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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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—, [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

Vanessa and Virginia, by Susan Sellers

The lives of the ‘Bloomsbury-group’, including the Stephens’ sisters, Virginia [Woolf] and her sister, Vanessa [Bell], are well documented. The curious reader can pick over the facts of their rather risqué, Bohemian life-style and learn of their artistic accomplishments in any one of the authoritative biographies and collections of letters weighing down the literary shelves [...]

Read Full Post »