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
ISBN: 0099288478 Snow, ice and then a hint of fog. Boxing Day a time for keeping warm and feeding off festive calories whilst dozing and sipping mugs of tea.… Read More »Susan Hill – The Woman in Black Review and Analysis GCSE English Literature
1940’s York, the wintry river and a dark weedy bend stretches ahead; me face down, submerged, covered with his cloak. I am Hunted by these rigid men in black, their drooling animals leashed tightly against … Read More »Dreaming Ophelia
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
Janet LewisonBoltonUK Untitled Late July and the grey tarmac was melting. A fat girl stole the cabbage white butterfly from my yellow bucket and squashed it because she could. Barefoot,… Read More »Untitled:50 word miniSTORY
With all this ice around I have decided to read a ghost story and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger seemed a natural choice. So here I am at Hundreds’ Hall,… Read More »Sarah Waters: The Little Stranger
Everyone over seven was wearing an apron to differentiate themselves from the children, who flung their brightly wrapped presents into Esther’s ‘birthday grotto’ then scurried off to the garden. Nina… Read More »Olay!
Whoever She Was They see me always as a flickering figureon a shilling screen. Not real. My hands,still wet. sprout wooden pegs. I smell the applesburning as I hang the… Read More »Whoever she was. ( National Poetry Competition Winner 1983)
Wiping away the stains of Christmas dinner, a smell not unlike spiced up turpentine with wings, wafted before her, and she halted, breathing this reminder of borrowed time, trying to… Read More »Turkey
The Archdeacon claimed that his house had stood at the end of the lane since the railways began shifting eager folk away from a countryside they had tired of looking… Read More »The Visitors
I stood at the edge of my child’s sleephearing her breathe;although I could not enter there,I could not leave. Her sleep was a small wood,perfumed with flowers;dark, peaceful, sacred,acred in… Read More »A Child's Sleep by Carol An Duffy
I love this time on a Sunday! So cold outside but my old boiler is burbling away sending heat through the draughts and the dogs have now camped out on… Read More »Get Into Reading at 7-10am
“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.” Neil Gaiman, A Midsummer… Read More »Neil Gaiman: A Midsummer's Night's Dream
Could this be the fire place I have been looking for? It just appeared in my in box and the shape and colour seem destined for a story about a small… Read More »The faded pink fire place: Rebuilding the portal.
And here you comewith a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongueand your girls, your girls.Wasn’t I beautifulWasn’t I fragrant and young? Look at me now. Medusa’s… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Medusa: The last Stanza and line!
‘nobody did come, because nobody does’ Some of the bleakest lines ever written. Jude distraught at the wayside and Hardy intervenes just to say this. Little wonder it appealed to… Read More »Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy
Fun never stops even when you’re sleeping but if you don’t believe in your self you won’t have fun or do a good job will you ? So believe in… Read More »Do it by Clara
A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousygrew in my mind,which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakesas though my thoughtshissed and spat on my scalp. My bride’s breath soured,… Read More »Medusa by Carol Ann Duffy ( First THREE stanzas)
A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousygrew in my mind,which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakesas though my thoughtshissed and spat on my scalp. My bride’s breath soured,… Read More »Medusa by Carol Ann Duffy from The World's Wife.
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at… Read More »Do not go Gentle into the Good night: Dylan Thomas
She could not get warm. Life was this dark conspirator, laying wait for all joy to be crushed. She tried wearing the oldest perfume in the world. Jicky at her wrist, beneath… Read More »cellar
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,Saying that now you are not as you wereWhen you had changed from the one who was all to me,But… Read More »Thomas Hardy: The Voice
The still explosions on the rocks,the lichens, growby spreading, gray, concentric shocks.They have arrangedto meet the rings around the moon, althoughwithin our memories they have not changed. And since the… Read More »Elizabeth Bishop: The Shampoo
