Tag: Review
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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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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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My Rice is Best!
By Selina Brown and Maxwell A. Oginni Penguin, Paperback, £7.99 Any books about food immediately draw me in, and this was no exception! Brown’s storytelling and Oginni’s illustrations are bound to start conversations about favourite foods and cooking. Each page is brimming with as much energy as the children in the book, Yinka and Shane,…
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Lands of Belonging: a History of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Britain
By Donna and Vikesh Amey Bhatt and Salini Perea Nosy Crow, Paperback, £9.99 This colourful and accessible book manages to bring together history, geography, culture and religion while remaining very readable. Perfect for ages 9 and up, it is helpful for adults too, as I certainly learnt some interesting things while reading it. Lands of…
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All Fours
By Miranda July Canongate Books, Paperback, £9.99 “I’d whipped myself into a froth of longing — or worked, created fictions…. Was there any actual enchantment or was it all just survival, ways to muddle through?” I’m jealous of you if you are yet to read Miranda July’s All Fours, now out in paperback. It has…
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The Safekeep
By Yael van der Wouden Penguin, Paperback, £9.99 Call Me By Your Name meets Girl With A Pearl Earring in this consuming and simmering debut novel set in a rural town in the Netherlands. The Safekeep is one of those rare books where the things left unsaid speak as much as the ones on the…
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Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Hardback £20 ‘Does it help to know that the world is full of people who are sadder than you?’ ‘But I am not sad, I just dream.’ I rarely underline or highlight my books, and yet for some reason I had to mark a lot of the passages in Dream Count, as…
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The Bat Book
*currently out of print, check second-hand shops and online stores!* “Bats can’t launch off the ground into flight like birds do, so instead they climb to a high point, hang upside down, and launch into flight”. I had always wondered about this. I am also delighted to discover that there are megabats and microbats. An…
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Flower Block
By Lanisha Butterfield and Hoang Giang Paperback, £7.99 A spirit-lifting picture book for young children, a small boy turns a tower block into a Flower Block by planting a sunflower seed. Jeremiah meets all the neighbours in his block of flats when his flowering plant creates a friendly wilderness. It’s a book about community, and…
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Wilding
By Isabella Tree Hardback, £20 Wilding is a stunning illustrated guide to bringing wildlife back, and is suitable for all ages. A combination of photos and gorgeous illustrations from Riverside favourite Angela Harding makes this a proper reference guide as well as a joy to sit down with. Telling the story of the rewilding project…
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Jamie
By L D Lapinski Paperback, £7.99 I was eagerly awaiting this 2023 release: a middle grade book with a non-binary main character fighting for their rights? Sign me up! I am most happy to report: the book lived up to my hype. Our charming protagonist is at a crossroads. Having come out as non-binary to…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Ten Days, by Gillian Slovo
Hardback, Canongate, £14.99, out 3 March Martin Luther King said that “riots are the language of the unheard”. Developed from Slovo’s successful 2011 verbatim play The Riots at the Tricycle theatre, this readable novel offers multiple voices and a wholly convincing and gripping anatomy of how a London riot happens. It is a scorching summer,…
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