Tag: Reviews

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…