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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I am very fortunate to have a family filled with readers. We may not live in geographical proximity to each other and our preferences may at times be wildly different, but we are able to hit each other up for a good book recommendation from time to time. My sister-in-law, Dr A, often enjoys a […]
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 […]
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 […]
I believe that there are points in every person’s reading cycle, where you just have to take a break and read some fluff for a while. For me this time came recently when I was feeling swamped by the kids, by work, by trying to get the blog up and running and by all those […]
As surely as every American of a certain generation knows where they were the night Kennedy died, the same can be said of every Brit on the morning the news broke of Diana’s death. Whether you were a fan or not and yes, public opinion on Diana was very mixed at the time of her […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 