Category: Reviews
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Is This a Plum?
By Dan and Finn Ojari Paperback £8.99 Is this a plum? No, it’s… something else! Laughs in this excellent picture book start from the very first page. Cut outs in the pages reminded me of firm favourites The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Under the Same Sky, but they are used in different way. The result…
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Heap Earth Upon It
By Chloe Michelle Howarth Goodness me. This is certainly a book. And it’s definitely not a coincidence that it’s coming out at Halloween. The back of my proof copy says: “A creeping story of sibling rivalry and dangerous obsession”, and I’d say that’s one of the most accurate descriptions of a book I’ve ever read.…
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Jacob’s Transition Goals
by Arthur Webber, illustrated by Ang Hui Qing Hardback, £12.99 This is a bright and exciting picture book that tells an important and moving story, aimed at children aged 3 and up. Jacob is a young boy who is trans and loves football. He moves from the girls’ to the boys’ football team, and after…
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Beyond: a Story of Love and Grief
by Katie Cleminson Hardback, £12.99 This beautiful picture book is exactly what is says it is: a story of both love and grief. I read it as a story about the loss of a baby, the transformative nature of profound grief, and everlasting love for a lost child. I found out later that Cleminson wrote…
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Lifeboat at the End of the World – a Volunteer’s Story
By Dominic Gregory “Do you really think all lives are worth saving?” This is the question that Dungeness lifeboat volunteer Dominic Gregory faces from a man on the beach when he and his crewmates return from trying to rescue strangers from some of the most dangerous seas on earth. This extraordinary book gave me an…
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The Street Art Mystery
by Sharna Jackson Paperback, £8.99 Another excellent middle grade mystery from the author of High Rise. Margot is (maybe) about to start a new school in London, moving from Luton to live with her mum. She and her two friends are spending a weekend at the Notting Hill Carnival, in her (maybe) new home. The…
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Almost Life
by Kiran Millwood Hargrave Hardback, £16.99 This wonderful novel begins with Erica, who is about to start university, taking a trip to Paris in the summer of 1978. There she meets Laure, who is a few years older and draws Erica in with her cool demeanour and air of grubbiness. Hargrave lays out the ways…
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Love in Exile
by Shon Faye Paperback, £12.99 Right from the first chapter of this insightful and engaging memoir and investigation into the politics of love, Faye made me question how I view the topic. Her writing is both rigorously researched and entertaining – Love in Exile is a clever analysis of how political and social influences can…
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Careless People: A story of where I used to work
By Sarah Wynn-Williams Paperback £10.99 By the time you read this review, every MP in the United Kingdom will have received a free copy of Careless People by Pan Macmillan, to try and fight against Meta’s wish to see this book buried at least three feet in the ground. If you want to know more…
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The Night of Baba Yaga
by Akira Otani (Translated by Sam Bett) Paperback, £9.99 The Night of Baba Yaga is an adrenalising, cleverly-plotted queer action thriller. It is the most violent, goriest, and yet most heartfelt story I have ever read. Translated and published in English in 2024, it won the 2025 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation.…
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Orange
by Curtis Garner Paperback, £10.99 This is a beautiful book. It’s Garner’s second novel, and it follows Daniel, who has moved to London from Cornwall and is figuring out how to mesh his identity together. The chapters alternate between Daniel’s somewhat pained life as a lonely teenager in Cornwall and his much livelier one as…
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James
Percival Everett The best novel I’ve read this year. The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn…
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Vigil
by George Saunders Hardback, £18.99 The vigil in question is being held for a wealthy elderly man called K J Boone who is dying in what appears to be the present-day United States. Those coming in and out include people from his past – some from his time as a global leader of an oil…
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The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig Paperback, £9.99 This novel was published in 2020, and is an antidote to the stress caused by life’s inevitable uncertainties. Haig had me thinking about what actually matters, beyond all the specific choices we all make. The Midnight Library follows music shop assistant and cat owner Nora Seed, who has had enough…
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Briefly, a Delicious Life
by Nell Stevens Paperback, £9.99 If I had to condense my review of this book into three words, I would describe it as full of life, which is ironic, as the narrator is a ghost who has been dead for centuries. However, this ghost – Blanca – watches and involves herself in the stories of…
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The Secret World of Spider Webs
by Jan Beccaloni and Namasri Niumim Hardback, £14.99 A gorgeous children’s non-fiction book stuffed with excellent facts and Namasri Niumim’s accurate and appealing illustrations (see inside the book here). As with all the best children’s books, it is good for adults too. The Secret World of Spider Webs is hugely popular at Riverside, and not…
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The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive
By Mathelinda Nabugodi Hardback, £20 The Trembling Hand is a rich and thought-provoking discussion of the Romantic writers in the context of enslavement. I found that I was thinking about Percy and Mary Shelley, Byron, Keats and others differently, and that this was both hard and relevant. Nabugodi’s explanation of historical contexts of their lives…
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It Might Never Happen
By Emily Slapper Hardback, £16.99 The cover and the first page of this book drew me in because I suspected it would fit into the same niche as Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan – and having read it, I think it does – but it has something a little different. Slapper’s writing is more visceral,…
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