Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss

I managed to miss out on this book when it was first published in 2003 though I remember clearly its immediate popularity.  I received it recently as a birthday present which seems to imply that I am something of a pedant (although I’m not). As a longstanding devotee of the comma, I loved this book. [...]

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Coming up on Vulpes Libris

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. ‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. [...]

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Swim the Fly by Don Calame

This is a sort of double header post… only the second head involved is a little shy.  So I’m going to be lead vocal and my eleven year old son, Cole will be providing backing.  We are very much in tune about this book though. Swim the Fly by Don Calame is about three best [...]

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Literary Theory: an introduction by Terry Eagleton

Literature from [Matthew] Arnold onwards is the enemy of ‘ideological dogma’… Arnold himself had beliefs, of course, though like everybody else he regarded his own beliefs as reasoned positions rather than ideological dogmas.  Even so, it was not the business of literature to communicate such beliefs directly — to argue openly, for example, that private [...]

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Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon: lost children and the luminosity of waiting

… It was the afternoon Alex disappeared, and the phone was ringing. If she answered it, her life would wind back, like a movie run backwards, to a moment before she knew. It would start forwards again, but sane this time, the world a sunlit idle place. On the phone would be the school nurse, [...]

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Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch

Review by Jamie Mollart The Victorian era is a rich vein for novelists to plunder and never more so than now. Maybe something to do with the waning of our political power as a world voice, maybe because it was a period of great discoveries, but I think it is likely to be because it [...]

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Baking Cakes in Kilgali by Gaile Parkin

One of my most frequent expressions in reviews is to say something is “a quiet little novel”, and this one is, but it’s also full of depth, in a way that is seldom depicted in fiction. It is the story of Angel Tungaraza, a woman from Tanzania, who moved to Kilgari when her husband, a [...]

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Coming Up Post

One of Phil Bradley’s terrific set of save the library posters based on original posters from WW2. To see the complete set click on the image MONDAY Jackie finds much to admire in Gaile Parkin’s novel, Baking Cakes in Kilgali. WEDNESDAY Our intrepid guest reviewer, Jamie, discovers a magical novel that combines two real life [...]

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Poetry Week: The Booktime Book of Fantastic First Poems, edited by June Crebbin.

Roses are red Violets are blue I did like this book But some of it was . . . really quite bizarre, you know, and I wasn’t at all sure what to make of it. Okay, so none of the poems in this book are quite that bad, but there are some seriously wacky contributions. [...]

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William Cowper: The Castaway

In his introduction to the 1984 Carcanet Press edition of William Cowper’s Selected Poems, Nick Rhodes says of Cowper: “Aside from a few buoyant, devotional years , he spent most of his life in a state of severe internal conflict and doubt, suffering particularly from a conviction that he, uniquely among mankind, had been selected [...]

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