The Bookbag
From TheBookbag
Hello from The Bookbag, a book review site, featuring books from all the many walks of literary life - fiction, biography, crime, cookery and anything else that takes our fancy. At Bookbag Towers the bookbag sits at the side of the desk. It's the bag we take to the library and the bookshop. Sometimes it holds the latest releases, but at other times there'll be old favourites, books for the children, books for the home. They're sometimes our own books or books from the local library. They're often books sent to us by publishers and we promise to tell you exactly what we think about them. You might not want to read through a full review, so we'll give you a quick review which summarises what we felt about the book and tells you whether or not we think you should buy or borrow it.
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This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
I haven't really read a Marian Keyes book before, I've tried one but couldn't get into it so I was a bit unsure about what to expect from her latest offering, This Charming Man. After reading the synopsis inside the jacket cover, I thought it sounded like it could be a great read, but I couldn't believe the size of the book - it was huge! Full review...
The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch
Miles O'Malley is thirteen. His preoccupations are like those of many another thirteen year old boy. He's small for his age and he'd like to grow. He's in love with his ex-baby sitter. His parents aren't getting along and he's afraid they'll separate. But this last, the threat to his home, connects to Miles's other preoccupation. And this one isn't common to most teenage boys. Miles lives on Puget Sound. He's an amateur naturalist and beachcomber and his heroine is Silent Spring's Rachel Carson. Miles spends all day and much of the night on the beach, searching out its beauty and life. Full review...
Blue Horse Dreaming by Melanie Wallace
There is little in Blue Horse Dreaming that is precisely pinned down. Set sometime after the Civil War, at a frontier posting somewhere in the United States, a band of soldiers returns having rescued two white women from captivity with the native 'savages'. One couldn't be more pleased to be back in a 'civilised' place, the other - Abigail Bulwell - couldn't be more horrified. Full review...
Witch Baby and Me by Debi Gliori
In the coldest, wettest and most remote part of Scotland, high on top of an impossibly steep mountain called Ben Schreeeiiighe live the Sisters of Hiss. The Chin, the Nose, and the Toad are witches, and have lived on top of the mountain for four hundred years, using any unwitting humans that come knocking as fire wood. Full review...
Moon Called (Mercy Thompson) by Patricia Briggs
Mercedes the car mechanic (tee-hee) has employed a werewolf as assistant. Not only that, he is a fresh young werewolf, barely in his mid-teens, and changed mere months ago. Therefore, he has learnt nothing of the were-life, nothing of controlling his changes with the full moons, nothing of the societies werewolves live in, with packs controlled by Alpha males, and so on. Full review...
A Place In My Country: In Search Of A Rural Dream by Ian Walthew
At the age of 34 Ian Walthew was the worldwide marketing director of the International Herald Tribune living in various parts of the world and leading a jet-set lifestyle. He was also on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Faced with a move back to London, he resigned and rather than buy a property in London he and his Australian wife bought a cottage in the Cotswolds to give Ian the peace which he needed to recuperate. Full review...
Paper Butterfly by Diane Wei Liang
Mei runs her own private investigation business, although she calls it an information consultancy because private investigation is illegal in China. When she is asked to find a missing girl, a popular singer called Kaili, she expects to find that the girl is just taking some time out. But Kaili is eventually found dead, apparently murdered, and Mei is warned off the case. Curious, Mei continues with the investigation, and finds a link with a student called Lin who was involved with the student uprising back in 1989. Can Mei find out what really happened to Kaili? And where is the mysterious Lin? Full review...
Bamboo Goalposts by Rowan Simons
When it comes to football, I'm in agreement with the great Bill Shankly when he said: Football is not a matter of life and death, it's far more important than that. When it comes to China, my knowledge is limited to what I've seen on the TV recently about the earthquake, the Olympics and the protests; vague memories of Tiananmen Square and a love of the cuisine, or at least the version that comes from my local takeaway. Like many in the Western world, I have no concept of what life is truly like in China. Full review...
The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt
I approached this book with a fair degree of trepidation, as I had never heard of the author, and wondered if, when reading the synopsis, I was about to embark on a Terry Pratchett type novel (and I have to say, much though I admire his achievements, I'm not a fan of Discworld!) However, my fears were unfounded, and from page one I found myself drawn into this clever and erudite novel. Not having read the preceding novels in the series did put me at a slight disadvantage, but didn't detract from my enjoyment, and has certainly ensured that I'll read the others in the near future. Full review...
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh by Amy Raphael (Editor)
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh is an intimidatingly chunky book. The director himself stares out of the cover, holding a camera lens up to one eye. It's a fitting image for Mike Leigh, a simple representation of a man in love with the cinematic medium, but who has never sacrificed his emphasis on characterisation and human emotion within his films. Full review...
Lost Souls by Neil White
D C Laura McGanity and her young son, Bobby, have left London and moved to Lancashire to join local reporter Jack Garrett, but it's not long before the calm and quiet proves illusory. Children are being abducted but then returned a week or ten days later, apparently unharmed and with no memory of where they've been or what has happened to them. There's urgency but not panic in the local police force. Then a woman's body is found. She's been strangled and her eyes and tongue have been brutally cut out. Full review...
More from Our Own Correspondent by Tony Grant (Editor)
From Our Own Correspondent began in 1955. It's a series of monologue dispatches by BBC foreign correspondents in which they give a personalised and in depth view of an aspect of current events from their posting. It's fascinating. It's educational. It's a national treasure. In this second anthology of broadcasts, More From Our Own Correspondent, these radio essays cover topics ranging from the heady oxygen-light road through Bolivia's mountains, the world's most dangerous thoroughfare, through the Honey-Hunters of Bangladesh to Mr and Mrs Nie in China as the Beijing Olympics approach. Full review...
Blood Noir (Anita Blake Vampire Hunter) by Laurell K Hamilton
I don't think all this can be blamed on Mr Bram Stoker. Of course there is a sexual element to the exchange of bodily fluids of his Dracula and his victims, but this has become too much in this example of what can only now be loosely termed vampire horror. Anita Blake, US Marshall with distinction in killing unwanted undead, due to some part-supernatural skills of her own, lives with at least one regular sexual partner, Nathaniel, but takes herself off with Jason, an occasional lover and full-time werewolf, to help him. Full review...
White Nights by Ann Cleeves
A guest at the opening of a Shetland Isles art exhibition breaks down in tears as everyone else looks on in embarrassed horror. Jimmy Perez, on his first real date with one of the artists, Fran Hunter, helps the man to his feet, feeling it is his duty as a policeman to do so. The man, who is English, claims to have no memory of who he is or why he is there. Perez thinks that it has something to do with the light, the fact that the sun never quite slips below the horizon even at midnight. Here in the Shetlands they call it the 'simmer dim'. Everyone in the Shetlands goes a little crazy at this time of year. In the morning, though, the Englishman is found dead, hanging from the rafters of a fisherman's hut. Full review...
A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr
If this had not been written by one of the best-known journalists and commentators working today, I'd have had my doubts about the title. Sure, the book is what it says on the cover, though a rather dry academic designation like that might put off the more general reader. Full review...
The Cairo Diary by Maxim Chattam
Modern day France. A woman, Marion, sees something she should have never laid eyes on, in her job as a secretary to the morgue. She is hidden away by the authorities under threat of danger, in the sanctuary of the religious community on Mont St Michel. There she is welcomed in differing ways by the 'natives', and by a coded message, and seemingly shadowy dealings, most of which she could do without. They might just be part of her paranoia playing on her mind, but before long she finds something else she perhaps ought not to have seen. Full review...
Breath by Tim Winton
In a squeal of sirens and lights Bruce Pike arrives at the suburban home to find a middle-aged guy broken and huddled on the front steps. Inside the daughters are hunched and silent, separate.
Upstairs a mother is tending to her son…who is dead. Full review...
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Era of the Electronic Mob by Lee Siegel
Some people switch the television or the radio on first thing in the morning and only turn it off when they go to bed. For me, it's the computer and particularly the internet. It's my source of information, my work, my play and to an unfortunately large extent, my social life. To most it seems bizarre that I list amongst my friends people I've never met or even spoken to, but it's a fact. Whilst I might argue that circumstances have thrust this situation upon me and that life would be emptier without the computer it's still something which shouldn't be allowed to persist without thought. High-tech isolation and social famine are not necessarily the best way forward. Full review...
The Crossing of Ingo by Helen Dunmore
The Call races through Ingo, into every underwater cave, through the hulls of sunken treasure ships, searching out the Mer who are ready to make the Crossing of Ingo.
Sapphire and Conor hear it too, and they feel its power just as strongly as any Mer. They too must make the crossing, go to the bottom of the world, and not only because the call of the conch is irresistible. Saldowr has said that their crossing is the most important of all. No one of human blood has ever been called before, and if they succeed, Sapphire and Conor will enable the healing of Ingo and Air to begin. Full review...
In Arabian Nights by Tahir Shah
Once upon a time there was a traveller who travelled through Pakistan to visit far Afghanistan, where he would seek out the lost treasure of the Mughals. Sadly the traveller had an English passport and a Muslim name, and he was travelling from one enemy state to another. His story was not believed. Full review...
The Nursery by Warren Hargodd
A man in a strange city picks a suspiciously single girl up in a bar, but back at her place finds her jabbing him with a needle and her flatmate laying out protective floor covering. What ensues after a mysterious gap is him thinking he can fly around the high towered building he wakes up in. Full review...
