If you're looking for something extra to read (as well as Baby, Baby and The Labyrinth Year, which we hope you’ve bought and read!) some reviews of others you may enjoy, from Mari Howard…
Mari’s Book Club
The Art Fiasco
Lion Hudson, 2020
Paperback: £9.99Ebook: £9.99
“Poppy didn’t like being on the receiving end of a journalist’s questions…” No, she certainly wouldn’t! Our protagonist in The Art Fiasco is a journalist herself… a lady journalist, and the year is 1924. The Art Fiasco is the fifth in the Poppy Denby series of mysteries, and having read all four preceding books I… Read More
Red Cabbage Blue
Instant Apostle, 2019
Paperback: £8.99Ebook: £5.99 (Kindle)
Red Cabbage Blue is a gently told story of enormous tragedy, family secrets, and intergenerational conflict. I don’t do spoilers if I can avoid them, but the book follows a therapy journey: a young girl, Adele, an art student, who turns up in a counsellor’s office presenting unusual symptoms… That is enough to sketch out… Read More
Conversations with Friends
Faber & Faber , 2018
Paperback: £6.00 (Amazon)Ebook: £4.68 (Kindle)
When I finished reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, I thought that is the saddest novel ever. When I re-read it some years later, I felt the same. Now Sally Rooney has updated my list: Conversations with Friends is up there with Tess, the saddest tale – though not ‘told by an idiot, full of… Read More
Stranger at St Brides
Hawkesbury Press, 2020
Paperback: £8.99Ebook: £2.99
Stranger at St Brides (a school story for grown-ups) is the second in a series by my writing friend, Debbie Young, and here she is really into her stride. Whatever we think of Public (boarding) schools, packed with the local and the overseas offspring of doting parents who can do without their teenage daughters for… Read More
Normal People
Faber & Faber, 2019
Hardback: (Amazon) £8.93Paperback: (Amazon) £4.50
Ebook: (Kindle) £4.28
I watched the television adaptation of Normal People before I read the book. If this mistake was shared by a large audience then many, like me, could’ve initially understood the main point of this story as mainly significant looks and glances, and episodes of “having sex”. Most indoor scenes were filmed in half darkness, the… Read More
Bird Summons
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2019
Hardback: £16.99Ebook: £3.99 (Amazon Kindle)
The book I have just finished reading, Bird Summons, by Leila Aboulela, is unusual, deeply thoughtful, and obviously inspired by the author’s combined knowledge and interest in politics and faith. Aboulela is a practising Muslim, born in Cairo and raised in Khartoum. She now lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. She studied economics at the University of… Read More
Flight Behaviour
Faber & Faber, 2013
Paperback: £9.99‘Living systems are sensitive to very small changes…’ so says Dr Ovid Byron, lead scientist of a group investigating the strange appearance of pretty much the whole population of Monarch butterflies to a farming area of the Appalachians in Tennessee, when they should have flown, as usual, to overwinter in Mexico. I wrote this review… Read More
The Natter of Knitters
Hawkesbury Press, 2020
Paperback: £2.99Ebook: Kindle £1.99
Here’s another escapade for Sophie Sayers, the young woman who’s recently moved to the Cotswold village of Wendlebury Barrow. This time, the story’s conveniently contained in an envelope-sized format, great for slipping into a birthday card to your retail-therapy friend or old-school-chum (or others!) I recently enjoyed this mini-volume as a relaxing break between two… Read More
Where are the Grown ups? and Unsettled
Inglebooks and Faber & Faber, both published 2019
Paperback: £7.99 (Where are...) £8.99 (Unsheltered)This review tries to cover the latest two books I’ve read recently: Where are the Grown-ups and Unsettled. They’re very much not a pair, so don’t expect one to cover both memoir and the challenges of change… Interestingly, I love both these books – which are very different– but disagreed with a great deal of… Read More
Self Portrait
Jonathan Cape, 2019
Hardback: £20.00Ebook:
I love this book, and began reading it avidly the day it arrived. Celia Paul is an artist, a painter, and, as the book documents, we learn what it can be like when creativity is the driver in your life. “You need to give yourself completely, while at the same time seeing things from a… Read More