Forthcoming Publications

15 AUGUST

Review of The Calculations of Rational Men by Daniel Godfrey General Fiction It's the 10th of December 1962 when we first meet Dr Joseph Marr. Just to put what happens in context, the Cuban missile crisis is still very fresh in people's minds. The world has barely had a chance to breathe out. But for Joe Marr, it's not the missile crisis that's at the front of his mind. He's been convicted of murder. With the current state of medical knowledge, it's hard to think otherwise than that the prosecution would never have been brought but Joe Marr has spent his first few days in HMP Queen's Bench, a relatively new prison. He's just getting used to his roommate, Mervyn, and learning to be wary of the McArthur brothers. Full Review

18 AUGUST

Review of Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal Autobiography As Philip Larkin so eloquently put it, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit De Waal focuses on this idea of parenthood and the bonds that bind family. This book is a memoir focussing on the author’s formative years as a teenager living in a lower class area of Birmingham. Her father is from St. Kitts in the Caribbean and her mother is an Irish woman ostracized by her family for becoming pregnant by and marrying a black man. This intersectionality plays a large role in the autobiography. Kit De Waal faces multiple hurdles due to her race, her class and her gender. Her parents loom large and are written with care, love, and the kind of anger only a child can express to their parents. Full Review

Review of Dark Music by David Lagercrantz Crime How far from the original can a book allegedly inspired by Sherlock Holmes get before the allusion breaks? This does have a wonder-mind at the heart of what little investigating is going on, but there is not a lot that Conan Doyle fans could really pin down as on their exact wavelength. For one, the main focus of the narrative, Micaela, is no John Watson MD. She's a Chilean in the Stockholm police, put on a murder squad as she knows the prime suspect of old, in a case where a referee of a junior football match was found stoned to death shortly after the match, and just outside the stadium. Beppe, the suspect, was drunkenly antagonistic to the ref during the closing minutes, but refuses to admit anything, through days and weeks of interrogation. When some disreputable coppers (the kind who dismiss anything their superior comes up with, the kind who think they can judge Micaela from her fringe and how she might dress – that kind) are told to go and see what brainbox Professor Rekke thinks of it all, she can only smirk when he says Beppe is innocent and the investigation is a shambles. But taken off the case, she can no longer help solve the crime, and with Rekke the most erratic, irregular kind of guy, she can't get his full verdict on it all. Until, that may be, she manages to stop him in the middle of an apparent suicide attempt... Full Review

Review of Hope to Die (D I Fawley) by Cara Hunter Crime It began rather oddly. There was a 999 call suggesting that a shot had been fired in an isolated house but the call hadn't come from the householder. A couple of PCs went to make certain that everything was alright and it took quite a while for the elderly householder to answer the door. He somewhat reluctantly told them that they'd better come in. In the kitchen there was a body on the floor: the head had been blown off with a shotgun and the corpse was holding a knife in its right hand. Richard Swann told the police that he'd heard sounds of an intruder and had come downstairs to investigate. The ignorant young lout had called him Grandad and come at him with a knife. Swann had shot him in self-defence. Full Review

1 SEPTEMBER

Review of The Story of Greenriver by Holly Webb Confident Readers Silken and Sedge, for all their differences, have a lot in common. Silken is a girl whose father is the Master Builder of what might be the finest beaver lodge on the Greenriver. Unfortunately she is also a kind of runt figure, and as a result is patronised, and given the most tokenistic tasks when it comes to fetching wood and shoring the dam up. She also stands out for the unique artistic ability to sing. Otters like Sedge sing, but he too, as the son of the lady of the holt, has pressure on him to be a bit less feckless and more attentive to class. He, after all, will eventually inherit the job of keeping the otters safe from the wolf that both animal species fear the most, and from dreaded events like a Dark Spring. Full Review

Review of Into Goblyn Wood by Anna Kemp and David Wyatt Confident Readers Meet Hazel. For the last nine of her eleven years she has been stuck as a foundling in a horrid, Victorian institution, generally peeling vegetables or acting as a servant. She'd arrived at the place at the same time as Pete, and they're inseparably good friends now, until a chance for them both to escape, and enter the outside world, does not go to plan. There had always been the idea of a life idyllic in the nearby forests, Goblyn Wood, and a tribe of Wild Children, but none of that comes to pass, as Hazel finds herself in the care of a professor at the Natural History Museum. But life with him is not anything like what she might have expected it to be – and Hazel is determined to return to the Woods, restore her friendship with Pete – and to work out just what is going on in the forest, both the light and the shade, and the deathly dark... Full Review

6 OCTOBER

Review of Fly by Alison Hughes Confident Readers This is a very impressive read, as it does a lot of what mainstream teen and tween fiction still struggles with. Its focus is courtesy of the first-person narration from Fly, a secondary school lad with cerebral palsy, a down-on-her-luck single mom nearing retirement from being a cleaner, a carer while at school, and a bundle of assumptions people lay on him. First they assume that with a broken body comes a broken mind, then they decide he's a maths savant – they even believe they can get away with calling him Fly, which isn't his real name, but everybody just uses it. Full Review

13 OCTOBER

Review of Red as Blood by Lilja Sigurdardottir and Quentin Bates (translator) Thrillers When Flosi’s wife goes missing, all the evidence seems to point towards her having been kidnapped. The ransom note tells him not to have any contact with the police, so instead he enlists the help of Arora, a financial investigator. She manages to persuade Flosi that they will need the help of the police, and she calls her detective friend, Daniel, whom she met when he was investigating her sister’s disappearance. Together, they start to secretly investigate Gudrun’s disappearance, trying not to arouse the suspicion of anyone, since they have no idea who the kidnappers might be, yet the more they uncover, the more confusing things become. Full Review

21 OCTOBER

Review of The Book of Hope by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams Politics and Society The done thing is to read a book all the way through before you sit down to review it. I’m making an exception here, because I don’t want to lose any of the experience of reading this amazing book, I want to capture it as it hits me. And it is hitting me. This beautiful book has me in tears. Full Review

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