Review: Ramshackle, by Elizabeth Reeder

Ramshackle, by Elizabeth Reeder (Freight Books) ISBN 978 0 9566135 7 8, 161pp In Ramshackle, Elizabeth Reeder captures perfectly the see-saw sensibilities of teenage years in this tender tale of becoming. On a cold, wintry Friday night in a house on the shores of Lake Michigan, fifteen-year old Roe Davis’s adoptive locksmith father reads her [...]

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Made in Britain – review

‘Every Town’, the near-mythical setting of Gavin James Bower’s post-industrial landscape in Made in Britain, is peopled with dysfunctional families, suffused with social disengagement, law-breaking and public disorder. It’s a bad but normal British town. A bit too bad. It’s as if an evil giant has gobbled up the moral fabric of this ‘dirty old [...]

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Dead Money by Ray Banks

Review: Dead Money, by Ray Banks (Blasted Heath) ISBN: (epub) 978-1-908688-04-0 (Kindle) 978-1-908688-03-3 “If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”  — Paul Newman Alan Slater is an affront to double-glazing salesmen everywhere. Alongside the usual display of dubious sales techniques, he physically [...]

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Q & A with Sara Sheridan

Q & A with Scottish-based writer Sara Sheridan.   Before her book event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, I caught up with writer Sara Sheridan, author of books for children and adults, Committee Member for the Society of Authors in Scotland and Board Member of writers’ collective, 26. Whether writing picture books, like the [...]

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Book Review: Today by David Miller

Today, by David Miller (Atlantic Books, 2011) Today is a superbly crafted book. Miller’s Conrad is silent, in the wings, while his secretary/ “typewriter”, his cook, his wife [who is decidedly not based on Woolf’s description of her as his “lump”], his daughter-in-law, his grandson and sons and friends – like those flawed, failed characters who [...]

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Book Review: Into the Darkest Corner

Into the Darkest Corner, by Elizabeth Haynes (Myriad Editions, 2011) It had to be an exceptional book to break my book-blog-block and this is it: Into the Darkest Corner — a nervy, heart-racing, page-turner —the debut thriller by Elizabeth Haynes. The story is common-place enough: party-going good-girl meets dark, handsome stranger with mysterious past… except—, [...]

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‘Lost’ Enid Blyton Manuscript

Seven Stories, the national gallery and archive of children’s books has discovered a hitherto unknown manuscript by Enid Blyton among their collection. Hanna Green, the archivist who made the discovery, dates it to the mid-1930s; an “an early piece of writing by Blyton, a little bit experimental and perhaps not as confident and accomplished as her later works.” The 180 page manuscript,titled Mr Tumpy’s [...]

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Review: Faulks on Fiction

On paper, Sebastian Faulks is the ideal guide to take us through the British novel in Faulks on Fiction: Great British Characters and The Secret Life of the Novel (BBC Books, 2011). His writing encompasses so many different genres and styles that he can’t easily be pigeon-holed, having attempted, amongst others, contemporary satire (A Week [...]

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Trespass: Review

Trespass, by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus, 2010; Vintage, [pbk] 2011) It isn’t hard to find why Trespass was long-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. It’s a terrific, multi-layered story, which demands more than one reading to uncover the depth of Tremain’s imaginative and intellectual achievement. At its simplest, the incisive shifting viewpoint reveals [...]

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The Postmistress: Review

Letters from the Edge   I’m in mourning for The Postmistress, newly released in Penguin paperback and unveiled as one of Richard and Judy’s Book Group Spring titles. I don’t grieve for what the novel could have been, but for what, according to the blurb, the publisher’s hype, and rave book reviews, it should be. [...]

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