Not many games feel like they could find a place on a book review blog but Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley is a true shining example. My gaming experience is pretty much confined to various incarnations of the Sims and also playing the original Spyro trilogy during my teens. My partner generously bought me that Hogwarts game and I haven’t had time to sit down and play it. But when I saw that Snufkin was hitting the consoles, I knew that an exception had to be made. Friends, this is as close as we will ever get to visiting the Moomins for ourselves. From the earliest moments of gameplay, t ..read more

I am aware that my inner pedant can come out to play when it comes to historical fiction. I have worked hard to keep this troublesome creature subdued. I try to see it as the same battle as when I get irritated by changes made in book-to-screen adaptations. I remind myself that sacrifices sometimes need to be made for good story-telling. It does not matter if Gillipa Phregory says that Henry VII was being tight-fisted around Katherine of Aragon’s dowry by making her and Prince Arthur use the plate for their meals so that it would be scraped by their cutlery even though people did not use knive ..read more

Well, well, well. What have we here? It seems like a fairly major being milestone has crept up on me. Two thousand posts. I remember the days when I was pretty pleased with myself that I had hit one hundred. Blimey. This is not to say that it is two thousand book reviews. Between my top tens, sharing poems, pictures and quotations, there were a few years where I was generating a lot of content. But then I hit parenthood and after that things seriously slowed down. For context, I published my 1000th post eight years ago. Content production has slowed down a lot since then. So it feels ..read more

The first time I read this was over twenty years ago. I was a teenager and having a Richard III phase. I had seen a Shakespeare play in the theatre for the first ever time, which saw Robert Lindsay put on a rather pantomime villain turn as history’s ultimate wicked uncle. Then a few months later, I was gifted The Daughter of Time by a family friend who wanted me to see ‘the truth’. I remember being puzzled by its general thesis that Richard III’s portrait seemed too nice to be guilty of murder. Portraits were generally intended to be flattering things and were not as accurate as phot ..read more

A couple of years ago, I read and loved Cecily which covers around thirty years of the life of Cecily Neville from her aged around sixteen to the moment when her son Edward IV takes the throne. A few months later, I was at a book signing for a well-known author of historical fiction and biography. Since the event had been centred around the women of the Wars of the Roses, I asked her if she had read Garthwaite’s novel and she said yes but that she had thought the ending was a ‘cop out’, finishing before all the mess of the Yorkist in-fighting. When I explained that a sequel was in th ..read more

In September 1920, a detective visits Darkacre Hall, ancestral home of the Stilwell family. He has some questions about the disappearance of local boy Bobby Higgins back in the summer of 1914. In the intervening years, the detective can see that the family have come through hard times. Still, he notices their shifty glances and stilted responses to his enquiries. It is clear that something is up. But is the truth about to come out? Like many upper class families post World War I, the Stilwell are struggling. The death of the patriarch and the heir has left them reeling from double death duties ..read more

My offline life has been rather hectic over the past few months. One of the major calamities that has beset our household recently has been the discovery that we have been playing host to some mice. Now, this is not my first time at the rodeo. I spent the latter part of my childhood living near a canal. Rats got in to our first house there and even we moved elsewhere in the village, they camped out round the wheelie bins. Electrical difficulties in the same house were found to be a result of a mouse having wandered up to the attic, nibbled some wires, died from electrocution and then its tiny ..read more

A few things across the past few years have forced me to see that I am not very widely read. Yes, I read a lot. But scanning down the lists of books that I have read, themes and patterns do emerge. I have a very well-trodden path of literary fiction, classic fiction, vintage fiction along with a sprinkle of non-fiction based around my very specific interests. Bluntly, I like what I like and I don’t really experiment. This got me to wondering about what other people do, especially the keen ones. How far do you try to mix up your book choices or how far do you play it safe? I’ve shared before ab ..read more

I think I may actually enjoy reading Monica Dickens more than I do her great-grandfather. I mean to say, I think she is easier reading. When one finishes a book by Charles, it is akin to completing a marathon. There is a sense of pride and achievement in ticking off the milestone but it requires concentration and is flipping hard work. Reading a book by Monica Dickens is more similar to a dance. In this lightly fictionalised account of the author’s time working at a local newspaper, cub reporter Poppy battles against her difficult landlady and tries to make her way into journalism. And since s ..read more

I’ve been having a bit of a love affair with Celia Fremlin over the past year. Dubbed the British Patricia Highsmith and ‘queen of domestic-noir’, several of her novels have been reissued, which is slightly confusing because this also happened a few years ago. No matter, she is enchantingly creepy and with this, my third Fremlin adventure I was ready for some truly nasty winter chills. There is the feeling that Faber & Faber are really aiming to market a Fremlin for every season with the summer’s Uncle Paul bearing the tagline ‘Welcome to the Nightmare Summer Holiday’ and th ..read more