Category: Books

Krakatoa is one of those volcanoes that everyone knows about, and in 1883 it exploded in the largest recorded manner killing thousands. This brilliant book sets the explosion in its full historical context, filling the reader in on both the scientific and social situation. Well worth a read.

0552150231

014062032X

0752858963

0140167773

I’m not entirely sure why I picked up this book. But it may have had something to do with being cheap, me not having anything to read at the precise moment, and being near the hated Tesco. Zoe Heller is one of those newspaper columnists that on the whole I can’t abide. So why then…

Can you tell that I’ve been away with very little to do? The Kalahari Typing School for Men is the fourth in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. You either like these books or you don’t – they’re slight, and inoffensive, but they take you away to another world. And although AIDS doesn’t really…

Regular readers will know that I’m something of a Mankell fan. Firewall is the latest to appear here in translation, and apparantly the penultimate Kurt Wallander novel. Firewall starts with someone dropping dead at a cashpoint and a seemingly senseless murder of a taxi driver by two teenage girls, before the plot thickens and a…

Now this is more like it. After the disappoitnment of The Da Vinci Code, it was good to read a literary thriller that held up to all that it was trying to be. Set amongst the literary elite of New England in the late 19th century as they battle to help Henry Longfellow put together…

0099450259

1843430169

0007162510