If you know me at all, you will understand that I am not one of life’s happy campers. I can appreciate the beauty of the great outdoors without experiencing any desire at all to sleep in it. My back is designed to carry a simple day pack, not a tent or a stove. I value […]
I don’t know quite where I am with The Confusion of Languages by Siobhan Fallon. It’s not the book I thought it was, but it’s none the worse for it, it’s just that I’m surprised. I don’t normally pick up books about the Middle East or indeed books that in anyway relate to the military […]
Many years ago, when Child Number One was very small and I still lived in London, my dear friend Ms S and I used to frequent any number of playgrounds to occupy our children and to fill our days. This was in an era long before the iPhone became ubiquitous, when it was still possible […]
For a while I have been feeling a little restless, wanting to read something that’s different from the books that I normally choose. It’s hard to break out from patterns of your own making, but I really wanted to. I’d seen Adele in my local bookstore a few times and although it matched such criteria, […]
I do love a good ghost story but I’m not one for being scared into an early grave, unable to switch the lights off or get to sleep for fear of what lurks in the closet. As I grow older I definitely enjoy a good fright far more than I used to in my twenties […]
Whatever weekend plans you have, cancel them. I’m serious. They simply cannot be better than sitting down and giving a day to Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J.Firky. I absolutely adored this novel, in fact along with Victor Lavalle’s The Changeling, which is a very different kind of book altogether, it’s my favorite book […]
The Death of Mrs Westaway is my least favorite of Ruth Ware’s novels, but even having said that, it’s still a truly great read. That’s just how good she is. You never need worry about which Ruth Ware novel you choose whether it be The Lying Game; In a Dark, Dark Wood or The Woman […]
If you enjoyed the ‘feel’ of All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda then The Perfect Stranger will most likely appeal. I read these books roughly a year apart and enjoyed both, perhaps preferring the former, but only marginally so. To me, Miranda has such a clear style that they read very similarly, perhaps a […]
I used to think that Jane Green understood me, personally. It’s the one foot in England and one foot in the US thing, that gives her a comforting transatlantic reliability in my mind. I know that the stories will be good and that she writes about what I know, namely the cultural and emotional differences […]
It would be impossible to write about Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin, without referencing Monica Lewinsky because that’s the kind of story that this is and sadly, when you think about political sex scandals in the US, even twenty-something years later, that’s still where our minds go. That said, Zevin knows this and uses […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 