The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

George Duncan is an American living and working in London. At forty-eight, he is the owner of a small print shop, divorced, and lonelier than he realizes. But one night he is awoken by an astonishing sound-a terrific keening, coming from somewhere in his garden. When he investigates he finds a great white crane, a ( Read more... )

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home and is drawn to the farm where, when he was seven, he encountered a remarkable girl and her mother and grandmother. As he sits by the pond behind the ramshackle old house, the unremembered past comes flooding back-a past too strange, too frightening, ( Read more... )

Havisham by Ronald Frame

Catherine Havisham was born into privilege. Spry, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer. But she is never far from the smell of hops and the arresting letters on the brewhouse wall-HAVISHAM-a reminder of all she owes to the family name and the family business.

Sent by her father to stay with the Chadwycks, ( Read more... )

The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes

France, 1916. Artist Edouard Lefevre leaves his young wife, Sophie, to fight at the front. When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War I, Edouard’s portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant. As the officer’s dangerous obsession deepens, Sophie decides to risk everything- ( Read more... )

When I was younger, my father complained that I read too fast.

“How can you possibly enjoy that? You’ve just started and now you’re returning it to the library,” he would complain, ruefully shaking his head. “Books are meant to be enjoyed-slowly“I enjoy them just fine!” I would retort. “Now can we go to the library again? I need to borrow more ( Read more... )

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

It is 1930, the midst of the Great Depression. After her mysterious role in a family tragedy, passionate, strong-willed Thea Atwell, age fifteen, has been cast out of her Florida home, exiled to an equestrian boarding school for Southern debutantes. High in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with ( Read more... )

Apologies my book reviews have been so few and far between over the past couple of weeks. The truth is-I’ve been in a bit of a slump.

After bingeing on YA novels, in early July I decided to give my mind a breather from dystopian worlds and star-crossed romances and just stick to fiction and lit, the classics even. But maybe I just wasn’t in the ( Read more... )

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch’s father is growing concerned. He’s a hard drinker, largely absent, and it isn’t often he worries about the family. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn’t much to save.

( Read more... )

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its ( Read more... )

Room by Emma Donoghue

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world. It’s where he was born, it’s where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where Jack is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it’s the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through ( Read more... )