A Thousand Ships – Natalie Haynes

In her third novel, Haynes has, as the muse Calliope says, ‘picked up the old stories and … shaken them until the hidden  women appear in plain sight.’ And it is a great cast that tell us the story of Troy and its aftermath from this female perspective. Helen is present, but Calliope tells us, …

Dominicana – Angie Cruz

The shock of the opening line, ‘The first time Juan Ruiz proposes, I’m eleven years old…’, sets us up for an uneasy insight into the life of a young girl from the Dominican Republic, whose life is to be shaped by the poverty of her homeland and the ambitions of her mother. Ana’s mother is …

Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens

I suspect that I’ll be a tad unpopular after this, and so I’ll get straight to the point. I liked this novel – I didn’t love it. Hear me out… I do see all the things that people have raved about, and it is clear that this is a much-loved novel for  lot of readers. …

An Interview With … T. G. Campbell

Good morning! Today, I'm talking to T. G. Campbell, author of the Bow Street Society novels about Victorian London, multiple narrators, and commemorative mugs. Tell us a little bit about the Bow Street Society. Where did the idea originally come from? The Bow Street Society is a fictional group of amateur detectives operating in Victorian …

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. …