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 …

70 Reviews: 10. A Taste of the Unexpected – Roald Dahl (Pocket Penguins)

This is the second set of short stories I’ve read from the pocket Penguin collection in a week, and I have to confess that, self-confessed literary snob though I am, I preferred the Dahl collection to the Borges. I’d taught The Landlady a couple of times, and so the construction felt more blatant – prior …

70 Reviews: 8. Nothing Bad Ever Happens in Tiffany’s – Marian Keyes (Pocket Penguins)

I'm a firm believer in every book having its day. I'd started this series of reviews back in June 2018, keen to work my way through Penguin's boxed 70th Birthday collection that doubles up as a doorstop. It's a brilliant set of reads, usually from longer books, that draws upon Penguin's long and varied history …

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 …

A Midsummer Knight’s Kiss – Elisabeth Hobbes

This was such a satisfying read to kick off the new year - in this story, Hobbes has revisited the Danby family, last seen in Redeeming the Rogue Knight and The Blacksmith's Wife. This time, we meet the next generation, Rowenna and Robbie. They've known each other since childhood, and I loved the way Hobbes …

The Testaments – Margaret Atwood

Warning – contains spoilers… My relief at the fact that this is bloody good is immense. I’d disliked Oryx and Crake – and let’s not talk about The Year of the Flood – and I’d feared that she might go too far down that sort of route again. But, no. This is Gilead as we …

Lanny by Max Porter #BookerPrize2019

I love this time of year – the announcement of the Booker Longlist signals the onset of Autumn and gives me just the sort of challenge I like. Admittedly, I haven’t actually got round to reading last year’s winner yet, and I can never call it in terms of who should be shortlisted, but I …

Secrets of a Highland Warrior – Nicole Locke #BlogTour #LochmoreLegacy

‘… Rory’s eyes locked with hers and she knew he understood a fraction of a moment before she did how Lochmores could gain more without a fight. ‘All you need to is marry my daughter.’’ Locke’s Secrets of a Highland Warrior is a very satisfying conclusion to an excellent series. Locke has pulled together the …