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 […]
I love the way The Drowned Detective, by Neil Jordan, is written. It just feels so incredibly oblique and dreamlike, which works well in the confusion of the story itself and our inability as reader to tell the difference between what is real and imagined. Does the title of the book refer to the fact […]
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper, by Phaedra Patrick, is just the most gorgeous novel. I read it at a time when I really wasn’t happy and when I most profoundly needed an emotional lift. It tells the story of Arthur Pepper a sixty-nine year old man, living in York, England. A widower for nearly […]
There are times when we have all toyed with being terrible parents, tempted to do the wrong thing. For most of us however, the angel on our shoulder kicks in, reminding us of our parental obligation and ensuring beyond a shadow of a doubt that our child or children are taken good care of. Not […]
The Husband knows all too well that the words ‘science fiction’ and ‘fantasy’ are like a like a death knell for me. Nothing fills me with greater dread than stories set in a different world or in the future. Something in me dies a little when asked to make a leap into a story about […]
If you have pesky commitments like a day job, mortgage, kids, then picking up The Widow by Fiona Barton, is probably not your best idea. Some books, the best kind, demand to be read from the second you pick them up and The Widow is one such novel. Jean Taylor is the kind of woman […]
I bought The Daughter right on the back of having read and loved What She Knew. What She Knew, by Gilly Macmillan, had opened my eyes to a genre that I had thought, as a parent, would be impossible to enjoy, namely the missing child story. For years I had steered clear of any such […]
OK, I admit it. This is yet another crime novel set in Bristol. I believe that now makes three for this blog. If you have little knowledge of the UK, you must be envisaging that Bristol, the city I went to school in, is some kind of latter day Gotham City. A hotbed of crime […]
In the past I have been critical of novels written in reverse chronology. Last summer I devoted a chunk of time to reading The Rocks by Peter Nichols and when I sat down to write a review of the book, I simply couldn’t. The story was great, engaging in fact, but the chronology was all […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 