January 2010

ISBN: 0140187014 It may seem strange to recommend a book that is subtitled “A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences” but this is a seminal work of… Read More »Truman Capote – In Cold Blood

ISBN: 0304366242 So, not one of your literary greats but for me a monumentally influential work that I first read at twelve years old and which saw me become a… Read More »Pierre Clostermann – The Big Show

ISBN: 0753820307 James Lee Burke is an author I hold in the very highest regard for the sequence of novels involving his flawed Detective Dave Robicheaux. His novels race along… Read More »James Lee Burke – A Stained White Radiance

ISBN: 0006174523 The difference between you and me and Richard Sharpe is that Richard Sharpe doesn’t give a bugger. And that, for what I believe is primarily a male readership,… Read More »Bernard Cornwell – Sharpe's Regiment

ISBN: 0140620664 Tranquility is an important value central to Mansfield Park. Diffused throughout to form part of its basic structure, it is presented through ironic contrasts and tensions between situations… Read More »Jane Austen – Mansfield Park

ISBN: 1844080382 Long tenacious fingers curl around the rusted spokes of a large iron gate. Opening, the gate leads onto a twisting and turning labyrinthine gravel path, which is surrounded… Read More »Daphne Du Maurier – Rebecca

ISBN: 1904271227 “Come woo me, woo me, for I’m in a holiday humour and like enough to consent.” Rosalind’s wonderful line is one of my favourite moments in literature, and… Read More »William Shakespeare – As You Like It

ISBN: 0192836609 Perversely I will begin this brief appreciation of Edwin Drood with a reference to David Copperfield: ‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own… Read More »Charles Dickens – The Mystery of Edwin Drood

ISBN: 0140157549 Chronicle of a Death Foretold Gabriel Garcia Marquez This was my first experience of reading Marquez though his reputation for titles such as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’… Read More »Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Chronicle of a Death Foretold

ISBN: 9780755331604 A Wicked Read… Just finished it, in between Ofsted inspection and daily grind….loved it! The characters of Elphie and Glinda were so well defined and real – mutable… Read More »Gregory Maguire – Wicked

ISBN: 978-0-7528-8263-5 ‘I am an exile’ states the ill starred narrator of Ellory’s homage to To Kill a Mocking Bird. We are in a Southern small town scratching at the… Read More »R. J. Ellory – A Quiet belief In Angels

ISBN: 978-0-7528-7441-8 ‘I see my father with that shovel.’ Harlan Coben opens his bestselling crime novel The Woods with this disturbing recollection. Significantly it is ‘that shovel’ and as we… Read More »Harlan Coben – The Woods

ISBN: 978-0330449557 Minette Walters, The Chameleon’s Shadow. Lieutenant Charles Acland has returned from Iraq with severe head and face injuries and a predilection for sudden rages particularly against women. Three… Read More »Minette Walters – The Chameleon's Shadow

ISBN: 978-0-00-725988-5 I read this book on a holiday in Tunisia and was forced to review it 🙁 Playing with Fire is a great book to read because you learn… Read More »Gordon Ramsay – Playing with Fire

ISBN: 978-0099472285 “Out”, not just a book, not just a novel, but an accurate depiction of of life as it is and the consequences of what can happen when an… Read More »Natsuo Kirino – Out

ISBN: 9781845022280 I like this book because it is exciting.My favourite character was Tallulah because she has a big dream to sing. Her favourite band is Betty and the Bee… Read More »Clare Grogan – Tallulah and the Teenstars

ISBN: 0755322819 Gaiman’s American Gods- What an engrossing read! Something I can’t quite identify about the ‘flavour’ of this book…reminds me of a combination of Beckett, Sachar and even- maybe… Read More »Neil Gaiman – American Gods

ISBN: 0007243316 Just read this over a couple of days and really enjoyed the easeful sequencing of past and nearly present. Manages to combine a high profile kidnapping narrative with… Read More »Val McDermid – A Darker Domain

ISBN: 85326 7482 This Wordsworth Edition of Sherlock Holmes’ stories combines the stories elected by Conan Doyle as his very best, with a group selected by the editor. The resulting… Read More »Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Best of Sherlock Holmes

ISBN: 0752893518 It’s the season for catarrh! Children are back at school and the supermarkets are selling lots of boxes of cheap tissues and of course, anti-nit shampoo. Today I… Read More »Ian Rankin – Exit Music

ISBN: 0007217161 Just begun this novel and delighted to find it in the library after my new thrift policy eschewing spending lots in Tesco or Amazon! Very atmospheric from the… Read More »Val McDermid – The Distant Echo

ISBN: 978 1 8435 7396 We went to one of the Balti places in Brick Lane. She said she was born and brought up in the beautiful city of Sarajevo.… Read More »Steven Galloway – The Cellist of Sarajevo

ISBN: 0140258345 There are short story writers and then there is William Trevor. A simple yet devastating truth. Reading his story ‘Friendship’ from his 1996 collection ‘After Rain’ just now,… Read More »William Trevor – After Rain

ISBN: 0571269228 Seamus Heaney’s latest collection opens with an admission which reminds us all of our cognitive fragility : Had I not been awake I would have missed it, A… Read More »Seamus Heaney – Human Chain

ISBN: 97807011865633 Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when… Read More »Angela Macmilllan – A Little Aloud

This freezing week made comfort reading an absolute imperative and I abandoned anything too demanding for the wonderful comfort of a well built country house where strange goings on, lead… Read More »Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles