Reviews 

Bought another one, as I finished 738 before being ready to sleep. This one is actually even better – about a 15 year old girl in Cork...

Heard this on Radio 4 a few weeks ago and enjoyed it enough to read. It is very good; a coming of age novel about an 18 year old boy who...

The author is apparently the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. It is actually quite a good exploration of a fairly taboo sexual topic...

A library book of Paddy’s; I can’t say I enjoyed this, although maybe unfairly. I found Emily Dean insufferably girly, trendy within a...

This was an S&P purchase from Lymington market back in May 1979 and neither of us had ever read it. So that is 40 years of life on...

This was very good; neither Paddy nor I had read it before, but it is a rattlingly good plot with bits of Jane Eyre influence. A gauche...

This is a huge and very challenging book. The basic plot is relatively simple – three brothers with an unpleasant and dissolute father,...

I have never read this before, although our old paperback edition was bought 41 years ago. So better late than never. I didn’t enjoy The...

I thought I would read some Dickens, partly because Susan Hill (568) likes him, and chose this as I don’t like the novels. Dickens does...

I loved this; she said she likes to write about people on the periphery of major events so here we have a WW1 novel set in Zennor, just...

I thought this was very good. A thriller, gay female love story/ romance. A young girl Nadine is moved into a Bristol flat by her...

One of Paddy’s – didn’t do a lot for me, although he did make points about pets and their deaths (pets generally don’t live as long as...

Rivals 470 for book of the year. An unreliable, pompous and unpleasant narrator believes he has conned a group of friends into funding a...

I always try to take one big, difficult book on holiday, and am not a fan of Dickens, but persevere. Fairly typical of what I dislike...

There is less plot really in this one: Darley returns to Alexandria, gives the girl to her father Nessim and becomes Clea’s lover....

Meant to read a Zola next, but got a bit hooked by no.352. This is much more of a stand- alone novel, centering mainly on Mountolive, a...

Book 2 of the Alexandria quartet, which I am beginning to really enjoy. Balthazar overwrites Justine, correcting a lot of misassumptions...

My Dad had the whole quartet, so another purloined book. The is the first, and although they are beautifully written, the plot is spare...

Despite the endorsement by Philip Pullman (who I thought may have written the first chapters), this was complete rubbish. Not much more...

This is a fictionalised account of the Borgias. The writing is poor; the characters very stereotyped and lacking in character. Reads...