Paul Kalanithi was thirty six years old when he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. How ridiculously unfair that someone who had worked so hard to become a neurosurgeon and could have helped so many people was destined to die so young. But he doesn’t whine about it: instead he writes this beautiful, sparse book […]
Latest Reviews
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
How much of Anne’s diary resonates with you will probably depend on how old you were when you first read it. I was 13, the same age Anne is when she begins to write in her diary. It was the first time I had heard anything substantial about the Holocaust, and it cut deep. I’ve […]
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Strayed’s memoir about a long hike undertaken after completely messing up her life following the death of her mother resonates with many of us, especially perhaps those of us who have lost mothers. It is partly about carrying a huge stinking bucket of grief around with you wherever you go, and not knowing quite how […]
Broken Ground by Val McDermid
This decent little thriller is the fifth in McDermid’s series featuring slightly bloshie, coffee-loving DCI Karen Pirie, head of the Historic Cases Unit in Edinburgh. This time Pirie has a particularly nasty enemy in her superior officer and a lot of grief and gin to get through, but she is as doggedly determined as ever […]
A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold
We sometimes speak about the murder of a child as ‘every parent’s worst nightmare’, but how much worse would it be if your child was the murderer, and then killed himself? Sue Klebold knows. Her son Dylan was one of the perpetrators of the original high school shooting, Columbine, in 1999, and in this blazingly […]
What She Knew by Gilly Macmillan
This great little thriller was originally published in 2015 under the title Burnt Paper Sky. What She Knew takes us to terrifying places: the shock and the guilt that comes when a mother gives her eight year old son permission to ‘run ahead’, out of her sight, in a public park because she wants to give […]
The Party by Lisa Hall
Nothing new to see here, people. Move along. This alleged thriller involves a lot of cliches and a predictable ending. With so many great thrillers out there, I wouldn’t waste valuable reading time on this one. Can’t believe I did.
All the Hidden Truths by Claire Askew
A recommendation from Erin Kelly on the cover of any book is enough to make me buy it, and this one was money well spent. It’s about a young man who shoots and kills thirteen women on a college campus in Scotland, and about the police and families trying to pick up the pieces afterwards. […]