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 […]
Latest Reviews
Tombland by CJ Sansom
What a pleasure it is to be back in the company of hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake, the thinking woman’s sixteenth century crumpet. Tombland is the seventh novel in the Shardlake series and reading the first six is necessary pleasure, so please go and do that before beginning this one. It’s the best historical fiction series I’ve encountered. […]
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 […]
Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales
Into every life must come some pain, or so the saying goes. In this quite beautiful book, journalist Leigh Sales looks at how normal people deal with intense emotional and physical pain; how they incorporate it into their existence and continue to lead good lives. She also talks to professionals who deal with traumatised people at […]
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 […]
After the Darkness by Honey Brown
Wow, this is pretty darn awesome. A middle aged couple, Trudy and Bruce (such uniquely Australian names), happen upon a secluded mansion containing a gallery on The Great Ocean Road. They go inside and what happens inside effectively poisons the rest of their lives. Brown’s writing is mercifully free of cliche and conveys the horror […]
The Katharina Code by Jorn Lier Horst
Love a good bit of Nordic crime fiction. This one is quite not as gripping as its back cover suggests; my heart was not close to stopping at any stage. It is a however a gently unfurling story which is just interesting enough to keep you reading, with a satisfying conclusion. But as far as […]
The Bus on Thursday by Shirley Barrett
The first two thirds of this truly interesting Australian novel are solid gold. Eleanor is a breast cancer survivor who’s not afraid to tell it like it is, and mostly it’s utterly crap. She is a woman after my own heart, combining a tendency to look on the darker side of life with an abililty […]