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The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle This is my second Sherlock Holmes adventure that I have read, and coincidentally one of only four full-length novels that he wrote. I also have jumped from the first to the last…
Continue readingStella by Helen Eve I knew from the very beginning that I was not the target demographic for this, the first novel from Helen Eve. I came across it because Helen is an alumnus of the MA Creative Writing course where I…
Continue readingA Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to read some Sherlock Holmes. I never have until now, in part because I’ve imagined it to be quite a slow, difficult read. When…
Continue readingHow It All Began by Penelope Lively When I was little, Penelope Lively’s sadly often forgotten children’s novels were some of my favourite reads. Once I had exhausted her children’s books I moved on to enjoy her adult fiction. Last year when…
Continue readingArtemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer I’ve always loved stories of fairies, elves, and the hidden people, but in truth whenever I think of them I imagine them living a simpler, more rural, rustic way of life tucked away out of…
Continue readingThe Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw This is the natural follow-up to Ali Shaw’s brilliant debut, The Girl With Glass Feet. It is every bit as beautifully and lyrically written as that story, but it is in a way…
Continue readingAt the beginning of 2013 I reset my perennial new year’s resolution to read more, and resolved once more to try and read 20 books this year. Today I can report that I have smashed my target, ground my previous…
Continue readingSpider Circus by Alice Nuttall I knew nothing about Spider Circus before I read this, and little about Alice Nuttall other than she was a student at the university where I work and I had put her profile on the web. When…
Continue readingThe Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader & the Imagination by Ursula K. Le Guin I don’t usually comment on the star rating that I give to books, but with this one I feel it is…
Continue readingBefore Midnight by Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy For the last eighteen years I have loved the film Before Sunrise. Shortly after seeing it I found a copy of the screenplay and it became another favourite. That edition of the book is no…
Continue readingThe Awakening (The Judas Curse, #1) by Angella Graff Religious fiction is not really my usual bag, but urban fantasy (for want of a better word, and I think there probably is…) is. When I came across this book with…
Continue readingBanzai’s Unexpected Voyage by Jane-Anne Hodgson, illustrated by Sammy Jim! When I read the first Grubson Pugg book – Grubson Pugg’s Christmas Voyage – as the final book of last year (and what a festive joy that was!) I found…
Continue readingWrite by Phil Daoust (Editor) I first encountered this joy of a book when I attended a talk on a cold, snowy day at the Oxford Literary Festival in March last year. A couple of students from the Oxford Brookes…
Continue readingFour British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper by Charles Butler I’ve owned this book since it came out in 2006 but have shamefully only just got…
Continue readingBurial Rites by Hannah Kent As I am myself a foreigner inspired to write about Iceland, I was clearly going to read this Australian’s debut novel. I am so glad I heard about it. It’s based on a true story…
Continue readingI’ve been getting some good feedback recently for Mr Tumnal, but this one that I got absolutely blew me away… Have been reading since about 9.30 this morning, have reached Chapter 10 of part 2 … it’s safe to say…
Continue readingGhost Hawk by Susan Cooper Ever since I read Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, and the sequence of which it is part I have loved Susan Cooper’s books and she she has remained one of my favoured authors. Probably…
Continue readingThe Red House by Mark Haddon This is the story of two families who haven’t really spoken in 20 years who decide to holiday together in a cottage on the Welsh borders after, and for the sake of, their recently…
Continue readingBracelet of Bones by Kevin Crossley-Holland From the beginning, the first book in Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Viking trilogy reads like an old Norse myth or saga. The language is, as you would expect from the author, beautiful and poetic, and he…
Continue readingA Thread Through Time by Deborah Shepherd This is Deborah Shepherd’s second novel, after her debut, The Underhill Buttons, and like with Buttons it is a classic time-shift novel of the kind that Penelope Lively used to write when she…
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