Reviews 

The author wrote a good and lurid novel about police corruption in New York - ‘In the Cut’ - some years ago. This is completely different...

This didn’t work for me. Described as "understanding the anger of Britain’s underclass", it really wasn’t about this at all. McGarvey...

Bought this in Blackwells in Edinburgh. A Japanese detective novel, published in the late 1950’s and, apparently, never out of print,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Book of the year, so worth a re-read. Beautifully written, with sentences that bounce into quasi-verse and others that begin with one...

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...

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...

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....

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...

This is quite good. Published in 1936, it is set in Cornwall/Devon sometime I think in Victorian England. Weirdly coincidental to read...

A long and difficult book. A weird mixture of straightforward contemporary narrative, souls jumping from body to body as the normal and...

This is a wonderful book. Passion in the title has the ambiguity of sexual and religious passion. Judith Hearne, a lonely spinster in...

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...

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...

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...

The first Laidlaw novel, completed by Rankin following McIvanney’s death in 2015. I found it very hard work and with few characters of...

A Skandi–noir novel, I guess. Well plotted especially toward the end, but I found the central characters totalling un-interesting. Hanna,...