A Dangerous Man by Anne Brooke

“Want to swap books?” Anne Brooke asked me last week. “Okay then,” I thought, “We both write on the dark side, so why not?” But I swore I wouldn’t let it interfere with my other reviewing duties. After all, I had five other books in the queue. And then I read the first page [...]

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Janet Todd: Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle

Wollstonecraft, Imlay, Godwin – for a young unmarried woman, dead at twenty-two, Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny had many names. It seems to be in fashion these days to write biographies of people who might be termed ‘historically insignificant’; usually such biographies try desperately to milk these lives for all the drama and passion they’re [...]

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Living the Good Life by Linda Cockburn

Living the Good Life is the record of six months spent by an Australian family; Linda Cockburn, her partner, Trevor and their six-year-old son Caleb, in an experiment to try to reduce their impact on the environment to a minimum. To drum up more interest in their project, they also describe it as an attempt [...]

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Simon Barnes: How to Be Wild

A fair number of books about wilderness have come out in 2007. I have yet to read the others, but I’m guessing How to Be Wild is at the most accessible end of these. A record of a year in the life of a keen amateur naturalist, it is a collection of personal anecdotes and [...]

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Small Publisher Interview: Emma Barnes from Snowbooks

With an award for Small Publisher of the Year 2006, not to mention personally gracing various lists of successful business people under the age of 35 (the latest, still top secret, was recently alluded to on Snowbooks’ blog), Emma Barnes is used to accolades. Yet, despite these successes, she does not pretend that her [...]

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The Eyrie by Stevie Davies

I finished The Eyrie (written by my MA tutor, Stevie Davies) just over a week ago and every day since I’ve woken up and thought ‘I’ll write a review of that today,’ but I haven’t. How does this crime-writer get a hook on a novel in which there are no murders, no torture and nothing [...]

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Not a review…

… as I’m no good at writing about lyric poetry – my vocabulary in this respect consists of ‘wow’ and ‘hmm’ – but I thought I’d draw your attention The Scent of Blue, a poetry pamphlet by one of our contributors, Catherine Czerkawska.
These poems feel like memories, with seemingly ordinary moments and sights transformed into [...]

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Elina Hirvonen: When I Forgot

I have now made several attempts at describing When I Forgot, the debut novel by young Finnish author Elina Hirvonen, but each attempted paragraph has been disappointing, dull, and confusing. The novel itself is not disappointing, dull, and confusing, but it is greater than the sum of its parts.
Anna, the narrator, spends the ‘present-day’ span [...]

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Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses by Marjorie Garber

There are some people who picking up this book with it’s titillating title, will be very disappointed to find it an exploration of the meaning and functions of homes over the course of civilization. Part history, part sociology, part interior decoration, but not the least bit steamy. It’s NOT the sequel to that TV show [...]

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Decent Exposure by Phillipa Ashley

I don’t know what the Lake District mountain rescue teams made of this first novel by Phillipa Ashley (and I’m sure some of them wouldn’t have been able to resist at least taking a peek …) but I can’t imagine any of them exactly bristled with disapproval at the book’s portrayal of the breed.
It’s not [...]

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