The local bookshop in my town recently underwent a takeover and between their closing down discounts and then starting up offers, I’ve been giving them a lot of business. I picked this up at the start of the summer on the basis that I had heard good things and that it was something I actually did not have a galley copy of lurking in my Kindle. In a series of email correspondence, Roderick Turner QC has set a task for two law students. They have to comb through a mountain of correspondence between a local amateur dramatics group and use the information which is there to solve a murder ..read more

I have been meaning to read another Joël Dicker novel ever since I spent a wonderful afternoon reading The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair while eating a slice of the best cake I have ever tasted in my life. I have an incredibly strong sensory association between the plot of that novel and the incredible frosting on said dessert but all these years later, the pace of my life has shifted and so I read The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer more in snatched fragments. The pace of investigating back across the decades with interweaving narratives was very similar to the&nb ..read more

Every so often, I succumb to blogger fatigue. In fact, since having my children it is not even ‘every so often’. There are long weeks and even months where I barely sit down at my computer. I struggle to find the time to read, let alone draft my thoughts on it into coherent sentences. But every so often along comes a book that makes me remember why I love being a book blogger. Yellowface is one of these books. It was lovely to get an early copy, stay up late so I could storm through its nail-biting final pages and then stand back to watch the book soar through the bestseller charts ..read more

The nights are drawing in. It’s getting cold. There’s a lot of rain. November is such a dreary month as you start to feel the pre-Christmas stress without any of the actual fun starting yet. There is only one thing to do. Hide in your book. Indeed, there are few better books in which to hide than this one. A few years ago, I put a lot of energy into finding comfort reads. While the themes of family connections restored and faith rediscovered may be unsurprising in a piece of up-lit, the genius octopus who can solve mysteries is a more surprising supporting player but he does rather steal ..read more

This was one of those novels that felt like it was written with a scalpel. The tension hums from the opening page and left me bristling with dread. There are some authors where you pick up one of their books and you know roughly what you will be getting. This is not true of Jo Baker, with The Body Lies a very different creature to Longbourn, the only other novel of hers that I had read. The only shared quality between the two was an exploration of fiction but where Longbourn dived into the back stories of the invisible characters, The Body Lies instead consid ..read more

Anne Tyler is one of those writers where you know in advance what you’re getting. If I were to sum her work up in a word, I would say ‘kind’. There is a theme across her novels which celebrates the heroism of the everyday. She even makes a sly wink to this in her latest book’s opening line, ‘You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer‘, listing his scruffy clothes, unvarying daily routine and apparent solitary life. He seems hardly worth a second glance. But as Tyler proves time and time again, appearances can be deceptive. I decided to read this in response to l ..read more

Opening with the disclaimer, ‘Spoiler alert: We will all die in the end’, poet Salena Godden’s debut novel packs quite the punch. It fascinated me how she noted in the early pages that ‘any book with the word Death in the title must be light enough to carry in your hand luggage’. Reflecting back, I think of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and The Language of Dying – both books burned into my brain – and remember that they too sit slight on my shelf. Death is a topic that we cannot bear to sit down beside for too long. We can hardly bear to look at it. Indeed, we walk ..read more

Despite being Mandel’s fifth novel, The Glass Hotel had the feel of a sophomore follow-up to her blockbuster fourth book Station Eleven. In the wake of COVID-19, the latter novel made a return to the bestseller lists as a kind of grim ‘it-could-be-worse’ escapism. But how exactly could Mandel equal that level of success? Could we expect a sequel? Or would it be something utterly different? My bet was on the second option. I was right. At this novel’s heart are two events; the collapse of a Ponzi scheme and the disappearance of a woman at sea. But like its predecessor, Mandel’s w ..read more

I wasn’t planning to read this. While I appreciated Room‘s depiction of a powerful mother-child bond overcoming unimaginable horror, the subsequent trend for fiction exploring extreme abuse and captivity has felt sensationalist and exploitative. Books such as My Absolute Darling seemed designed more to titillate rather than granting a voice to the victims and increasingly, I shied away. In recent years, there has been a tendency to force female characters into torture situations under the pretext of ‘bearing witness’ to the sufferings of women down the centuries. It’s bizarre faux-fe ..read more