The Searcher – Tana French

Whilst I enjoyed The Wych Elm (I was fascinated with the gothic story behind the title), I preferred The Searcher - the ending feels more plausible, and the whole thing is more tightly structured. Cal Hooper has handed in his Chicago Police Badge and upped sticks to a remote village in the west of Ireland. …

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The Wild Silence – Raynor Winn

Since finishing the final page of The Salt Path last year, I've been waiting to find out what happened next. The Wild Silence is, in my opinion, even more marvellous. I loved the walk that structured her first story, not least because it's all such familiar terrain. But this is perhaps a more structurally complex …

The Lying Life of Adults – Elena Ferrante

'Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.' A more condensed narrative than the rather sprawling Neapolitan Quartet, Elena Ferrante's new novel is a classic bildungsroman with an interesting gothic flavour. As with the Quartet's main figures, our new narrator, Giovanna, is focused on her growing awareness …

Q & A – H. A. Leuschel

H. A. Leuschel has got a new novel out. To find out more, I asked her over to the blog for a chat. Morning, Helene! I hope your Sunday has started well! Tell us a bit about Lizzie in The Memories We Bury. Lizzie is a young Scottish woman with a passion for music who, …

The Death of Francis Bacon – Max Porter

Once you’ve read The Death of Francis Bacon, you can’t help feeling that only Max Porter could have tackled the imagined thoughts of this violently visual painter. As already seen in Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Porter’s style suits the noisy, graphic style of the painter himself. In a way, the layout …

Just Bea – Deborah Klée #Blogtour

On the face of things, Bea Stevens is very different to Deborah Klée’s previous heroine, Angie, in The Borrowed Boy. But scratch a little deeper and there are similarities – Bea may well have learned to adopt a glossy veneer, but she still feels very much the outsider looking in at the prestigious Hartleys department …