Reading “Bangkok Days” whilst on holiday in Bangkok was a wonderful, border-line surreal experience, since it made me simultaneously embarrassed at how little I know the city, whilst also inspiring me to try and follow in Mr. Osborne’s steps. Not with the drinking nor the dentistry (the original reason the …
Having got totally hooked on the Gabriel Allon series, I am rattling through Mr. Silva’s books way too fast for comfort. But they are so addictive, and the stories are so compulsive, that one really doesn’t have that much choice. “The Defector” is the 9th in the series, and it …
No sooner had I finished the first Inspector Singh novel, than I started on the second – and books 3-6 are already stacked up and waiting on my Kindle – so addicted have I become to these murder mysteries set in SE Asia, and starring the wonderful overweight, chain-smoking, wheezy, …
Oh, the joy of discovering a wonderful new series of whodunnits. After reading just this first book in the Inspector Singh series, I am already a loyal fan. Inspector Singh is going to be a great character, and a hugely likeable one at that. I just know it. A middle aged, overweight …
Clichés like “a page turner” and “unputdownable” are unavoidable in a review of this extraordinary, gripping, dark novel which is – yes, here goes – a page turner and is absolutely unputdownable. This hefty novel (beautifully translated from the original Swedish) grips you from the very first page, and keeps you …
What a charming, feel-good read this novel is. It is humorous and quirky and – without in the least spoiling the plot – it has a happy ending. Delightful, in a word. Allan Karlsson is 100 years old, and well and truly fed up of the old people’s home where …
It’s been a few years since I read a John Grisham novel. Not by design, I hasten to add, but more by accident/many more book clubs books to read than I can decently keep up with (ooh, ugly, unwieldy sentence, that, & ending with a preposition to boot…) Anyway, away …
To describe this touching, well-written novel as an Aga saga is to demean it somewhat. True it does chronicle the quintessential Aga-esque life of middle-class English people in a pretty village, where only one villager is actually a working farmer and everyone else is living the countryside dream. But there …
“Home Boy” is the powerful début novel by the young, talented Pakistani writer H.M.Naqvi. A picaresque novel of post 9/11 America, it is hard-hitting and shocking in its depiction of a land, a landscape and a people changed for ever. Three young Pakistani friends live in and around New York. …
