This one’s a slow burner, but well worth a read if you have a hankering for good writing and well drawn characters. So quintessentially English.
Latest Reviews
Munich by Robert Harris
I do hope Robert Harris will again reach the gripping literary heights of the Cicero Trilogy and Fatherland, but alas he doesn’t with this one. Munich takes place in September 1938; it’s well written, dense with the comings and goings of gentlemanly diplomats, but never really engages or intrigues.
The Good Father by Noah Hawley
”He was twenty years old. As a boy he had never been attracted to the mindless aggression of men. He did not collect toy guns or turn everything he touched into a weapon, he saved birds that had fallen from their nests. He shared. And yet there he was in two-lane Texas, test-firing automatics on […]
We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
This one reminded me very much of Jonathon Frazens The Corrections, with its intimate detailing of a time and a place and a family you feel quite connected to by the end of the novel. It seems to take an astonishingly long time for Ed’s Alzheimer’s disease to be diagnosed; his wife Eileen is quietly […]
Tigers In Red Weather by Liza Klaussman
Liza Klaussman’s first novel is like an icy cocktail on a simmeringly hot day; quite delightful. The decadence of life in Martha’s Vineyard in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s is bought languorously to life but beneath the surface the lives of her characters are not especially charmed, which makes them much more interesting. The writing […]
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Weird. Unsettling. Peculiar. But at least original.
The Sudden Departure of the Frasers by Louise Candlish
Another winner from Louise Candlish, whose finely observed portraits of relationships between friends, spouses and neighbours reminds me very much of Liane Moriarty. This book has Christy and her husband moving into their enormous dream house on Lime Park Road. Soon enough they notice there’s Something Weird Going on, to do with the the disappearance […]
Into the Night by Sarah Bailey
This one comes hot on the heels of Bailey’s first novel, The Dark Lake. Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock has ditched her complicated life in the country for an equally complicated life in Melbourne. She has left her young son with his father and feels the guilt and sadness of it every day: yet another part […]