In Darkling Wood – Emma Carroll

To be honest, Carroll had me at ‘darkling’. As Alice, her teenage heroine, says, there’s something spooky about it, ‘It’s a funny word. Old-sounding.’ And then it was the marvellous cover. Fortunately for my high expectations, the rest of the book was brilliant. Alice has come to stay with her spiky and solitary grandmother at …

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

I’m divided on this one, I have to confess. He’s one of my favourite writers, I was fairly gripped by the plot… but there’s also much about this novel I didn’t like. Beginning in the 1860s, the story follows two families new to the Salinas Valley, the Trasks and the Hamiltons. The latter have been …

The Mirror and The Light – Hilary Mantel

I waited a long time to witness Thomas Cromwell’s death – after all, Mantel’s trilogy concerns a period in which such deaths were public spectacles – and when it finally came to it (that is surely not a spoiler), it was heart-wrenchingly tragic. I’m still experiencing that sense of loss that follows the end of …

The Vanished Bride – Bella Ellis #TheBronteMysteries

Taking as its premise the idea that the Brontë sisters embarked on brief careers as crime-fighting ‘detectors’ in 1845, the period between Charlotte and Emily returning home from Brussels and the three sisters becoming published authors a year later, this novel offers us a delicious new version of the famous siblings, superbly reimagined by Bella …

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ – Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities

I'd be lying if I said that the recent use of this novel's famous opening paragraph in an advert (BT?) hadn't been a small nudge to finally get reading this classic. I have been setting the opening as a prac. crit. text for years, feeling like a complete charlatan each time because I have an …

Children of Fire – Paul CW Beatty #BlogTour #Review

Josiah ran flat out over the lip of the dell and off along the path weaving in and out of the trees to make the marksman’s aim harder. It was nearly forty seconds before the next shot came, this time well off target but the time between hearing the ball and the report was reduced. …

After the Party – Cressida Connolly

This was a surprising book – not the story I thought I was going to get, but all the more interesting for it. Rather than being simply a Gatsby-esque exploration of beautiful lives being ruined by scandal (don’t get me wrong – I love that sort of story), this becomes something far more political and …

Lissa Evans’ Old Baggage – simply marvellous.

Mattie Simpkin is a brilliant character. There’s been so much written on the fight for female emancipation, both in fiction and elsewhere, but Evans’ novel, set in 1928, is a moving and often very funny account of what a woman like Mattie, an ardent suffragette and unflagging campaigner for equality, does next. ‘Mattie wore her …

‘There She Blows’ – Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Well, that was some read. I read quickly (it’s my only useful skill) and this has taken me weeks. It’s on a par with Richardson’s Clarissa in terms of the stamina required, but I’m glad I’ve read it - and unlike my experience with Richardson’s epic tome, I wasn’t being whipped along by the demands …

A Right Royal Face-Off by Simon Edge #BlogTour

Previous centuries, in my head at least, have very distinct identities. The 13th Century is bloody and muddy, the 16th Century is a rip-roaring adventure in all sorts of ways, and the 19th Century is earnestly tedious and a bit worthy. The ‘long’ 18th Century feels like the witty, clever century, and it is in …