Category: Books

Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link comes highly recommended, and I’d been looking forward to picking up a copy for a while. Happily, it’s in a current 3 For 2 at Waterstones, so I’ve been reading Link’s stories over the last few days. Her tales are very magical realism, and I really enjoyed them –…

I read Louise Welsh’s first novel, The Cutting Room, and liked it, but the prospect of a new novel with a magician protagonist and set in the seedy part of Berlin amongst other places was irresistible. The action takes place in three cities, London, Glasgow and Berlin. As the novel opens, William Wilson is putting…

William Boyd is always worth reading, and this novel has done especially well. It’s probably selling more than all his previous novels combined by virtue of it being on the Richard & Judy list. It was also shortlisted for the Costa Coffee Book Prize. And you know what? It’s really good. It’s basically a spy…

Catching up with a few recent books still. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was the Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago – you can’t miss the sticker on the cover telling you as much. The author, Paul Torday, also popped up on the Simon Mayo book segment a couple of…

I read something recently that suggested that Alexander McCall Smith is able to knock out another No.1 Ladies Detective Agency novel in a fortnight or so. That’s probably not quite the case, but he certainly is a one-man publishing phenomenon putting the likes of Terry Pratchett (in his prime) in his place. As well as…

Well I noted the other day that I hadn’t read this book yet. Well now I have… obviously. I must admit, for a book that’s won prizes for comic fiction, I didn’t find it terribly funny. It takes a serious-ish subject and handles it with a very light touch. But I’m not sure I’d go…

The Ghost Map is a completely fascinating non-fiction title about two characters, who in 1854, managed to get to the bottom of the cause of one of the scourges of the age – cholera. If you know where I work, then read the following paragraph, and even though it covers events a couple of hundred…

Obviously, I picked up The Prestige following thre recent release of the film version. But I’ve yet to see that, instead preferring to read the novel before the movie made or ruined the story for me. The book begins in a modern day setting as Andrew Westley visits Kate Angier to find out why she’s…

This novel won The Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize earlier this year. Per Petterson is Norweigian (well – it’s a while since my last Scanidnavian title), and is very well regarded in his homeland. Out Stealing Horses is a wonderful novel telling the story of Trond, both as a child in 1948, just after the war…

If you’re really quick, you can get this book from Penguin in 10 weekly paperback chunks for £25. They’re serlialising it in a Dickens manner, before publishing it in hardback in January (for less than £25). Obviously, if I’ve read the book, I’ve done none of these things – it was published in the States…

I saw Tom Reynolds give a talk about blogging from work a year or so ago at an NTK event, but I must admit, that I hadn’t really spent much time reading his blog. Blood, Sweat and Tea is a compendium of entries he’s made over the last couple of years or so, which means…

You may know Gary Imlach. He’s the man who for years has presented UK coverage of the Tour de France, first on Channel 4, and then more recently on ITV (with Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin providing race commentary). Before that, he was a face on the Channel 4 coverage of American Football alongside sometime…