Helen Cullen’s The Lost Letters of William Woolf #review

This is a fascinating tale, taking as its starting point a fascinating location – the place where lost letters, those with illegible or incomplete postal addresses, end up. ‘Lost letters have only one hope for survival. If they are caught between two worlds, with an unclear destination and no address of sender, the lucky ones …

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70 Reviews: 6. The View From Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins (Pocket Penguins) #review

I’m so far out of my comfort zone with this one that the edge of the comfort zone is a dim hazy blur on the horizon. This, together with the fact that I suspect I have the ‘certain kind of literary mind’ that Dawkins takes a shot at in his second paragraph, means that I …

Elisabeth Hobbes’ Beguiled by the Forbidden Knight #review

  As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not really a Romance kind of reader these days – although some of my all-time favourites have contained a large dollop of the stuff and so I probably need to qualify that statement somewhat – but I will always pick up one of Elisabeth Hobbes’ novels. They’re so full …

Lauren Wolk’s Wolf Hollow – truth and loyalties in 1940s America #review

This moving and tautly-constructed tale of secrets and damaged characters is an excellent read for young and old(er) adults alike. From the opening line, ‘The year I turned twelve, I learned how to lie’, we’re in the hands of an accomplished storyteller, and one who isn’t afraid to pull her punches when it comes to …

70 Reviews: 5. Innocent House by P.D. James (Pocket Penguins) #review

Whereas the other volumes covered so far in this boxset series have worked well as stand-alones, this one is definitely a teaser and I’m going to hunting out the complete novel, Original Sin, as soon as I’ve finished this review. And here comes reading-confession-time again – this is the first time I’ve read a PD …

70 Reviews: 4. Summer in Algiers by Albert Camus (Pocket Penguins) #review

I had read some of Camus’ novels (in translation – my GCSE French textbook, the marvellous Tricolor, didn’t cover existential thought) and loved them. I had not, however, spent much time with his essays. This is another brilliant thing about this Penguin boxset challenge – I’m reading things I might otherwise have passed over because …

Nicole Harkin’s Tilting #BlogBlitz #Review

I guess that everyone has a moment in their childhood when they suddenly realise that what is normal in their house doesn’t necessarily happen in other homes. Usually this is something minor, something that ultimately becomes a familiar routine or in-joke. However, for some, this realisation can be more stark, more defining in terms of …

Philip Hensher’s The Friendly Ones #review

Picked up as an impulse buy (its proportions are pleasing - I liked the look and feel of it), The Friendly Ones has introduced me to a novelist who is undoubtedly going to become a firm favourite. I absolutely loved this novel, and its beauty is in the detail. We move between two families, swinging …

70 Reviews: 3. Otherwise Pandemonium by Nick Hornby (Pocket Penguins)

I’m onto the third volume in the Penguin 70s boxset and back into fiction territory. This is a pair of short stories by Nick Hornby, a writer I’m ashamed to say I’ve not read before (the films were so good that I just didn’t feel the need. Apologies – I now realise my error); the …

70 Reviews: 2. Cogs in the Great Machine by Eric Schlosser (Pocket Penguins)

An extract from his 2001 Fast Food Nation, Book 2 in the Penguin 70s collection is a damning exposé of safety practices in the meat industry of rural America. An investigative journalist, Schlosser has used his words to lay bare the mistreatment of workers and the abuses of power within this section of the mass-market …