Full disclosure with this one, I know Heidi Perks. We don’t know each other well, but for the last twenty-five years or so we have shared a very dear friend, Mrs D. This means we’ve been to parties, hen nights, that kind of thing together. I still hear about her whenever I go home, so […]
There are some books that you simply live as you read, part wishing that this life could be yours. Paris By The Book by Liam Callanan is one of them. Callanan tells the story of Leah, a mother of two girls, living in Milwaukee and married to novelist, Robert Eady. Robert has a good deal […]
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 some reason I had it in my mind that Euphoria by Lily King was a first novel, so I went online to see if she had published a second. Much to my delight I found that she had published not one, but three novels previously of which I was unaware. Choices! Choices! I promptly […]
Reasons to Stay Alive is not the kind of book that I would normally pick up. I’m a fiction reader, pure and simple. I only did so because it happens to be written by the wonderful Matt Haig and because it tackles the issue of depression. Over the last few months it feels like a […]
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 […]
As I read Where the Crawdads Sing, one thought kept going around and around in my mind: what must this novel have done for North Carolina tourism? Honestly, if the The Husband wasn’t such a slave to the office and the kids weren’t constrained by the restrictions of school, I think that I would be […]
Nutshell Book Reviews 