Category: Books
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The Island by Ragnar Jónasson
It’s 1988, many years before the events recounted in the first of the Hidden Iceland trilogy, The Darkness. A pair of teenagers have headed out to a remote summer house for a weekend of passion – but things don’t go quite the way they’d planned. Next thing, the girl’s father has been arrested and charged…
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The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson
Following on from the latest Yrsa Sigurðardóttir novel, I thought I’d stay in Iceland and catch up with Ragnar Jónasson who I’ve been meaning to read for a while. His latest series of books are the Hidden Iceland trilogy, and The Darkness is the first of the three novels. Hulda Hermannsdottir is approaching her retirement,…
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The Absolution by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
The Absolution is the third in the “Children’s House” series of books from one if Iceland’s leading crime writers. A teenager has been brutally murdered, with the perpetrator first capturing some kind of apology and then sharing the video to victim’s friends on Snapchat. The police race to capture the video while it’s still there and…
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Reasons to be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe
It’s the early 1980s and our narrator, Lizzie Vogel, is about to leave home for the first time, and move from her village into the city of Leicester. Her first fulltime job is to be a dental assistant working for the awful JP and his partner Tammy. The job comes with its own flat, and…
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Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel
I picked up a copy of Walking in Berlin over Christmas having become fascinated by the period after reading the first couple of Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath novels and watching the superb TV dramatisation Babylon Berlin. A recent trip to Berlin also got me even more interested in the period. This book, newly translated by Amanda…
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The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
This book lays out the horrifying facts about climate change in a compelling and urgent way. In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells takes a comprehensive stroll through the very real perils that the world is facing from climate change. He opens with a devastating picture of just how quickly we’re going to see real suffering and destruction,…
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My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing
A twisted thriller about a couple who are not all they seem. The set-up for My Lovely Wife is intriguing and it’s hard to avoid giving away too much in the way of spoilers. ‘Tobias’ narrates this story. He’s married to Millicent and they live together in an idyllic gated community in Florida with their two kids…
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Tangerine by Christine Langan
The cover of the paperback edition of Tangerine has a quote from The Times claiming that the book is like a cross between Girl on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. This was one of those books that I absolutely did pick up based on the cover – but that strapline also sold it to me. Tangerine is Waterstones’ fiction book…
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Normal People by Sally Rooney
When a book receives as much hype as Sally Rooney’s Booker longlisted, Costa winning and Waterstones winning novel, it can have a reverse reaction for me. The book sounds like it’s being over-hyped. I begin to think that it can’t possibly live up to expectations. I tend to actively avoid such titles. But then, I…
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Turbulence by David Szalay
This is essentially a book of short stories with a clever over-arching mechanic that links them. Each chapter tells a different story about someone who is somehow travelling between airports. So the first chapter starts with a flight from London to Madrid. The next story will take us from Madrid to Dakar. And so we…
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Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Ghost Wall was a book that seemed to come up in quite a few of Best of 2018 blogs and articles that I read over Christmas, so I was eager to read this. It’s an incredibly slim volume, running to around 150 pages, but in packs an absolute punch. I read it across a single day. Silvie…
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Man at the Helm and Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe
When Love Nina came out a few years ago, I thought it was one of the funniest books I’d ever read. Nina Stibbe was a young girl from Leicester who’d come down to London to become a nanny. The book is made up of letters sent home describing the goings on the Gloucester Place household.…