‘Boulevard’ by Jim Grimsley

Don’t you just hate it when you find a book with a cover so awful that you very nearly don’t read it at all? This happened with ‘Boulevard’ – the copy I picked up in the library had a photo of a young man on the front that was so ‘blond brain-dead Eighties porno-flick twink’ [...]

‘Time and Place’ by Alan Sheridan

Okay, I’ll admit it – this book had me baffled. It was billed as a fictionalised biography based on the diaries of a real-life actor, Mark Sheridan, as written by his descendant Alan Sheridan, but I have to admit I couldn’t tell if this was the case, or if it was really just a novel [...]

‘Haweswater’ by Sarah Hall

I bought this book just before we went on holiday to the Lake District, because it happens to be set in… the Lake District! There’s a lovely sepia photo of a lakeland scene on the cover, and the story it tells is one of human drama and tragedy in the 1930s, when the Manchester City [...]

‘The Whaleboat House’ by Mark Mills

I read Mills’ ‘The Savage Garden’ last year and thoroughly enjoyed it (a garden *and* a mystery – what’s not to like *g*) so when I saw another title by the same author I grabbed it.  Oddly, it isn’t a follow-up; ‘The Whaleboat House’ is actually his first novel, republished under a different title.  I [...]

‘In the Company of the Courtesan’ by Sarah Dunant

I first came across this author when a friend gave me her first novel, ‘Birth of Venus’, for Christmas. Straight away I loved her style of writing, but in that case found the story a little too tragic. Thankfully, ‘Courtesan’ has none of the same aching sense of sadness and wasted lives, [...]

‘Death of a Monk’ by Alon Hilu

Finding this book at all was something of a happy accident, since I’d never even heard of the author, let alone the title. This isn’t really surprising as Hilu is an Israeli writer and Death of a Monk was translated from Hebrew by an American scholar. Browsing the shelves of an Aladdin’s cave [...]

‘Ripley Underwater’ by Patricia Highsmith

Bit of an odd one, this. It’s the last (so far) in the Ripley series about a charming psychopath, the first of which was made into the film The Talented Mr Ripley starring Matt Damon. I’d never tried Highsmith before and wanted to read one of the books to see whether there was as much [...]

‘Fool’s Errand’ by Louis Bayard

The first of the holiday reads…

Gorgeous, just gorgeous! This book is warm, funny, lively, involving and, er, did I mention gorgeous?
It tells the story of Patrick, a gay man living in Washington DC who falls asleep at a friend’s house and sees the man of his dreams. But has he dreamt ‘Scottie’ (so called because [...]

‘The Benefits of Passion’ by Catherine Fox

One from the files to keep you going until I have time to report on the holiday reading. 
I started out by loving this book. It tells the story of a thirty-something woman, single and training to be a priest, who suddenly starts to hear her body-clock ticking and to take her mind off [...]

‘The People’s Act of Love’ by James Meek

The quote on the front cover, from Louis de Bernieres, describes this book as ‘…the most original… I have read for years’.  I was a bit dubious about that as virtually every book in the stores these days claims something like that – but boy! was I wrong.
The book is set in 1900s Siberia and [...]