Fiction
Clever Girl, By Tessa Hadley
Ten-year-old Stella lives with her widowed mum in rented rooms in run-down Sixties Bristol. Top of the class, Stella loves horses and reading. When her mother remarries and they move, teenage Stella meets Valentine. With his Caravaggio cheekbones and inte
This is Paradise, By Will Eaves
The middle-class Alldens live in a house in Bath. This novel opens in the Sixties with parents Emily and Don expecting their fourth child, and ends in the present day as their offspring face the decline of the older generation.
The Woman Upstairs - Claire Messud
Nora Eldridge has always been a good girl: a good daughter, colleague, friend, employee. She teaches at an elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the children and the parents adore her; but her real passion is her art, which she makes alone,
Spilt Milk by Chico Buarque - review
The fictional memoirs of Eulálio Assumpção tumble out in no particular order and create the impression of a proud dynasty brought low by military governments and debauchery
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud - review
This is a novel in which very little happens. Yet it is also an addictive page-turner, and written with such artistry that the reader can do little but succumb. Rarely has the mundane been so dazzling.
The Monster's Lament - Robert Edric
April 1945. While the Allied Forces administer the killing blow to Nazi Germany, at home London's teeming underworld of black marketeers, pimps, prostitutes, conmen and thieves prepare for the coming peace. But the man the newspapers call the English Mons
Heroic by Phil Earle: review
Phil Earle's YA novel Heroic is a gripping tale of two brothers and the impact on their lives of the war in Afghanistan.
Paperback: Dirt by David Vann (Windmill,
Galen is a dysfunctional 22-year-old guy who lives, as he would put it, with his horrible mother, and in close proximity to his horrible aunt, and his horrible teenage cousin who sexually abuses him. He lusts after her. She
