Reviews 

This is a very long bildungsroman and I found it very hard work. Would probably help if I had any memory of the plot of David...

A library book via P, as was no.1051. I struggled with the lack of any significant plot here. One of Charles Dickens’ many children...

I think I may have read one of his before – a trilogy called 'Berlin Noir', many years ago. This was long and ponderous at times, but a...

The full title continues ‘of English cricket'. But I couldn’t really work out whether it was a parallel biography of these 2 cricket...

I wanted a modern crime thriller after all this 19th century stuff and picked this (or rather her next book – I will always go back to...

Haven’t read this for a long time but it is a brilliant book. About sex, love, metaphysics, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in...

I have read this before (499, Malaga last year). It is a good book, pretty weird, and my summary at 499 hasn’t really changed. Unclear...

Best book of the holiday. Strange, quite hard work, as I understood it's a book basically about a place in the Nevada desert and it's...

Very good book; ‘academic’ Lit Crit, but well written and argued. My problem was an ignorance of Jane Austen’s novels (which I must now...

Pretty good and totally different. Full of pretty lurid sex which however becomes just a motif. Quite like an 18th century novel about...

Complete rubbish. Get this on Amazon

This, I thought, was poorly written, but the terrific pace of the plot made up for that. A man is minding his own business in his garden...

I gather Dan Kavanagh is really Julian Barnes, writing private eye thrillers under this pseudonym. Certainly a fairly salacious page...

I hated this at first; to say that Zola is prolix is unjust in the context of Knausgaard. The first 200 pages seemed to be a tedious...

Misleadingly packaged as a thriller (which it isn’t) this is the strangest book I've read on holiday. A very weird Japanese novel about...

Enjoyed ‘The Trial’ enough to read another Kafka, but Metamorphosis has less weight; it is very internal and apart from Gregor’s family,...

Bought this in 1972, a few years ago; wonder what I made of it then? I thought it was really good and quite funny – hard going in places,...

Paddy recommended this; I didn’t like it at first, but enjoyed it more and more as it progressed. It is a semi-fictionalised biography of...

Truly awful, but I needed a bit of a light read and found this in the villa. Kellerman is the worst type of US psycho-crime babble...

I have read a trilogy, I think called 'Berlin Noir' before, without really enjoying it. l am not sure that I enjoyed this a lot either-...