This mind bending thriller is a cross between Agatha Christie at her bloodiest and Groundhog Day. A sick sort of house party is taking place in a dilapidated mansion in a secluded forest some time in the distant past. At 11pm the host’s daughter Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered. The protagonist Aiden wakes up each day […]
General fiction
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Unsheltered is about having a secure place to live; the physical and psychological comfort that can provide, and the psychological distress that arises when your home is unsafe and worth next to nothing financially. ”Without shelter, we stand in daylight. Without shelter, we feel ourselves likely to die.” Willa Knox, living in modern America with her […]
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver is no doubt haunted by the success of this ripper novel, published in 1998. I’ve read nothing of hers since then that is quite as good. It’s a gripping story of an American missionary couple who move to the Belgian Congo in 1959 with their four daughters. The father is an arrogant man who […]
Cedar Valley by Holly Throsby
Apparently Holly Throsby is a songwriter. It shows. Her sentences are peeled back, distilled to what is utterly necessary. Simple words say a lot. When the wife of local police detective is stomping around the kitchen, irritated and making lunches, “Simmons didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t offer to help her. He didn’t interact with […]
22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson
This very good but slightly harrowing book will make you grateful for your comfortable bed and fridge full of food. During World War Two, Silvania and her infant son, Aurek, flee Warsaw. After a series of horrors she ends up in the forest with a toddler, barely surviving through freezing winters and burning summers, so […]
Transcription by Kate Atkinson
Atkinson has done it again, producing a compelling and often unexpectedly funny portrait of wartime Britain. It is 1940 and Atkinson’s protagonist Juliet Armstrong is a newly recruited M15 agent in London. She is also an orphan and almost entirely alone in the world; Her mother was-had been- Scottish (although you couldn’t tell by looking), and […]
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson
Here Atkinson’s focus is on Teddy, younger brother of Ursula Todd whose story was explored in the excellent Life After Life. Teddy is a World War Two pilot and his story is riveting. Unlike his sister, he only gets one life and is often bewildered as to how to live it. Atkinson’s writing brings the war to […]
Canada by Richard Ford
”First, I’ll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.” Pretty good start to a novel, Richard Ford. How could you not read on?Dell Parsons’ fairly ordinary small town life ends abruptly after his parents commit a bank robbery. They are the people not accumstomed to criminal behaviour, and woefully […]