We all love a good little-fish-in-a-big-pond story, when the little guy from out of town has to survive among the city-slickers. But we love it even more when the little guy turns out to be…
If you ever thought philosophy was for people with glasses and sticking-out ears who need to get out more, you may be in for a shock. Every crime thriller you’ve ever read is steeped in…
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is on The Library Shelf today It’s an unlikely best-seller. A darkly humorous novel about a dowdy young woman with an abusive mother. who she only speaks to on the…
The English love the countryside and never more than when there’s a corpse spreadeagled over the lawn. The country crime sub-genre appeared almost as soon as the detective genre itself. Three years after the first English…
Feeling overwhelmed by all those emails, all that paper,the to-do lists stuck to the wall or just the things you know you have to do that are running round your head? Everyone I know who’s…
Most of us remember our first encounter with a mechanical life-form. Depending on when we were born, some of us had nightmares about Daleks. Others have had their dreams haunted by Transformers. Or Alexa. In…
Agents, publishers, books on writing tell you to write about nice characters who grow and learn. Louise Doughty clearly missed that memo. Her characters are troubled, rarely nice, placed in dark situations. Nazi mass killing…
Should we legalise drugs? Peter Paget MP thinks so. But he’s only a lowly backbencher in a government whose ministers hardly notice him as they rush past on their important business. But one day Paget…
Spook Street: Spies, it seems, come in distinct and recognisable flavours. There’s the glamorous-sexy (Bond), the depressive-tragic (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold). The dumped-on-by-the-boss (The Ipcress File). The intellectual-self-effacing (Smiley). And, of…
24th century princess Charity Freestone is fighting for her life against the massed forces of at least two diabolical business enterprises who have the power to inflict deeply unpleasant forms of torture, such as the…
It may surprise you that a verbal attack can be much trickier and more difficult to deal with than a physical attack. And you never know when one might come. A few years ago, a…
Yesterday I came close to inflicting serious verbal damage on an indie bookshop manager. I’d very much like to know from anyone else who has a similar story, either as an author, a publisher or…
When the Man Booker shortlist was announced earlier this year, Andrew Holgate of the Sunday Times noted how the judges slagged off the while industry of creative book blurbs along with the celebrity quotes that…
What is it about sex and law that gets our pulses racing? A famously dry and dusty profession, somehow the law can be remarkably sexy when on page or screen – whether it’s a John…
If you want to improve at something, you can’t do better than studying the habits of people who’ve already done it well. Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals aims to make this easy with bite-sized chunks…
I’ve read many books on Buddhism, but this, by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, stands out as very special. In just a few pages, he cuts through the faff – writing in a very down-to-earth manner. Starting…
This is a nice little book, full of enjoyable bite-sized detective stories. There are many good stories, recent and older, including pieces by Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin and Sara Paretsky. And there are some absolute…
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie LeeMy rating: 5 of 5 stars I don’t know anyone who’s opened this book who hasn’t been immediately enchanted by it. Much less famous than Cider…