Category: News

  • The Return – Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, by Hisham Matar

    Hardback, Penguin:Viking, £14.99, out now Hisham Matar’s father Jaballa Matar, an active opponent of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and imprisoned in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim jail.  After 1996, there was no word of what happened to him.  This beautifully written memoir concerns not only Matar’s memories of family life…

  • Cabin Porn – Inspiration for your Quiet Place Somewhere, by Zach Klein and Stephen Leckart

    Paperback, Penguin, £10.99, out now What do you need for your ideal hideaway?  A mountain view and an icy lake?  Dense woodland and a log burning hot tub?  A warm nook for reading, or a breezy beach veranda for birdspotting?  If this is the kind of thing you dream of, this book will make you…

  • Dead Man’s Blues, by Ray Celestin

    Hardback, Mantle, £12.99, out now For his second crime mystery novel, Celestin takes us to Jazz age Chicago.  Louis Armstrong is transforming the cornet solo, and Al Capone largely owns the city, which is corrupt at every level.  The novel opens with a gangster funeral almost Roman in scope, where the crowds are showered with…

  • My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout

    Hardback, Penguin Viking, £12.99, out now Lucy is in hospital in New York, separated from her husband and young children while her illness rumbles on.  Her mother, who she has not seen for many years, comes to visit her, staying by her bedside for several days.  The reasons for the physical and emotional distance in…

  • The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry

    Hardback, Serpent’s Tail, £14.99, out now Victorian religion, science and superstition battle it out over a possible giant sea serpent off Essex. Cora, whose abusive husband has just died, sets out with her unusual young son Francis and working class activist friend Martha to investigate.  Finally able to explore her own interests, this amateur naturalist…

  • Skyfaring – A Journey with a Pilot, by Mark Vanhoenacker

    Paperback, Vintage, £8.99, out now The cover of this book makes me want to jump on a plane and fly off somewhere.  As someone who likes flying, despite serious concerns about climate change, I thought I might like this book.  I was wrong.  I love it. If I’m looking for escape in a book, I’m…

  • Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy

    Hardback, Hamish Hamilton, £12.99, out now The mother made me want to scream.  Out loud.  “She will wake up and shout, ‘Get me water, Sofia,’ and I will get her water and it will always be the wrong sort of water.”  Brilliantly effective and funny, this is a sharp and speedy summer read. Sofia has…

  • The Gustav Sonata, by Rose Tremain

    Hardback, Chatto and Windus, £16.99, out now Gustav lives with his widowed mother in Switzerland, just after the Second World War.  A young boy, he is raised by his mother to value Switzerland’s neutrality, and told to master his own emotions.  Gustav forms an intense friendship with a new arrival at his school, a Jewish…

  • Gratitude, by Oliver Sacks

    Hardback, Picador, £9.99, out now Gratitude is a final gift from the excellent neurologist and writer of popular science, Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015.  These short but beautiful pieces encapsulate all that is best about his writing.  Humane, kind, interesting and funny, they offer his reflections on a life well lived from one who…

  • The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

    Hardback, £9.99, Egmont ‘Classics’ Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s classic The Wind in the Willows was republished last year in a beautiful hardback edition by Egmont ‘Classics’, complete with an appendix of activities for children, a well-conceived glossary (as some of Grahame’s words are challenging) and E. H. Shepherd’s original and unforgettable pen illustrations. I cannot…

  • East West Street – On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, by Philippe Sands

    Hardback, Orion Books, £20, out now International human rights barrister Philippe Sands opens his remarkable new book with a quote from Nicolas Abraham: “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”.  Sands tries to fill some of these gaps in the stories of both his family…

  • This Must be the Place, by Maggie O’Farrell

    Hardback, Tinder Press, £18.99, out now – limited number of signed copies available in store Daniel is an American academic married to a reclusive former film star, and living in rural Ireland.  His happy second marriage to Claudette has produced two young children, to add to the ones he left in California and never sees. …

  • I am Henry Finch, by Viviane Schwarz and Alexis Deacon

    Paperback, Walker Books, £6.99, out now A deserved winner of the excellent Little Rebels Award for radical children’s books (https://littlerebelsaward.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/alexis-deacon-invites-children-to-come-up-with-an-alternative-to-capitalism/ ), this beautiful picture book made me roar with laughter. Henry Finch is a small bird who comes to realise that he exists, and thinks, and that he can use his thoughts to tackle THE…

  • The Mountain Can Wait, by Sarah Leipciger

    Paperback, Tinder Press, £7.99, out now A distracted young man, Curtis, is driving along a mountain road at night.  A woman flashes into his headlights, is struck by the truck, and disappears.  He keeps driving. Curtis’s single father Tom manages planting for logging in the Canadian Rockies.  His teenage daughter, like his son, appears alienated…

  • Citizen – An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine

    Paperback, Penguin Books, £9.99, out now This book has been out for ages.  It has been in the shop for ages.  It won the Forward Poetry prize for best collection last year.  So why am I writing about it now? I am writing about it because I can’t stop thinking about it, and because it…

  • The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte

    Paperback, Vintage, 7.99 Ashamed of not having read anything by Anne Bronte but only her sisters I recently began reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and was astonished (though perhaps should not have been) firstly by how psychologically convincing the characters are, and secondly by the strangely addictive quality the writing possesses; considering its length…

  • Being a Beast, Charles Foster

    Hardback, Profile Books, £14.99, out now If the belated but welcome Spring sunshine has you feeling newly mindful of our wildlife and hankering for all things natural then I couldn’t recommend anything better than Charles Foster’s latest book, Being a Beast ( – short of actually departing for the country and taking up residence in…

  • Exposure, by Helen Dunmore

    Hardback, Hutchinson, £16.99, out now An engaging thriller with a very human heart, this cold war spy story is fresh and believable.  Giles, a long time Soviet mole in the 1950s British security services, calls in a favour from his old co-worker Stephen.  Giles is in hospital and must have stolen secret papers removed from…

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