why the hype
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton — book review
Whodunnits, Agatha Christie, mysteries, and puzzles are all favourites of mine…so I was pretty excited to read The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle as it promised to combine all of these things together. “I suddenly have the sense of taking part in a play in which everybody knows their lines but me.” With a […]
MoreThe Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes – book review
“She wasn’t really one for big groups, but she quite liked this, the jokes and the merriment, and the way that you could see actual friendships springing up around the room, like green shoots.” The Giver of Stars is a sweeping romantic western that tells a fictionalised account of the Kentucky Pack Horse Librarians. It […]
MoreThe Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow — book review
“Reason and rationality reigned supreme, and there was no room for magic or mystery. There was no room, it turned out, for little girls who wandered off the edge of the map and told the truth about the mad, impossible things they found there.” Readers who have yet to dip their toes in the vast […]
MoreThe Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy — book review
For readers in want of an incisive and creative account of life in East Germany, I strongly recommend picking up something by Christa Wolf. I think that from now on I might stick to Deborah Levy‘s non-fiction. While I’m glad to see that many of my friends and other readers were able to enjoy this […]
MoreOur Stop by Laura Jane Williams – book review
While Our Stop may have made me smile me smile, once or twice, it mostly frustrated the living daylights out of me. Our Stop implements a similar gimmick as quite a few other romances: from new book releases such as The Flatshare—where the two leads develop feelings for one another through post-it notes—to the classic […]
MoreThe Truants by Kate Weinberg — book review
This is the type of non-literary book that has literary aspirations yet its laboured attempts to imbue its story and characters with a certain dose of moral ambiguity and depth ultimately fall flat. In spite of its intriguing first few chapters The Truants soon followed the well-treaded path of similar campus/college novels: we have a […]
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