunkster of over 500 pages that can be read in just a couple of hours for over half the pages are pictures – black and white pencil drawings mostly. But it’s not a Read More
Great title, great cover …
Up a Tree in the Park at Night with a Hedgehog by Paul Robert Smith Could the second book I’ve read in the past few months to feature the word ‘hedgehog’ in the title possibly be as good as the first here? Sadly, no – Up a Tree in the Park at Night with a Read More
Friday Nights by Joanna Trollope
Recently I saw Joanna Trollope talk about her latest novel Friday Nights and wrote about it here. She was a great speaker and we had fun listening to her talk about her new experiences in researching for this book, and I had no hesitation in getting a signed copy. Now I’ve read the book, and, Read More
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
This book comes with a bit of baggage. A debut novel, and thriller no less, set in Stalinist Russia. Its publishers gave it a massive publicity campaign, and got it longlisted for the 2008 Booker. Instant controversy – thrillers can’t be literary can they? Well yes they can, you only have to think of John Read More
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa 1997 Nobel laureate Saramago was born in 1922 and is considered to be Portugal’s top living writer. He wrote this novel in 1995 and what a book it is! This was our book group choice for December, and we all found it an intense and compelling read. When an epidemic Read More
Short Takes
The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark The 100th book I read this year. It was a delightful short novel about a young man who arrives in a slightly posh bit of South London, stirs things up rather devilishly bringing this staid bit of town to life, and then he disappears. Is Dougal Douglas Read More
Rebus #2
Hide and Seek by Ian Rankin Ian Rankin’s second Rebus novel is not quite as good as the first, but is still very enjoyable. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, this time the doughty inspector investigates the death of a junkie with possible satanic overtones, while his super involves him in Read More
What’s your relationship to your reading?
Can you have more than one book at a time on the go? In other words are you a serial monogamist or a two-timer in your relationship to your reading materials? I’m always impressed by people who can manage to read several books at a go, swapping between them as the mood takes them and Read More
