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I had the absolute treat over Christmas and the New Year (perhaps I’m a bit behind times on writing the review, oops…) of reading Siri Hustvedt’s captivating social drama and novel of ideas, What [...]

As a self-confessed serial killer documentary enthusiast, I strangely enjoy reading and watching academics attempt to uncover the mysteries of murder. I find the psychological investigations on [...]

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Mary Lennox lives in India, and then a disease called cholera breaks out and her whole family dies. She is sent to England to live at Misselthwaite [...]

The Explorer by Katherine Rundell (Bloomsbury 2018). The book begins with some children in an aeroplane flying over the Amazon, and then the plane crashes in the middle of the jungle. The [...]

Carlos Ruiz Zafón The Shadow of the Wind “Once, in my father’s bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into [...]

Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories, 2002, Oxford World’s Classics ISBN 978-0-19-953735-8 Mansfield’s Selected Stories brings together her finest work; from early stories inspired by her time in [...]

Robert Harris Hutchinson 2020, ISBN: 978-1-786-33140-3 Published in July 2020, this book was, Harris says, largely written in lockdown.  He describes attempts by the British to hamper the [...]

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar As we are currently unable to travel, I have made it my project to read a novel from every country in the world – although I do rather hope that the [...]

Malcolm Vale’s contribution to the debate on the origins of the Hundred Years War – The Origins of the Hundred Years War: The Angevin Legacy 1250-1340 – as the title would suggest, [...]

Sarah Waters – Tipping the Velvet Review As “one of the best storytellers alive today” (Independent, n.d.), Waters’s writings are confident, precise and sensuous with irony and wit [...]