Tag: Reviews
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Exiles
I’ve read every Jane Harper crime thriller and this is the best one so far. Aaron Falk, her investigator in previous books The Dry and Force of Nature, is visiting friends in a small Australian town. It’s a year since his last visit, and a year since local woman Kim went missing from a seasonal…
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Space Crone
This excellent diverse anthology includes essays and short stories from the author of speculative fiction including The Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness. I was delighted to find that it included my favourite short story of all time, Sur, in which a group of women set out to reach the south pole…
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Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare
This essential and well-written book is a mixture of useful history and current issues in UK healthcare. The author explores areas including eugenics, race science, development of health policies and treatments. Sowemimo brings her personal experience as NHS doctor to her analysis. Her first-hand accounts of training and practice in UK medicine map her historical…
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His Bloody Project, by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Paperback, Contraband, £8.99, out now This Booker-longlisted novel is the story of a 17 year old boy facing the death penalty for a triple murder committed in a remote village in the Scottish highlands. It is 1869, and Roderick Macrae is the son of a crofter who is living in a feudal society. His Bloody…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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. …
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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…
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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…