Sirens – this week’s review in the Library Corner I was standing in Waterstones, asking for dark crime stories, when the assistant handed me Sirens – debut novel by Joseph Knox. Sumptuously produced in hardback,…
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…
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…