Reviews 

Quite enjoyed this, but it was a pale imitation of Boyd’s brilliant 'Any Human Heart'. Set one hundred years earlier, and involving an...

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

I enjoyed the beginning of this, but as it progressed the similarities to (and repetitions of) My Brilliant Friend began to proliferate....

This was quite hard work, but I ended up enjoying it, as the rather disparate plot elements were pulled together in the last 50 pages....

I enjoyed this although it started slowly and ponderously. Illyria is a country estate, somewhere near New York, to which leading artists...

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

This was very good, but I would have enjoyed it more if it had been written in a linear narrative, rather than with all the time shifts,...

Quite enjoyed this. A romance between a 40 year old white woman, divorced with two kids, and a 20+ old black man, who works in the local...

I enjoyed this more than I expected. I can’t see anything special about his prose style. But I enjoyed this as a novel about an American...

Quite enjoyed this; had heard it on the radio a year or two ago. A first love story, loosely structured around 'Romeo and Juliet' which...

Local library now open again, post lockdown, so opportunity to try some books. This was very good – an almost 19th century novel written...

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

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...

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...

An odd book, by a writer I am not sure I really like. About a love affair between a 19 year old chap and a 48 year old woman, set...

Needed something easy to read after the rigours of 696 so plucked this off the bookshelf. It is pretty low grade really – a tiresome...

Haven’t read this for a long time but it is a brilliant book. About sex, love, metaphysics, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in...

A library book of P’s. It is quite a slight book, with a heroine lacking in character and very reactive, although P says that girls were...

One of Paddy’s library books; I have never heard of the author (although I think I may have read ‘The Cleaner of Chartres’), but this was...

A retelling of ‘The Iliad’ from a woman’s perspective, so the central figure is Breisis (I think), a Trojan princess captured by the...