Our latest reviews
Boonie by Richard Masson
Boonie takes place in a world that has been ravaged and turned into desert, where the seas have been poisoned and the land is ruled by anonymous flying Silver Men. In this strange and cruel landscape lives a young boy…
Suspect by Robert Crais
Armed with an entirely new set of characters, Robert Crais has crafted another thriller that is tense from the very beginning of the nail-biting prologue. Scott James is a cop whose partner, Stephanie, was murdered a year earlier. Maggie is…
Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed
Christine Sneed is an American short-story writer whose work has appeared in many prominent journals and whose first collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won rave reviews a few years back. Her first novel…
Y by Marjorie Celona
Stories of adopted and foster-care children are some of the hardest to read, and the better the writing, the more difficult I find it to persevere. On occasions, I had to stop reading Celona’s book and walk away, which I…
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Graeme Simsion wrote The Rosie Project in the space of just 50 days. According to his blog, he spent 19 days writing the first draft, then 30 days re-writing, before entering and winning the award for an unpublished manuscript at…
Joyful Strains by Kent MacCarter & Ali Lerner (eds.)
Joyful Strains is a collection of essays about the experience of immigration. It gathers together 27 different stories from 27 different places, and this variation is its great strength. One of the lasting impressions that this collection creates is that…
The Holiday Murders by Robert Gott
The Holiday Murders is so satisfyingly local that you’ll spot the location of no less than three current Readings stores in the map on the front cover. However, it is also anchored firmly in a past that, mercifully, we can…
The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon
The Sweet Girl, Annabel Lyon’s second historical novel, is a striking vision of Pythias, Aristotle’s daughter and eldest child – a figure barely mentioned in historical sources. Here, Aristotle teaches Pythias to read, write, dissect animals, swim, ride horses…
Cat & Fiddle by Lesley Jørgensen
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice seems to be an inexhaustible source of literary rummaging for the writers of today – from Colm Tóibin’s solemn tribute in Brooklyn to P.D. James’ somewhat more tongue-in-cheek Death Comes to Pemberley to name but…
Belomor by Nicolas Rothwell
The first few pages of Belomor left me feeling disoriented. They provide a brief account of the eighteenth-century Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto, which read more like a summary of a history book rather than the opening of a novel. Shortly…
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