Reviews 

Number three in the Thursday Murder Club series. I don’t like these at all, and this was certainly the worst; poorly and predictably...

I didn’t enjoy the first of these, I think called ‘The Thursday Murder Club’. But that is because I didn’t understand the genre. This is...

Pleased that the local library is open again post lockdown; I am probably borrowing too many books, and the choices there are quite...

Very good. Quite a difficult book about her childhood in Motherwell, written by a successful and now I think sadly dead journalist in her...

I enjoyed this, particularly the last quarter after the boy’s death, but struggled with the early chapters where there were (for me) too...

Good, and very different, despite feeling slightly negative about the author as a clever dick TV quiz show presenter. Set in a retirement...

A thank you present for Paddy from Cristina next door, whose novel Paddy ‘proof read’ to anglicise the prose. (Cristina is Italian but...

This was on the radio and bits of it were set quite locally in Binfield, so I thought I would give it a go. Bits I liked, for instance...

This is a wonderful, but still (at 3rd or 4th reading) difficult book. Is it (just) 4 symbolic characters at the end of the 2nd world war...

I struggled with the first half of this book which seemed almost Dickensian in its slow development. 2 kids are abandoned by their...

Not sure that I have ever read any Edna O’Brien before, if so a long time ago. Although set in rural, agricultural Ireland in (I am...

Bought this years ago, for obvious reasons and have never managed to read it. It is actually very good, about a couple who both disappear...

Another one from the attic; I have no memory of having read this before. It is quite a clever novel, written by an academic psychologist,...

Didn’t enjoy this at all; very dated and the humour seemed to me to be 2nd rate Clive James. Not entirely sure why I read it; except that...

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...

A quick pre-holiday read from the library. Not particularly good — a Jewish post WW2 variant on Henry James themes. I think you could say...

Thought I would read this in view of our impending trip to Barcelona. It is very flat and factual; you get no real idea why he went there...

Not sure if I have read this before. It is very good, quite difficult but at the same time oddly easy to read (and quiet short). It is...

Got this as a Kindle book for nothing (needed a break from no.11 below). A detective story with a very poorly characterised cop, which...