Reviews 

One of his ‘entertainments’ which I don’t on the whole enjoy. The conceit is quite amusing, a vacuum salesman in Havana is recruited by...

Paddy recommended this. I found it slightly hard going although as I got into it I wondered why. Maybe re-read on a beach. 3 main...

Am writing this on 20 February and can’t honestly remember anything about this book. These are a bit of a cheat. It is part of a series...

Enjoyed this a lot (must have read it before). Quite similar, structurally, to John Lanchester’s ‘Capital’, but Faulkes is a better...

Book of the year so far, by a novelist I had never heard of, although apparently quite prolific (wrote ‘The Boy in striped Pyjamas’ which...

No coincidence (and no relative I assume) but started re-reading this only for my Kindle to die. So unfinished. Finished this after...

Quite a long read, but have been very busy with work; maybe a summer holiday beach book. Quite a difficult read, very funny in places but...

A book about Brexit, by the author of The Rotters Club, and a sequel in that some of the characters recur. Quite an angry (I presume)...

So this is no.3 Jackson Brodie, and again very good – I wish she had written, or would write, more. This one begins with a family...

This last of the Jackson Brodies’ restored my faith in Kate Atkinson after the disappointing 625. This is a brilliant book, clever,...

A pretty atrocious book about a pretty atrocious person (Princess Margaret). Subtitled ’99 Glimpses of’ her, not one of these was...

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...

I have tried, I think, to read this before. It is quite a weird book, a slightly surreal campus novel set in Aberdeen or possibly Dundee...

Another Susan Hill recommendation. I don’t think I will follow these anymore as our tastes don’t match at all. This is an early novel by...

Possibly book of the year so far! An alien descends to earth (or in fact wakes up naked on a motorway near Cambridge) having been sent to...

I didn’t enjoy this much, at least until very near the end when the subject became a little clearer. So, (as everyone says nowadays), it...

The first Jackson Brodie novel; this is classy ‘detective’ writing compared to some of those above. As I have read a lot of these before...

A strange book, based among the poor working and criminal class in Modern Cork city. Couldn’t really work out the genre; crimes, but no...

I gave up on this before even discovering what Tennyson’s Gift was. A tedious reconstruction of a (possible or actual, I never got that...

Yet another via P as I can’t choose books for myself at the moment. This, sadly, was completed by his son as Torday died just before it...