I haven’t read for months and to get going again I treated myself in December to The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith, the latest in the Cormoran Strike detective fiction series (see my previous blogs on the rest of the series so far: The Ink Black Heart, Lethal White, Career of Evil, The Silkworm, The Cuckoo’s Calling and Troubled Blood). The series picks up with Robin dating detective Ryan Murphy, much to Strike’s disgust, and with a new case brought to the agency by a man whose son has disappeared into a cult. The only way to find him and to try and get h ..read more

I am always on the lookout for books that make work better and so was eager to read Supercharged Teams: The 30 Tools of Great Teamwork by Pam Hamilton. Its premise is that in a working world that is faster, leaner and busier than ever we forget that establishing good teamwork itself needs work. It helpfully argues that everything that stands in the way of good teamwork can be overcome. This is particularly useful for those of us leading teams in organisations seeking high impact fast, who want to create the kinds of teams that we all want to work in. Teamwork is all about a group of people wor ..read more

On a rainy July day I decided I need something escapist and that it was time to read the final instalment in the seven sisters series by Lucinda Riley – The Story of Pa Salt, written by her son Harry Whittaker after her death (see my blogs on The Missing Sister and the rest of the series). It starts as The Missing Sister ended, with the sisters gathering on the family yacht to pay respects to their late father Pa Salt. They are there with the partners they each found when researching their own adoption stories. When the last ‘missing’ sister, Merry, joins them, the revelati ..read more

Watching Davina McCall’s two documentaries about the menopause in 2021 and 2022 was game-changing for me, as it was for so many others, and I followed it up with reading Confessions of a Menopausal Woman by Andrea McLean and Davina’s book Menopausing: The positive roadmap to your second spring, written with Dr Naomi Potter, and passing both onto my friends. When I saw that Mariella Frostrop was speaking at the Hay festival this year on her new book Cracking the Menopause: Whilst keeping yourself together, co-written with Alice Smellie, I booked myself a ticket and went to the festival bookshop ..read more

I recently went to a talk about the history behind Operation Moonlight by its author Louise Morrish in Portsmouth and bought a copy. It’s a debut novel focused on a female British agent in the Second World War working in the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It’s lightly packed full of research about the training of agents and what it was like to be a woman in this part of the war and its dual timeline tracks to and fro from the present day to wartime. Elizabeth (Betty) is turning 100 and facing her secret past with the help of her carer Tali, who is struggling with recent heartbreak, f ..read more

I was looking forward to reading Bournville by Jonathan Coe, having so enjoyed Middle England and Mr Wilder and Me, and it absolutely didn’t disappoint. As the title suggests it is set in Bournville in Birmingham, which has the Cadburys chocolate factory at the heart of its community. It centres on one family, calling in on them through the decades from VE Day to the pandemic on particularly memorable and historic days. It is packed full of research that it doesn’t try to hide away and is a great insight into British life and changing attitudes to race, gender and sexuality. Through the Q ..read more

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller was recommended to me by a friend as a well-written love triangle that I would enjoy, so I read it on holiday by the pool in April, absolutely captivated by the setting and characters. The setting is a family lake house in Cape Cod, named the Paper Palace due to it’s flimsy construction. It is where the protagonist Elle spends her summers, from childhood to the present, with her mother, husband and two children. This is where her present coincides with her past, as memories of her parents’ childhoods, and her own with her sister Anna, come to her as sh ..read more

As I have blogged about many times, I love crime fiction but had never read Ann Cleeves or watched her Vera series on TV. I therefore thought I’d give her a try on audiobook over Christmas. I started at the beginning with The Crow Trap and then enjoyed Telling Tales and Hidden Depths. I will definitely be continuing with the series. The audiobooks are beautifully read by Janine Birkett and their setting in Northumberland, the county I am writing about and where my family is from, is depicted in all its bleak and beautiful glory. Inspector Vera Stanhope is everything I like in a crime protagoni ..read more

I can’t remember how I heard about These Are Not Gentle People by Andrew Harding but having long been interested in the history of South Africa and apartheid I put it on my reading list. This non-fiction book is about what happened when two black men were killed on a white-owned farm in a town called Parys, south of Johannesburg, set upon by a mob of forty suspects. It follows the stories of all those involved, the families of the murdered men and the families of the accused, as well as police and court officials. It is told as narrative non-fiction, so that you spend time with the thoughts an ..read more

I am a big fan of Gretchen Rubin (see my blogs on Better Then Before, Happier at Home And The Happiness Project) so I pre-ordered her new book Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World. As someone who spends too much time in my own head, Gretchen’s style of self-experimenting to tackle this appealed to me and I read it as soon as it arrived on publication day. The book is structured around the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, and her daily trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are used in each case to exp ..read more