'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Sian Rees
|title=Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=The Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed in Britain in March 1807, and the last legal British slave ship left Africa seven months later. Other countries were slow to follow suit. Everyone in Britain knew there would be resistance, and when the abolitionist Granville Sharpe purchased land in Sierra Leone to 'repatriate' freed slaves, Ottobah Cugoana, a former slave living in London, asked if it was possible for 'a fountain to send forth both sweet water and bitter.' Could the slave trade, he wondered, be abolished from West Africa - when West Africa was its source?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845951174</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sapphire
Clearly our governments and 'leaders' are not going to do this for us; we have to do it for ourselves.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>047074801X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jaki Scarcello
|title=Fifty and Fabulous: The Best Years of a Woman's Life
|rating=3.5
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=When you open a package and find a bright pink book which proudly proclaims 'Fifty and Fabulous: the best years of a woman's life' you can be forgiven for wondering if this is going to be another of those books which recommends strenuous exercise regimes, strict diets and just a little nip and tuck under the chin. Personally, my heart sank because, er, well, I'm no longer fifty. Were my fabulous years behind me?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906787603</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Will Birch
|title=Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Ian Dury was always one of the most individual, even contrary characters in the musical world. In a branch of showbiz where people often relied on good looks as a short cut to stardom, he was no oil painting. During the pub rock era, he and his group, the Blockheads, ploughed a lonely furrow which owed more to jazz-funk than rock'n'roll, and his songs extolled the virtues of characters from Billericay or Plaistow rather than those from Memphis or California. Alongside the young punk rock upstarts with whom he competed for inches in the rock press, he was comparatively middle-aged. As if that was not enough, in his own words childhood illness had left him a permanent 'raspberry ripple'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0283071036</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Glenn Cooper
|title=Book of Souls
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Area 51 is not what you think it is. No - all that UFO kerfuffle is a smokescreen for the powers that be to hide even better the most unusual manuscript known to (a handful of) mankind - the most unearthly, singular, and unsettling book, in thousands and thousands of volumes. All except one, which is about to come under the hammer in a London auction house. Our hero Will Piper must go very reluctantly on the trail of it and its secrets, a trail which will force him and others to become entangled with shadowy agents, who in turn know the very day of all their enemy's deaths.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099534479</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sharon Owens
|title=The Seven Secrets of Happiness
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=It was hard to think that life wasn't perfect for Ruby O'Neill. She and Jonathan had an idyllic marriage and a beautiful home. There was a job in a dress shop which she enjoyed and although she might not be close to her parents she had good friends. It was Christmas Eve and the tree had just been delivered by a lovely man on behalf of the garden centre when her world fell apart.
Jonathan had been killed in a car crash.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141028564</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alan Skinner
|title=Furnaces of Forge
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=In this [[Blue Fire and Ice (The Land) by Alan Skinner|sequel]], it's almost as you were, except here the mysterious powers of the blue flame are not being used by some outlander arsonist, but have been usurped by two inept young scientists from the Myrmidots, to fuel their industry. We can predict this will prove a bad thing, but the breadth of the journey to capture the flame, and the efforts of all our returning characters to put things right might still be a surprise.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0955726859</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Simpson
|title=Alastair Sim: The Star of Scrooge and the Belles of St Trinian's
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=The mere mention of Alastair Sim conjures up visions of pictures made during the 1950s when a more gentle humour was the order of the day. Yet the man hated and did his best to avoid publicity, claiming that the person the public saw on screen revealed all that anybody needed to know about him. How he would have fared twenty years later in the age of a more intrusive press, one cannot but wonder.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752453726</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Saci Lloyd
|title=The Carbon Diaries 2017
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=It's been a year since we read a diary entry from Laura Brown. We left her with a boyfriend and just about adjusted to a Britain in the full throes of carbon rationing. Her nu-punk band, ''dirty angels'', hadn't quite made it, but things were looking rather promising for its future.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340970162</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=P Robert Smith
|title=Sunday Daffodil and Other Happy Endings
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''Sunday Daffodil and Other Happy Endings'' is the sort of book you finish with the feeling that you've just read something with a million different meanings. Don't be surprised if you feel like you should start the whole thing again but with your brain more fully engaged, and perhaps that's the whole point.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535238</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dai Sijie
|title=Once on a Moonless Night
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=A French female scholar, studying in China, finds herself caught up in the search for a lost, sacred text that was inscribed on an ancient scroll. The scroll was torn in two by Emperor Puyi years ago, and was lost. After falling in love with a young grocer called Tumchooq the young woman becomes caught up in tales within tales, as she finds that Tumchooq's father found and translated half of the missing scroll and became obsessed with finding the other half, and soon Tumchooq too becomes embroiled in the search.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521326</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nicholas Stern
|title=A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How We Can Save the World and Create Prosperity
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=The hardback edition of 'A Blueprint for a Safer Planet' was published early in 2009 as an update to the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change. Now here is the paperback edition, published too early to critique Copenhagen, but nonetheless an interesting read. Stern is an expert witness who presents his evidence understandably for the layman; he is unemotional and very convincing.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099524058</amazonuk>
}}