Unlike most book lovers, I’m not such a great admirer of The Great Gatsby. For all its poetry, Gatsby has a cold heart and therefore failed to move me. Plus, the narrator is boring and Daisy is a twit. Gorsky is brilliant update of Gatsby and it’s so much more compelling. Gatsby/Gorsky is now a Russian billionaire who […]
Latest Reviews
A Well Behaved Woman by Theresa Anne Fowler
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
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 […]
A Double Life by Flynn Berry
I liked Flynn Berry’s earlier novel Under The Harrow very much, and expected to like A Double Life more than I did. The story is inspired by the 1974 case of Lord Lucan; a privileged man, a bitter marital split, a nanny brutally murdered (presumably because the killer mistook her for the wife), and then the disappearance of the […]
Still Lives by Maria Hummel
I only finished this book so I could tell you not to bother with it. According to The Book Reviewer’s Code of Ethics (that I just made up) I can’t give a book a star rating unless I’ve finished it. So I finished it, and that two and a half hours of my life I […]
Wedderburn by Maryrose Cuskelly
There seems to be no real justification for 65 year old Ian Jamieson murdering three of his neighbours in October 2014; only a series of slights, real or imagined, which Jamieson felt required addressing. Jamieson and one of his victims had previously been friends but both were hard men, stubborn and unwilling to give an […]
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 […]