What was it like?
From international best sellers to literary classics and quirky book store finds, take a look at our latest book reviews.
Autobiography suffers from a missing chapter
“Everyone has a chapter they don’t read out loud.” (Anonymous) Bob Dylan’s memoir might be as lyrical as his songs and offer fascinating insights about his arrival on the music…
Book Review: Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
It can sometimes be difficult to describe what a book was ‘about’. While some might centre on an earth shattering event, others carry on quietly, with the reader bobbing along…
Book Review: Chronicles: Volume 1 by Bob Dylan
I don’t usually read memoirs, or much non-fiction of any type, but I was curious about reading Bob Dylan’s book after he (controversially) won the Nobel Prize for Literature. At…
Book Review: The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose
I am no modern art lover – at best I am curious and at worst I am bewildered. However, in reading The Museum Modern Love, I found that I have…
Book Review: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Sibling relationships are at the heart of many novels, with Little Women, My Family and Other Animals and The Cement Garden among the most memorable. However, to that list we…
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Childhood never seems as close by as when you read it in a book. That is particularly true of reading My Brilliant Friend. Despite being set in a working class…
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Labelled by some as historical fiction and others as science fiction, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is a book that does not slot easily into any one category. I came…
Book review: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Much has been written about Jane Eyre, and it’s true that it is a hard book not to like. Its protagonist is a feisty, principled woman who was brought up…
Book review: Book review: Regeneration by Pat Barker
Regeneration is a different type of war book to what readers or students might be used to, with the action taking place in a hospital rather than in the trenches.…
Review: The Way to Paradise
Books can either reflect the world as the reader already knows it, but in a new and surprising way, or introduce a whole new world, which is unfamiliar and exotic.…
Freedom Song, Amit Chaudhuri
It feels as if spring has gone on strike, enabling winter to continue until December. The mercury is sluggish and the wind is fierce, and I have been stuck at…
On Love, Alain de Botton
From the popularity of The Bachelor to the amount of paraphernalia surrounding Valentine’s Day, it seems that romance is having a renaissance. And with all the roses, candlelit dinners and…
As sweet as a madeleine by the Seine – The Little Paris Bookshop, Nina George
I usually prefer books that can be described as moving, heartbreaking, uplifting or captivating. I like to be lifted up and shaken when I read, and I love books that…
Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut
Oh Billy Pilgrim, you are one of a kind. Has there ever been a character so pitiable, so pathetic, but so likable as the lead character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse…
The Natural Way of Things – misogyny out loud
Sometimes it is not the spoken but the whispered threat that is the most menacing. So it is with sexism. While important issues such as the gender pay gap and…
Charlotte Gray shines a light on the children of the Holocaust
It is very difficult to empathise with people we have never met, who lived a long time ago, in a country on the other side of the world. It is…
Review: The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Some books are so unlike any others that it takes a while to understand what is happening when you start reading them. Their characters are unfamiliar and the situations unrecognisable,…
