Category: Books
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The Tour According to G: My Journey to the Yellow Jersey by Geraint Thomas
For many people, Geraint Thomas was the surprise of last year’s Tour de France. He had gone into the race as joint leader with Chris Froome with Team Sky. Having spent years as a loyal lieutenant, he’d be a protected rider. While Froome had triumphed in the Giro d’Italia earlier in the year, to become…
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One Way Ticket: Nine Lives on Two Wheels by Jonathan Vaughters
As the Tour de France is underway – as I write, they’re on the first rest day – I thought I’d catch up on a few cycling books, both new and ones I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks/months/years. First up is One Way Ticket: Nine Lives on Two Wheels by Jonathan Vaughters. Vaughters…
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Then She Vanishes by Claire Douglas
A mystery about secrets and families set in the West Country. It seems like an open and shut case. Heather has been seen walking into a house and killing a man and his mother, before attempting to take her own life. Now she lies in a coma. Jess was once Heather’s best friend although something…
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Conviction by Denise Mina
Anna is living a double life; a true crime podcast is exploring the sinking of a luxury yacht. How are these two things linked? That’s the set-up for the superb new crime thriller from Denise Mina. Anna is having a bad day. Her husband is about to run away with her best friend, taking her…
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Walking to Aldebaran
This is the first work I’ve read by the Arthur C Clarke winning Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s a novella told in the first person about a trip to explore a strange alien artefact that has been detected from Earth. A motley bunch of crew members, chosen largely along political lines, has been chosen to explore this…
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Heida: A Shepherd at the Edge of the World by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir and Heiða Ásgeirsdóttir
This book captures the fascinating world of a remote sheep farmer in Iceland. Heida (or more properly Heiða) is a sheep farmer who single-handedly runs her farm, Ljótarstaðir. Having previously read James Rebank’s A Shepherd’s Life, about how things work in the Lake District, you discover that while some things are the same – everyone…
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The Legacy by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
Having recently read and enjoyed The Absolution, the third in the ‘Freyja and Huldur’ series, I returned to the first book – The Legacy – in my ongoing Icelandic crime fiction reading marathon. A prologue begins with three children being split up by social services – something that will clearly have ramifications later. And indeed,…
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The Island by Ragnar Jónasson
It’s 1988, many years before the events recounted in the first of the Hidden Iceland trilogy, The Darkness. A pair of teenagers have headed out to a remote summer house for a weekend of passion – but things don’t go quite the way they’d planned. Next thing, the girl’s father has been arrested and charged…
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The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson
Following on from the latest Yrsa Sigurðardóttir novel, I thought I’d stay in Iceland and catch up with Ragnar Jónasson who I’ve been meaning to read for a while. His latest series of books are the Hidden Iceland trilogy, and The Darkness is the first of the three novels. Hulda Hermannsdottir is approaching her retirement,…
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The Absolution by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
The Absolution is the third in the “Children’s House” series of books from one if Iceland’s leading crime writers. A teenager has been brutally murdered, with the perpetrator first capturing some kind of apology and then sharing the video to victim’s friends on Snapchat. The police race to capture the video while it’s still there and…
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Reasons to be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe
It’s the early 1980s and our narrator, Lizzie Vogel, is about to leave home for the first time, and move from her village into the city of Leicester. Her first fulltime job is to be a dental assistant working for the awful JP and his partner Tammy. The job comes with its own flat, and…
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Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel
I picked up a copy of Walking in Berlin over Christmas having become fascinated by the period after reading the first couple of Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath novels and watching the superb TV dramatisation Babylon Berlin. A recent trip to Berlin also got me even more interested in the period. This book, newly translated by Amanda…
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The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
This book lays out the horrifying facts about climate change in a compelling and urgent way. In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells takes a comprehensive stroll through the very real perils that the world is facing from climate change. He opens with a devastating picture of just how quickly we’re going to see real suffering and destruction,…