Open main menu

Changes

no edit summary
'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Alistair Duncan
|title=The Norwood Author - Arthur Conan Doyle and the Norwood Years (1891 - 1894)
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=At the age of 32 Dr Arthur Conan Doyle moved from London to a house in South Norwood, at that time part of Surrey, in June 1891. It found him at the stage when he was torn between pursuing a career as an eye specialist and trying to make a living through his writing, after he had sold a few stories to magazines. Shortly before the move, he had been confined to bed for three weeks with influenza, and while recovering from what had briefly threatened to be a fatal illness (or so he believed), he took the decision to abandon medicine in favour of becoming a full-time author. A few Sherlock Holmes stories had been published, but the man with the deerstalker and pipe had yet to make an impact on the reading public, and his creator could not yet call himself an established writer. Nevertheless, within the next few years he and the fictional detective were to become household names.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904312691</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=Milo suspects his mum has x-ray vision. She can see through the ceiling downstairs when he's jumping on her bed. She can see through the outside wall when he's making potions in the garden in her saucepans. Is she really a superhero? Milo puts her to the test...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407105388</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Angelica Garnett
|title=The Unspoken Truth
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=I would not normally start a review with the biography of the author, but The Unspoken Truth is presented as autobiographical fiction by a child of the Bloomsbury Group – in fact the subtitle is 'A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories'. The blurb on the inside cover even identifies which character is based on the author in each of the four stories, just in case we are not sure.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701184353</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Amos Oz
|title=Rhyming Life and Death
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Rhyming Love and Death is a kind of philosophical love letter to literature, or perhaps more so to fiction. It is a book about how to write, about the compulsion to write, and about the strange world that the writer of fiction must live in.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099521024</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jean Hannah Edelstein
|title=Himglish and Femalese: Why Women Don't Get Why Men Don't Get Them
|rating=4
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=Men aren't Martian and women don't hail from Venus. We're all Earthlings apparently; which seems like progress of a sort. Even so we still have trouble understanding each other because we speak different languages – Himglish and Femalese. Luckily Jean Hannah Edelstein is fluent in both and has written this light hearted volume to define the problem and translate.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848091729</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul
|title=Winnie's Jokes
|rating=2.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Who turns off the lights at Halloween? The lights witch. What does an Australian witch ride on? A broomerang. Yep, it's a joke book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192729063</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
|title=Beautiful Creatures
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Teenage boy meets mysterious new stranger in a small town. They fall in love, he finds out she's harbouring a dark secret, the pair of them try to find out if their relationship can work while she tries to keep him safe from her world. This kind of book appears to be released every few weeks since [[Twilight by Stephenie Meyer|Twilight]] became so successful – but rarely in the past few years has it been done as well as it has in Beautiful Creatures.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141326085</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jasper Fforde
|title=Shades of Grey
|rating=4.5
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=Sometimes with authors you just don't know what you've been missing. Other times you do. Jasper Fforde has long been on my catch-up list. Snippets of Thursday Next and reviews and interviews were enough to convince me I had to get to know this work.
 
My chance finally came with the first in a completely new series: Shades of Grey.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340963034</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Sam Mills
|title=Blackout
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary='I am a murderer.
 
'I'm standing in a bookshop, a gun hot in my palm. The bullet that sat in my barrel thirty seconds ago has pierced flesh, blown into brain tissue, metal now fighting consciousness. The woman slumps ont the floor. Blood begins to trickle from her head. It drips onto a pile of signed copies stacked on the floor.'
 
Oh my word! What an explosive beginning to a book! But what made a boy do something like this?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571239412</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Ebony McKenna
|title=Ondine: The Summer of Shambles
|rating=3
|genre=Teens
|summary=Ondine de Groot wants out of psychic summercamp, so together with her pet ferret Shambles, she flees from the tea leaf readings and astral projection classes, back to her family's restaurant. Only, as soon as she leaves summercamp, she starts hearing voices. Specifically a broad Scottish voice – one that seems to be coming from her ferret. Shambles, it transpires, is in fact a man, turned into a ferret by a witch. Ondine starts to wonder what Shambles would look like as a man, but her imaginings are soon interrupted by the arrival of handsome Lord Vincent, son of the Duke, who sets Ondine's heart fluttering.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405249617</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jean Rowden
|title=More Deaths Than One
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Constable Thomas 'Thorny' Deepbriar has a broken leg after his involvement in a case and so is taken by his wife, Mary, to recuperate in the seaside town where he worked as a policeman during the war. He expects to be bored - the most interesting thing on the horizon is a case of missing gnomes. Then he bumps into an old colleague - someone who left the force in a haze of suspicion. Shortly afterwards, a body is found on the beach. Even stranger is that the dead man is someone that Thorny and his colleague thought had died during the war. It seems that things are not as they seem. Can Thorny work out what is going on, even with a broken leg?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0709089309</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Paul Strathern
|title=The Artist, The Philosopher and The Warrior
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=The interaction between three very different, not to say contrasting, personalities of the Renaissance period sets the scene for what promises to be an intriguing title. In 1502 the paths of Cesare Borgia, notorious son of the equally infamous Pope Alexander VI, Niccolò Machiavelli, the intellectual and diplomat, and Leonardo da Vinci, at the time best known as a military engineer though remembered today primarily as a great artist, were destined to cross.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845951212</amazonuk>
}}