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May 26, 20231 min read
1069. Susanna Moore - The Lost Wife
The author wrote a good and lurid novel about police corruption in New York - ‘In the Cut’ - some years ago. This is completely different...
Apr 29, 20231 min read
1061. Darren Mcgarvey - Poverty Safari
This didn’t work for me. Described as "understanding the anger of Britain’s underclass", it really wasn’t about this at all. McGarvey...
Apr 15, 20231 min read
1058. Seichō Matsumoto - Tokyo Express
Bought this in Blackwells in Edinburgh. A Japanese detective novel, published in the late 1950’s and, apparently, never out of print,...
Apr 8, 20231 min read
1056. Liane Moriarty - Apples Never Fall
A library book via P, about a couple, the Delaney’s, their four adult children and very good on adult sibling rivalry. The couple used to...
Dec 1, 20221 min read
1033. Audrey Magee - The Undertaking
This is her first book, and very different from The Colony (no.1019). Set in 1940’s Germany, the central figures are a soldier on the...
Nov 23, 20221 min read
1031. T. L. Mogford - The Plant Hunter
I thought this was a bit silly, although I learned things I didn’t know from it. Like the existence of plant hunters in Victorian...
Nov 1, 20221 min read
1026. Graeme Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project
Bought this as listed for the Booker prize (2016) and in the crime section at Waterstones. It is very good and I can understand the...
Oct 7, 20221 min read
1019. Audrey MaGee - The Colony
Book of the year, so worth a re-read. Beautifully written, with sentences that bounce into quasi-verse and others that begin with one...
Oct 4, 20221 min read
1018. Ian McEwan - Machines Like Me
About a man Charlie, his lover Miranda, and a synthetic man, Adam, whom Charlie has bought. Set in an alternative 1980’s when Thatcher is...
Sep 29, 20221 min read
1016. Audrey MaGee - The Colony
Book of the year for me, so far. Never heard of the author, got it out from the library as no.1015 above. Set on an island somewhere off...
Sep 26, 20221 min read
1015. Val McDermid - 1979
Haven’t read one of her books for years, the early ones are too violent for me, but there was limited choice in the library last week....
Jun 3, 20221 min read
985. Dervla McTiernan - The Murder Rule
Better than no.984, but that wasn’t difficult to achieve. Hannah is convinced by her mother’s diaries that her father was murdered and...
Apr 3, 20221 min read
963. Daphne Du Maurier - Jamaica Inn
This is quite good. Published in 1936, it is set in Cornwall/Devon sometime I think in Victorian England. Weirdly coincidental to read...
Mar 20, 20221 min read
957. David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks
A long and difficult book. A weird mixture of straightforward contemporary narrative, souls jumping from body to body as the normal and...
Mar 6, 20221 min read
953. Brian Moore - The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne
This is a wonderful book. Passion in the title has the ambiguity of sexual and religious passion. Judith Hearne, a lonely spinster in...
Feb 4, 20221 min read
941. David Mitchell - Utopia Avenue
Never heard of the author, although he has written a lot and this was very good. About the fictional mid 1960’s rock band, covering their...
Jan 4, 20221 min read
930. Brian Moore - The Feast Of Lupercal
This is a wonderful book, that has somehow sat unread on the bookshelf for years, maybe since my dad died? Diarmuid Devine is a middle...
Dec 18, 20211 min read
924. David Mark - Past Life
I have read this guy before, a bit of a reading binge in Malaga in 2017, see no.490. But I hadn’t read this one; I think a fairly recent...
Oct 7, 20211 min read
903. William McIlvanney & Ian Rankin - The Dark Remains
The first Laidlaw novel, completed by Rankin following McIvanney’s death in 2015. I found it very hard work and with few characters of...
Sep 19, 20211 min read
896. Johanna Mo - The Night Singer
A Skandi–noir novel, I guess. Well plotted especially toward the end, but I found the central characters totalling un-interesting. Hanna,...