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 …

The Sanatorium – Sarah Pearse

'The figure is dressed in black. Something is covering their face. It resembles a gas mask; the same basic form, but it's missing the filter at the front. Instead, there's a thick rubber hose running from nose to mouth. A connector. The hose is ribbed, black; it quivers as the figure shifts from foot to …

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. …

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, …