This Eden – Ed O’Loughlin

I was lucky to get hold of a review copy of O'Loughlin's fast-paced This Eden, which is out today, and I raced through it. From the outset, we know that there is more to Michael's story than meets the eye. We're invited to study the evidence, and reminded that everything today is observed. 'Their first …

Mamma – Diana Tutton (British Library Women Writers)

In other hands, this could have been an uncomfortable (or perhaps horribly salacious) read, concerning as it does a growing connection between a woman and a younger man. But Tutton is too good a writer for that, and this becomes a fascinating exploration of motherhood, aging, and the often uncomfortable acknowledgement of desire in anyone …

In the Garden; Essays on Nature and Growing (Daunt Books)

'Here is a process, a mode of connection in which we understand that growth of any kind means that you must both work and wait. Water and wait. What happens or does not happen next will not be entirely up to you.' Victoria Adukwei Bulley This is the second collection of essays published by Daunt …

The Blue Bench – Paul Marriner

Set in 1920, The Blue Bench is a moving account of the damage, both physical and emotional in its nature, done to the soldiers who survived the First World War. Edward Thompson, a gifted musician, and his friend and former comrade, William, are in Margate for the summer. William, who acts as Edward's agent, has …

V For Victory – Lissa Evans

I finished Crooked Heart and immediately opened V For Victory, thus deferring that sense of loss you get when you finish an excellent book. That is how I'm feeling now I've come to the end of Lissa Evan's third book in her trilogy (read my review of Old Baggage here). It's now 1944 and Vee …

Crooked Heart – Lissa Evans

As regular followers may remember, I absolutely loved Old Baggage’s Mattie Simpkin. Published as a prequel after Crooked Heart, it provided readers with Mattie’s story in 1928. Crooked Heart, although the first of the two novels, moves forward a decade and Mattie, very sadly, is now suffering with dementia and ‘looking after’ a godson, Noel. …

Troy – Stephen Fry

I'm a bit obsessed (if that isn't an oxymoron?) with the story of the Trojan War these days. As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, I think it stems from a gap in my formal education, and in recent years I've loved novels such as Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, Madeline Miller's The …

Hot Stew – Fiona Mozley

Fiona Mozley's new novel is excellent. It's very different in tone to her outstanding debut, Elmet, but excellent all the same. Hot Stew has a large cast of characters inhabiting Mozley's Soho, a landscape she builds from open fields in a virtuoso fast-forward motion in a matter of paragraphs. The buildings, the visitors, the inhabitants, …

Kate Atkinson – Big Sky; a Jackson Brodie novel

Finishing this novel left me with that fizzy feeling, the one which makes you want to buy all the other books in the series and binge-read until May. Quite how I am so late to the Jackson Brodie party, I have no idea. It’s not like I haven’t read loads of Atkinson’s other novels and …

Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's new novel picks up on some of the ideas and concerns visited in Never Let Me Go, but that novel now feels like something of a rehearsal for Klara and the Sun. In his latest novel, Ishiguro has perfected the limited-perspective narrative style and given us a marvellous new invention in Klara, an Artificial …