book reviews

This is a mystery story related in three timelines from different points of view. At the centre is the presumed

Brian Bilston (not his real name) is a poet who found fame on social media, “The Poet Laureate of Twitter”,

Still Alice tells the story of Alice Howland, a distinguished professor of psychology at Harvard who, at the peak of

Anna Burns was born in Belfast in 1962 so, like the protagonist in her novel, she was a teenager during

At the age of nine Rose tastes her mother’s lemon cake and clearly detects and feels her mother’s emotional state.

Anxious People is set in a small town in present day Sweden where six prospective buyers viewing an apartment and

Days Without End is in the form of a first person narrative by Thomas McNulty, an Irish émigré to America

The book is set in a small Swiss town and is structured, like a sonata, in three parts covering the

In 1922 Moscow, Count Alexander Rostov a wealthy aristocrat aged 32 is charged with being a “Social Parasite” and placed

The Siege is an in-depth, extensively researched account of the six day siege at the Iranian embassy in 1980. It is a non-fiction

This is the story of Katherine Plantagenet, one of the seven children of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. She is

The book begins with a strange occurrence on a domestic flight from Tasmania to Sydney. A completely normal seeming grey-haired

Sea of Poppies is initially set in the opium poppy growing region of India in 1837 just before the Opium

This is a true story in the form of a novel about a miscarriage of justice. In Tiger Bay in

In an excellent interview with Andrea Levy at the end of the book (we wished that we had read this

Peter Byerly, an antiquarian book dealer, is a young American widower trying to piece his life back together after the

Less is a comic novel in which the protagonist Arthur Less, a moderately successful writer, is facing a mid-life crisis

Our book choice for this month was a work of non-fiction relating a year in the life of a female

Margaret Forster took her inspiration from a series of paintings by Post-Impressionist artist Gwen John (1876-1939). Deceptively simple, these small

This novel tells the story of Lotta Rae who, in 1906, aged 19 is raped at her workplace by one