Howard Jacobson - Howard Jacobson is noted for his comic novels (very noted, he won the Booker Prize with ‘The Finkler Question’ back in 2010) but as well as being able to conjure up funny set pieces from the most unlikely of subject matters, he’s also a …
Ocean Vuong - Ocean Vuong won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2017 for his poetry collection ‘Night Sky with Exit Wounds’ in which he drew on his family history: his grandfather was a US soldier posted to Vietnam during the war; his mother gave birth to him when …
Various authors - Launched at the recent IRON OR festival in Cullercoats, this excellent anthology contains poetry, prose and mythology from six writers who live in the seaside village. Novelist Carole Clewlow comes at climate change from an oblique angle…
Jessica Andrews - There are a lot of sweets in ‘Saltwater’. Fruit Polos, Caramacs and fizzy cola bottles all make an appearance in Jessica Andrews’ coming of age debut novel and I put this down to the fact that sweets awaken and enliven our memories like …
Mark Haddon - Mark Haddon, of ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ fame, has pulled several rabbits out of several hats with his latest novel. It begins with a plane crash. The only survivor is a baby, Angelica, who we follow as she is brou…
Alex Nathan - 1793. Herbert Powyss lives on a small estate in the Welsh Marches. He longs to make his mark with the Royal Society in London and dreams of one day presenting a science paper of real consequence. He hits on the idea of studying the effects o…
Taylor Jenkins Reid - There has been a lot of hype surrounding Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new novel, which purports to be a biography of the (fictional) band Daisy Jones & The Six. Sadly, rather like that difficult second album, it’s very patchy. It’s written …
Elizabeth Gilbert - The latest novel from the author of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ is the very definition of a page-turning romp. It’s largely set in the early 1940s and tells the story of Vivian Morris, a teenager who has dropped out of school and is packed off t…
Kate Atkinson - Jackson Brodie fans! Rejoice! Yep, Kate Atkinson’s world-weary private detective is back for his fifth adventure. This time he’s hitting the mean streets of Bridlington, Scarborough and Whitby and embroiled in all manner of criminal activi…
Sam Lipsyte - I loved American author Sam Lipsyte’s last novel ‘The Ask’, which detailed the travails of a third-tier university fund-raiser, and while ‘Hark’ doesn’t quite match its sustained barrage of hilarity, there is still plenty to recommend it. Ha…
Linda Grant - Linda Grant won the Orange Prize in 2000 and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2008. Strange then that she should publish a book as shoddy as this. The story begins with the body of an unknown woman who has been fished out of the Thames and …
Georges Rodenbach - This novel by Belgian author Georges Rodenbach was first published in 1892 and has been reissued by Dedalus with a translation by Mike Mitchell and introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. It begins with Hugues Viane mooching around Bruges. …
Candice Carty-Williams - Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old black woman living in London and working on the cultural desk of a national newspaper. She has a loyal bunch of friends (‘The Corgis’) but feels lonely because she’s currently in the middle of a tr…
Ian McEwan - Ian McEwan’s latest is set in an alternate 1980s. Margaret Thatcher is still Prime Minister (and sending troops to the Falklands, although with a rather different outcome), but the Labour Party is being fronted up by Tony Benn. More significa…
Harriet Tyce - This debut novel has been billed as the ‘most heart-pounding thriller of 2019’ but, alas, it’s anything but. It concerns Alison, a forty-something barrister living in London with her husband and young daughter. Her career is on the up and u…
Nicole Flattery - The debut collection of short stories from this 29-year-old Irish woman is almost frighteningly assured. Her female protagonists are often in asymmetric, unfulfilling relationships and their tales are told in a crisp style that is often …
Ruth is the head of a psychological trauma unit in London who works to help people who have undergone serious mental stress, including children who have witnessed a family member being killed or people who have been raped. She is highly respected by her c…
You can always rely on Peter Swanson to hit you up with a big dollop of crime thriller goodness and he’s on sparkling form with his latest. It begins with Hen and Lloyd who have just moved to a new neighbourhood in Massachusetts. At their first block part…
Sara Collins has said of her debut novel that she wanted to put a Jamaican woman in Jane Austen territory: “I wanted to see what would happen to someone like Frannie making her presence felt in these sophisticated Georgian drawing rooms”. The tale begins …
“This chapter is a poorly fleshed-out fictional pretense to write about something that isn’t fictitious”. If an entire book could be summed up in one of its sentences then here it is, right there on page 130 of Jarett Kobek’s latest novel. The chapter is …
The Ivy House is the affectionate name bestowed on a grand familial home in a well to do part of Dublin. The only person residing there is Hugo, who, despite living on borrowed time due to a brain tumour, still plays host when the extended family arrive f…
In some unspecified period in the near future the water levels around the world have risen catastrophically. All beaches have disappeared and the UK is “protected” by the Wall, which has been built around the entire coastline. It has been designed not jus…
The Flower Girls were the tabloid nicknames given to two young sisters who were involved in the kidnapping and killing of a toddler nineteen years ago. The eldest of them was convicted of the murder and is still incarcerated. The youngest meanwhile attemp…
The first novel from this young Nigerian author has been pushed under the “hotly anticipated” banner and she doesn’t disappoint. It concerns two sisters living with their mother in Lagos. Korede works as a nurse in the local hospital and she thinks hersel…
After making his name writing Science Fiction novels such as ‘Vurt’ and ‘Pollen’, Jeff Noon’s first foray into the police procedural is lifted out of the ordinary by dint of the unusualness of the case. It’s 1981 and Detective Inspector Hobbes gets caught…
This is the third book in the IQ series, IQ being the nickname of Isaiah Quintabe, a young black man living in LA who earns a crust by solving crimes. The Watson to his Holmes is Dodson, a former drug-dealer who is trying to get their fledgling business o…
Tom Rachman - Bear Bavinsky is a (fictional) American artist in the mould of the great expressionists of the 1950s, feted alongside the likes of Jackson Pollock. And like Pollock he lives a life of oppressive masculinity in which everything is sacrificed …
Leïla Sliming - On the face of it, you may think that Adèle has it all. A journalist living in Paris, her surgeon husband, Richard, is devoted to her and they have a young son. A move to an idyllic spot in the countryside has been tentatively mooted. Ther…
Matthew Sturgis - Even if Oscar Wilde had led a mundane existence he would still be remembered today because of his sparklingly modern plays and iconoclastic essays. But it’s because his life reads like a Victorian melodrama (or a Greek tragedy, as I’m su…
Daniel James - Ezra Maas is one of the most significant artists of the 20thcentury, winning a whole raft of awards and critical acclaim. An enigmatic figure he is often likened to JD Salinger due to his reclusive nature. He is also entirely fictional. Thi…
John Robert Brown - The redoubtable local publishers IRON Press continue to provide a platform for poets who might otherwise have fallen down the back of the settee and in John Robert Brown they have a real gem. As the subheading of this collection indica…
Elly Griffiths, Quercus - Clare Cassidy is an English teacher who has a love for Victorian ghost stories, an especial favourite being ‘The Stranger’, a chiller written by (the fictional) RM Holland. She is particularly drawn to his life and works because …
Stormzy, Merky Books - The author of this book of recent pop history is billed as Stormzy, but it has mostly been pulled together by Jude Yawson. He’s a young writer who has secured a place for himself in the burgeoning array of talents that have found th…
Laurence Cane-Honeysett - 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Trojan Records, a record label and real British success story. They played a key role in making reggae globally popular with many of the genre’s major stars being connected to Trojan includ…
Barry Fox - I don’t usually go a bundle for self-published curios, but in this case I’m going to make an exception. As far as I can gather Barry Fox is a local fellow who makes bizarro art and artefacts in the manner of Jean-Michel Basquiat having a fever…
Patrick deWitt - The Canadian author Patrick deWitt scored a huge hit with his 2011 novel ‘The Sisters Brothers’ (which has just been made into a film) and ‘French Exit’, his latest, is every bit as good. It begins in modern day Manhattan where we’re intr…
Angela Steidele - The story of Anne Lister’s life (1791-1840) may have slipped down the back of Time’s settee if it were not for a remarkable series of extensive diaries she kept. A self-absorbed woman she recorded great spools of her life, but much of it…
Pariah O’Donnell - The second novel from this Irish author begins with a deliciously dark chapter. We’re in Victorian London and a young seamstress arrives at a grand house in Mayfair. She is shown to the top floor where she ensconces herself alone in a r…
William Boyd - Towards the back end of the 19thcentury Brodie Moncur is working as a piano-tuner in Edinburgh. The firm he is working for have a piano showroom in Paris, but business is slow, and Brodie is offered the opportunity to relocate to the French…
Julia Darling - The novelist, poet and playwright Julia Darling was born in Winchester but moved to Newcastle in 1980. Her first novel ‘Crocodile Soup’ was long-listed for the Orange Prize while her second ‘The Taxi Driver’s Daughter’ was long-listed for …
Jonathan Coe - Jonathan Coe eviscerated Thatcherism in his 1994 satire ‘What a Carve Up!’ but for his latest novel he’s turned his hand to a rather trickier task: trying to make sense of the political gales that have buffeted England over recent years. Th…
Laura Purcell - Laura Purcell struck gothic gold with her debut novel ‘The Silent Companions’ and she’s also on fine form with her latest. Set in the mid-19thcentury she juggles the narrative between two protagonists: Ruth, a teenage seamstress who is in …
Sebastian Faulks - Disaffected Moroccan teenager Tariq lives with his father and stepmother in Tangier. He decides to run away with the vague notion of tracing the roots of his dead mother who lived in Paris. He eventually makes it to the City of Lights a…
Mark Hopkinson - “I like books that ramble on, that are like someone talking to you or you’re hearing thoughts. When I meet someone or just see them around I always think: what are you like? What’s happened to you?” That’s the 20-something hero of Mark Ho…
Richard Atkinson - Richard Atkinson can often be found banging out his work at poetry open mic slots around the region, and is part of the Scratch performance group. Charles Bukowski is an obvious influence on his work and he gets a couple of name checks …
Kate Atkinson - Kate Atkinson seems incapable of writing a bad sentence, never mind a bad novel, and she’s on fine form with her latest in which she covers some of the same ground that Anthony Quinn did in his recent, and very good, ‘Our Friends in Berlin…
John Boyne - When renowned gentleman of letters Erich Ackermann takes a fancy to Maurice Swift, a waiter working in a hotel in Berlin, he tries every way he can to ingratiate himself with the attractive young man, to the extent of offering him a job, of s…
Sarah Perry - Sarah Perry scored a huge hit with her last novel ‘The Essex Serpent’ set in a fictional English village circa the 1890s. Her latest takes place in modern day Prague and whereas the mysteries of ‘The Essex Serpent’ lay not so much in the sup…
Sally Rooney - With this, and her previous novel, ‘Conversations With Friends’, Sally Rooney appears to have cornered the market in people talking, and not talking, in rooms (as well as people saying what they mean, and, more pertinently, not saying what …
Esi Edugyan - The Canadian author Esi Edugyan scored a big hit with her previous novel, ‘Half Blood Blues’, which told the story of black jazz players in the Second World War. It was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes, and ‘Washington Black’, he…
Rupert Thompson - In Rupert Thompson’s latest novel he fictionalises the lives of two French women who meet when they are teenagers in the early part of the twentieth century. Lucie Schwob shuns the conventions of the time – playing around with her sexual…
Anthony Quinn - Anthony Quinn is never more at home than when he’s elbow deep in mid-20thcentury, cake-mix Britain, all turned-up trousers, hair oil and plucky, can-do gels. And he’s in his element with ‘Our Friends in Berlin’, his latest novel, which is …
Matthew Klam - This debut novel sees Rich Fischer on his annual trip to a New England beachside town where he teaches students how to make their own autobiographical comics over the course of a week, and he’s just one of the teachers at the arts conferenc…
Lynne Truss - Set in 1950s Brighton, Lynne Truss’s latest is subtitled ‘A Constable Twitten Mystery’ and is the first in a mooted series, adapted from her BBC Radio 4 show. The town is policed by Inspector Steine who is something of a local celebrity afte…
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