Fforde does YA and it’s Ffabulous Ffun!

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde Jasper Fforde has written a new book, and if it wasn’t for heroine being two weeks short of sixteen, no swearing, and no overt classic literary references, you’d be hard pushed to know that it was for young adults.  I expect that many grown-ups will read it anyway and some Read More

Sookie Stackhouse #2

Living Dead In Dallas by Charlaine Harris Living Dead in Dallas is the second in the hugely successful Sookie Stackhouse series of vampire novels by Charlaine Harris. If by any chance you’ve not encountered them before, either as books or in their TV incarnation True Blood, I suggest you start here with the first. In this second novel, Sookie is Read More

Catching up with Persephone Reading Week.

Last week was Persephone Reading Week which has been hosted by Claire and Verity.  As well as visiting the Persephone bookshop, I did manage to read one of their titles, but didn’t manage to blog about it last week. So here I am a week late – my choice was one of the Persephone top-selling titles: Little Boy Read More

A chilling and contemporary twist on the vampire novel

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist Translated by Ebba Segerberg All the other vampire books I’ve read in my ‘Season of the Living Dead’ have been rather cosy or had a good sense of humour. But then they’ve been mostly aimed at teens and young adults.Then I came to a Nordic vampire Read More

Loser’s Town by Daniel Depp

Loser’s Town is the first novel by Daniel Depp, half-brother of the more famous Johnny. As a Hollywood insider, it is full of satirical glimpses of life in the public eye and what goes on behind closed doors. Dave Spandau, ex-stuntman turned private eye is an intelligent and gruff hero that you can’t help but warm Read More

A Life’s Music by Andrei Makine

Translated by Geoffrey Strachan Last week I wrote here about Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, a thriller set in Stalin’s USSR, with train tracks on the cover. Well I followed it up with another book set in Stalin’s USSR some years earlier during the war, which also has a railway line on the cover, Read More

Love In A Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

Set between the wars, this novel follows the lives and loves of an impossibly rich and aristocratic family – the Montdores, seen through the eyes of Fanny, a childhood friend of their daughter Polly. Being from a less well-to-do family, but in demand by the Montdores as a sensible friend, Fanny is ideally placed to Read More

Lost Light by Michael Connelly

Published in 2003, Lost Light by Michael Connelly is the 9th Harry Bosch novel in an outstanding series set in Los Angeles that shows no signs of diminishing returns at all. In fact they’re getting better… What’s new about Lost Light is that Harry retired from the LAPD at the end of City of Bones, Read More