Books490 total entries
Recent reviews7 reviews in the last 7 days
Latest entry0 in the last 7 days
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Hilary Mantel - Bring up the Bodies
Released: 10/05/2012
Fourth Estate
The much-anticipated sequel to the Man Booker prize-winning Wolf Hall re-imagines the descent of Anne Boleyn (mother of Elizabeth I), who went from Henry VIII's favourite to headless ex-Queen within a few short years. As it's Mantel, think compelling historical detail, delicate power games and well-wrought characterisation, not fanciful Tudor romp. Read the opening pages here.
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 80%    
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Michael Frayn - Skios
Released: 03/05/2012
Faber & Faber
As his plays run in London and Sheffield, it would be easy to allow the much-loved humorist's theatrical accomplishments to overshadow his literature this year. Frayn's new novel should set the balance right, however. When two very different men both claim to be Dr Norman Wilfred, misadventure ensues on a Greek island.
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70%
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 5 |
Toni Morrison - Home
Released: 03/05/2012
Chatto & Windus
The Nobel laureate and unstoppable writer of American epics is back, tackling momentous themes again in her ninth novel. This is serious stuff, as a Korean War veteran returns home to face the racism of small-town Georgia, and Morrison's piercing poetic gaze turns to the difficulties of homecoming for psychologically damaged US front-line soldiers.
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75%
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Greg Baxter - The Apartment
Released: 03/05/2012
Penguin
A Preparation for Death launched Baxter's career: his memoir about failing to write a novel and the accompanying feelings of self-loathing. Two years later he's surmounted the problem, and the resulting fictional debut is The Apartment. In a wintry European city, an ex-US soldier and a mysterious young local woman become friends, and set out in search of a flat.
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72%
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Irvine Welsh - Skagboys
Released: 19/04/2012
Jonathan Cape
The title says it all, really, as Welsh revives the characters from his cult classic Trainspotting. With signature wit and energy, this prequel charts social disintegration in 80s Scotland, and the broken home lives that sent Mark Renton and friends on the road to addiction.
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73%
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HHhH - Laurent Binet
Released: 19/04/2012
Harvill Secker
This debut novel was a prize-winning hit in Binet's native France, and arrives this side of the Channel in a new translation. An historical thriller, it has been praised for its originality despite standing in well-trod WW2 territory. We follow two assassins of Nazi secret service chief, Reinhard Heydrich through their spine-tingling preparations. All events depicted are true.
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 81% |
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D.W. Wilson - Once You Break a Knuckle
Released: 12/04/2012
Bloomsbury
This debut collection from the 2011 winner of the BBC short story award focuses on the good people of a working-class mill town in remote western Canada, only they're not always so good. Serious masculinity issues abound and father-son relationships are tense - this is a world of violence and betrayal.
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70%
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Lauren Groff - Arcadia
Released: 05/04/2012
William Heinemann
Following her well received gothic debut, The Monsters of Templeton, Groff returns with an account of life in a New York State commune in the 1970s. The decaying mansion in which it is set pre-empts the eventual demise of ‘Arcadia', forcing child of the commune Bit to face the real world...
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63%
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Peter Carey - The Chemistry of Tears
Released: 05/04/2012
Faber and Faber
Catherine and Henry can never meet, hailing as they do from different centuries. With only handed-down notebooks and a curious mechanical object connecting them, their stories nonetheless converge in this mysterious romance. With two Man Booker prizes under his belt, this is a hotly tipped eleventh novel from Carey.
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90%
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Iain Banks - Stonemouth
Released: 05/04/2012
Little Brown
The acclaimed author of The Wasp Factory (and sometime sci-fi writer) takes up again with small-town Scotland, for another a pacy novel about modern life. Protagonist Stuart Gilmore returns to his hometown for a funeral after five years away, but his reappearance attracts the wrath of local gangsters, and Stu fears retribution for a mysterious past misdemeanour.
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