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{{newreview
|author=Stella Whitelaw
|title=Midsummer Madness
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=You'll like Sophie Gresham. She wanted to be an actress but suffers from paralysing stage fright and when the side effects became too much for her she worked behind the scenes. She's a very good prompt despite the fact that you need to wrap up very warmly to survive in the prompt corner she loves her job and most of the cast in the theatre company. It's a bit of a shock though when she realises that the guest producer from New York is Joe Harrison, the man she helped out when he had nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. Sophie was a little softer in those days – in the meantime she's had to develop a protective shell.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0709089147</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=A 17 year old girl at a new school meets a mysterious and impossibly good-looking boy, who she's immediately drawn to. He seems determined to either ignore her or be outright rude to her, until he saves her life, and the two of them end up drawn together. This isn't Stephenie Meyer's ''Twilight'', but it certainly has striking similarities.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0385738935</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gareth Hinds
|title=King Lear
|rating=3
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=Hound me out of town in a most appropriate manner, but I do not like King Lear. For me, even as a trained actor, the language is too dense and rich, the set-up too archly unfeasible to create the great tragedy it's thought to be. To my mind the acclaim and esteem in which it's held is only mirrored by its own over-long, over-blown blustering.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0763643440</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Theroux
|title=A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Set in India, familiar territory for Theroux, ''A Dead Hand'' tells the story of a travel writer suffering from writer's block (also known as 'dead hand') until a chance letter from an American ex-pat, the mysterious Mrs Unger, relating a story of a mystery of a dead body in a hotel leads him to release his creativity in very unexpected ways. The story is more about obsession and infatuation than it is about the mystery itself as the narrator falls under Mrs Unger's Tantric charms. But does she have more to hide than she's letting on?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144639</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Toby Lester
|title=The Fourth Part of the World: The Epic Story of History's Greatest Map
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=In 2003 a map was bought for $10 million, the highest price ever paid publicly for a historical document, by the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent public display. No ordinary map, this is sometimes described as America's birth certificate. It is the sole survivor of a thousand copies printed early in the 16th century, and was discovered by accident in some archives in a German castle in 1901. The sale and story behind it intrigued Toby Lester so much that he was inspired to discover more, and this book is the result.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1861978030</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Steven Lowe and Alan McArthur
|title=Is it Just Me or Has the Shit Hit the Fan?: Your Hilarious New Guide to Unremitting Global Misery
|rating=3
|genre=Humour
|summary=''The banks fell over like fat Labradors running over a wet kitchen floor.'' Surely that is the wackiest, most inappropriate simile for the credit crunch and all it has done for the world. You won't get any such namby-pamby animal likenesses from these authors, instead with quite a potty mouth on them they will lambast the modern world, the entire banking system, all those who failed to see it coming, and those millions just seemingly waiting for us all to revert to high-interest, high-risk, high-lending capitalism, so they can get back on the expenses train, and back up the rich lists.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847443656</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andy Stanton
|title=What's For Dinner, Mr Gum?
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=As soon as heroine Polly turns her back, and leaves the town of Lamonic Bibber for a day at the seaside, Mr Gum falls out with his best friend, causing carnivorous carnage all over the place. Meat is getting thrown around like it's going out of fashion, and we have to doubt whether Polly and her companions can ever utilise the power of love and put things to rights. Especially as this book does not contain a magic unicorn called Elizabeth.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405248246</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Loose Women
|title=Here Come the Girls
|rating=4
|genre=Home and Family
|summary=This is the second volume by the panelists from that nice ITV series, ''Loose Women''. Just as promised on the cover, this book is an entertaining night with the girls. It turns out that they're just like us. The faces are already familiar and even if you don't know them yet, with nine contributors, you'll soon find a like-minded woman behind one of the celebrity faces. The women are universally warm-hearted and supportive: there will be many a lonely woman who reads this book and feels as if she sat down with a group of friends for the evening.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444700154</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jean Ure
|title=Fortune Cookie
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Fudge Cassidy and the Cupcake kid are best friends. If the names remind you of a certain film then you'd be spot on as that's where Fudge's father got the idea from. They're actually chalk and cheese – Fudge is loud mouthed and opinionated and Cupcake is quiet and thoughtful – but the combination works. They've just started at secondary school and Cupcake has rather a lot on her plate. Her brother Joey has muscular dystrophy and his problems are becoming more obvious. Add to this that her father couldn't cope with the problems and he now has another family. It's just Cupcake, Joey and her mother – and not a lot of money.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007224621</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jenifer Roberts
|title=The Madness of Queen Maria: The Remarkable Life of Maria I of Portugal
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Born in 1734 in Lisbon, at that time the richest and most opulent city in Europe, Maria was destined to become the first female monarch in Portuguese history. Married to her uncle Infante Pedro, seventeen years her senior, she had six children (outliving all but one of them), and became Queen in 1777. A conscientious woman, she had the misfortune to be born in during the 'age of reason', when church and state were vying for supremacy. Instinctively a supporter of the old religion, with a humanitarian approach to state affairs, she was no Queen Elizabeth, no Catherine the Great, and wore her crown rather reluctantly.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095455891X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Hughes
|title=Thomas Wogan is Dead
|rating=4.5
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=Well, with a title like that, need I bother with a plot summary? A man has a day out in Morecambe, then the next thing he knows he's in the ultimate waiting room, with a strange array of animals (a bat, a toad, a sea urchin...), all waiting for... well, something. Yup, as you didn't need telling, he's dead.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>095580888X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dave Eggers
|title=The Wild Things
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Meet Max. When I say he sometimes gets the wrong end of the stick about adults, or dislikes his mother's new boyfriend, or gets a bit feisty when he feels the need for revenge, I am certainly understating the facts. He is a bit of a rascal to say the least. But all that might change when he finds himself travelling to a strange land of roisterous animals, and ends up installed as their king.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241144221</amazonuk>
}}
