Reviews 

Another very good book, although completely different. Set just after the end of the 2nd World War, Hilary Wainwright is an ex-British...

So nice to read a book with a coherent narrative plot, after struggling with Joyce. Have read this before, it is the one where River goes...

This is pretty low grade. From the writer of the French TV serial 'Spiral', which we enjoy. This is just violent turf wars and political...

This is a brilliant book. I am not sure I had ever completed it before (the left had side of the spine is suspiciously unbent) and I had...

One of P’s. I quite enjoyed this and it was original in that the two central characters Dan and Bea (Dante P suggested?!) are both dead...

Contemporary with 'Thérèse Raquin', this is not that interesting. Set in French 19th century bourgeois society, a story of a rather dull...

I enjoyed this, despite being irritated at times. Quite a big canvass for a debut novel. Set mainly in Lisbon in the middle of the 2nd...

I am reading these in chronological order as I find the complete works pretty un-navigable on my kindle. I have read this before, but...

No. 3 in my unnavigable Complete works. If I was writing a critical summary of Zola’s novels, I would say that this is a much longer...

I think 833 is the first book; this is the 2nd. Much more plot and characterisation, a dying woman entrusts her adopted son to care for...

I read this as a not very good Bildungsroman. About a young Provencal man who has come to Paris and ends up living in pretty abject...

Brilliant. As the blurb/a reviewer says, partly a hymn to Paris, but also via the alternating and very different narrators, an...

Inspired I think by no. 641 to re-read this as the books are thematically quite similar, in that both have an obscurely motivated murder...

This is a brilliant book; he seems to be really maturing into his Slough house characters, whose subtle and often very funny interactions...

The first of a series of novels featuring Thomas Kell, a disillusioned and cynical ex MI5 officer, who has been suspended in disgrace...

P’s book of the year so far, but not mine. The memoir of a woman who has a daughter with cystic fibrosis, who goes to live in France with...

Took this to Spain for aeroplane reading. I had remembered it mainly as a ‘French resistance’ novel with the dropped in British heroine,...

I didn’t read it in French, but don’t like the English translation (‘Abbe Mouret’s Transgression’ which misses half of the point) in my...

The first in the huge cycle of novels about this family and their antecedents. Thematically, this is the end of republicanism and...

I enjoyed 'Germinal' hugely and 'La Terre' quite a lot, but this, at best was like an early Shakespeare if you had started with say 'King...