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The 24-Hour Café by Libby Page When I read Libby Page’s debut novel The Lido upon its release in 2018 I was blown away about how good it was and it remained one of the best books of the year for me. I…
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Some bookshops feature in my Booklover’s Guide to Bookshops because I’ve known about them for years and love like old friends; some I’ve not actually visited by my co-author Erica has, and some I’ve been told about with enthusiasm. The…
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Murder by the Book by Debbie Young When I think of cosy/village mysteries I think of the ‘lighter’ Miss Marples, or an episode of Bergerac or Death in Paradise. What all of these mysteries have in common is that all feature a murder (and often…
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Kill Land by Dan Holloway I approached this book with trepidation because a perceived reputation for it’s sole-destroying depression. Maybe that was a misunderstanding on my part because what Dan Holloway was saying was that it was “lacking redemption”. Either way, I…
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Cuckoo Call by Betty Salthouse Family loyalties, teenage angst, sibling rivalry, murder, attempted suicide. These are powerful, important subjects. Betty Salthouse’s third book Cuckoo Call pulls all the subjects in a story that could easily be about human relationships as it is about a…
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Time Shifters: Into the Past (Time Shifters, #1) by Kate Frost If I could rate this book with 6 stars then I would as it an outstanding rollercoaster of read. There was one brief moment near the beginning when I was left…
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The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley, Edward Ardizzone (Ilustrator) It was the Edward Ardizzone illustrations that drew me in compulsively to this book, and they are an absolute delight – full of magic and wonder and joy. From the beginning it’s a…
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True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond I’ve been a huge fan of David Almond ever since I encountered his debut novel Skellig back when it all began in 1998. He is a prolific author and I always discover after the…
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Trick or Murder? by Debbie Young This is the second of Debbie Young’s Sophie Sayers Village Mystery series, and as the name suggests the mystery in this book is, as the title suggests, is it a Trick or Murder? This is no psychological…
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Dæmon Voices by Philip Pullman I love, love, love Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and his latest first book in the new Book of Dust series, but I have sometimes found sometimes when I’ve heard Philip talk in interviews for him to be a bit…
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A Stranger At Green Knowe by L.M. Boston I was not sure that I was going to like this book, the fourth in the sextet of Green Knowe books, because from the beginning – indeed for the first 50 or so pages…
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The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper I first read the entire sequence of The Dark Is Rising in the hot sunny conditions of a summer holiday in southern Italy – appropriate maybe for the first in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone but not so much for…
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The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris This a spell book of words. It is a book that you have to curl up in the armchair and pour over. It is a book that you can’t just just read, but touch and…
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The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern From its opening lines, “The circus arrives without warning […] Opens at Nightfall / Closes at Dawn”, this book and the story within it is an enticing prospect. Circuses are magical places in any normal world. Like…
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Close Encounters of the Furred Kind by Tom Cox You can’t read this book, the fourth in the quartet of Tom Cox ‘catoirs’, without feeling a poignant weight of sadness that it is nearing the end for The Bear aka @mySADcat who…
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J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: The Story of the Play by Eleanor Graham, Edward Ardizzone It has been a bit of a woeful embarrassment that I’ve never actually read Peter Pan, even more so because I’ve been in possession of this gorgeous volume for…
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La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust, #1) by Philip Pullman ** Caution: this post may contain spoilers ** This is the long-awaited and much anticipated companion to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and after the 17 year wait, I have been apprehensive…
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The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman This is the book that concludes Philip Pullman’s epic trilogy, and it is the most complex of the three. In Northern Lights we are introduced to the recognisable but different Oxford of Lyra Belaqua’s world with a self-contained,…
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Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman I’m going to get pilloried by the Gaimanites out there, but this book falls a little flat for me. Neil Gaiman has an authoritative voice and clearly knows the stories in and out, but this I fear…
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Friend Request by Laura Marshall The book that is, from the title on, all about Facebook this is a psychological thriller for the FriendsReunited generation. It concerns our protagonist, Louise (I am loath to say heroine as Laura Marshall deliberately paints her…
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