Tag: books

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…

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…

A twisted thriller about a couple who are not all they seem.  The set-up for My Lovely Wife is intriguing and it’s hard to avoid giving away too much in the way of spoilers. ‘Tobias’ narrates this story. He’s married to Millicent and they live together in an idyllic gated community in Florida with their two kids…

The cover of the paperback edition of Tangerine has a quote from The Times claiming that the book is like a cross between Girl on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. This was one of those books that I absolutely did pick up based on the cover – but that strapline also sold it to me. Tangerine is Waterstones’ fiction book…

When a book receives as much hype as Sally Rooney’s Booker longlisted, Costa winning and Waterstones winning novel, it can have a reverse reaction for me. The book sounds like it’s being over-hyped. I begin to think that it can’t possibly live up to expectations. I tend to actively avoid such titles. But then, I…

This is essentially a book of short stories with a clever over-arching mechanic that links them. Each chapter tells a different story about someone who is somehow travelling between airports. So the first chapter starts with a flight from London to Madrid. The next story will take us from Madrid to Dakar. And so we…

Ghost Wall was a book that seemed to come up in quite a few of Best of 2018 blogs and articles that I read over Christmas, so I was eager to read this. It’s an incredibly slim volume, running to around 150 pages, but in packs an absolute punch. I read it across a single day. Silvie…

When Love Nina came out a few years ago, I thought it was one of the funniest books I’d ever read. Nina Stibbe was a young girl from Leicester who’d come down to London to become a nanny. The book is made up of letters sent home describing the goings on the Gloucester Place household.…

If you’re a reader of this blog via an RSS reader like Feedly then two things are of note: You are very sensible. RSS readers are still excellent ways to stay on top of numerous websites. You are going to see a deluge of book reviews sometime around about now. Read on to discover why.…

Tim Moore seems to love setting himself unlikely challenges, often related to cycling. In French Revolutions he rode the route of the Tour de France a few weeks ahead of the race. In Gironomo! he did something similar, with the 1914 Giro d’Italia route, but used a bike from the era to do so. Most recently in The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold, he…

A twisty psychological thriller than will keep you on your toes until the last page.  In 1997, ten-year-old Laurel and six-year-old Rosie are playing a game that somehow results in the death of a baby. The country is shocked, and Laurel is old enough to be criminally responsible. She ends up juvenile detention and later prison, while…