It’s the oddest thing, but sometimes I ‘save’ an unread book. Maybe it’s as simple as knowing that I have a trip coming up, or maybe it’s more complicated and I know that there will be a point when I just need to really lose myself in a book. All The Light We Cannot See, […]
Would you go to a hen night/bachelorette party of a woman that you hadn’t seen since school? Nora does. Would you go even if you knew that you weren’t being invited to the wedding? Nora does. Yes it sounds implausible, but in the masterful hands of Ruth Ware, this horrendous social scenario becomes utterly plausible […]
Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, makes no pretense about what it is, namely a rollicking good read. For those Netflix fans amongst you, Horowitz was the brains behind Midsomer Murders and as you read this book, it’s hard to forget this legacy. No one would ever accuse Midsommer Murders of being highbrow, but it is hard […]
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, by Kathleen Rooney, is a tough book to write about. I finished it over the weekend and I look back on it and smile, but equally, it’s a book that I almost abandoned several times. It came to me via the trusted source of book recommendations that is Ms M, […]
To most of us married folks, open marriages seem like the most fascinating and mythical of beasts. Just as with a unicorn, I wouldn’t want one for myself (imagine the hair everywhere!), but if a friend had one, I would want to know as much as possible. So it was for me, twenty years or […]
When I was young I lived in London. All over London. Moving, as young renters do, approximately every twelve or eighteen months. What initially seemed like a fun way to live soon became a drag as flatmates moved in with boyfriends or went travelling. As I read JP Delaney’s novel, The Girl Before, I was […]
One of the curses of being a Brit and living in America is that many people assume you have a great interest in, or knowledge of, the Civil War. I have to admit that prior to moving here, the most time I had spent engaged in anything to do with this piece of US history, […]
As with a silent companion, this book snuck up on me. I finished it two nights ago and have been thinking about it ever since as, just like a Henry James novel, I’m not entirely sure what I just read. Was it a descent into madness, was it a ghost story, a betrayal? What? What […]
Sometimes you read a book and you just aren’t sure why you didn’t enjoy it more. Perhaps other things were going on in your life at the time or maybe you were just too tired. It’s hard to say. Sadly this is where I am with The House Between Tides by Sarah Maine. The more […]
Three Things About Elsie, by Joanna Cannon, made one thing very apparent to me and that’s how seldom we read about the elderly. There are of course many stories where a elderly person looks back across their life and reminisces about things past, but largely the action is set in those memories, during a time […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 