The topic of posthumous releases of author’s works has been on my mind a little lately, no doubt because of the Kafka rabbit hole I disappeared down! However, as I mentioned in my end of Sept…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

Later this month, Karen and Simon will be hosting another of their hugely enjoyable ‘Club’ weeks, focusing this time on 1949. Starting on Monday 12th October, the #1949Club is a week-long celebrati…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

I don’t quite know what it is about September, but it always seems to whizz past; maybe because I’m always back to work after the summer break and so things are frantic, with a lot of c…

Back in January I shared my thoughts about a wonderful book which I’d received as a Christmas gift from lovely Jacqui – “Souvenir” by Michael Bracewell. The book was basical…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

Earlier in this month of #SpinsterSeptember hosted by @pear-jelly, I read The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym. I wanted to try and squeeze in another Pym before the end, and I really enjoyed reading…

Slowly but surely, I’m working my way through Anita Brooker’s exquisitely written novels in publication order – they really are jewel-like in construction. First published in 1996, Altered States i…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

Praised by Raymond Chandler as one of the best suspense writers of her era, the American writer Elisabeth Sanxay Holding produced eighteen crime novels and many short stories over the course of her…

Despite having overflowing bookshelves and a mountainous TBR, I still always seem to amass multiple copies of individual titles, and today’s book is a good example of that. Back in the 1990s …

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

I dithered a bit about posting on Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey (1946) as although I enjoyed it, I wasn’t really sure if I could recommend it onwards. It’s an unusual novel written by an estab…

Prior to 2014 I didn’t keep any kind of record of when I bought books, where they came from or anything like that; and the list I’ve kept since then has been very useful! However, one t…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

Today I’m taking part in a blog tour for Corylus Books, a lovely indie publisher with a focus on translated crime fiction. I really enjoyed Black Storms, the first in Teresa Solana’s stories featur…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

If there’s ever a book which had me wanting to rush off to northern climes, it’s “An Island Rooing” by Joan Grigsby! The latest release from Michael Walmer in his Northus Sh…

If you follow Nora (Pear Jelly) on Bluesky or Instagram, you’ll know that she’s currently hosting #SpinsterSeptember, a themed reading event showcasing books featuring unmarried women, from the cla…

Source: Review copy from Corylus Books – thank you ! Translated by Peter Bush I loved the first of Catatan author Teresa Solana’s Barcelona Nights series of novels from Corylus Books, B…

I didn’t remember until late last night, but yesterday on September 15th, my blog reached 18 years old! Gosh, I never thought when I dipped my blogging toe into the water back on Blogspot in …

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

My second read for Short Story September is a book I picked up fairly recently after seeing it pop up on a number of blogs I follow; it’s by an author I’ve read before and was a recent …

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

I love Barbara Pym, an underappreciated writer whose gentle comedies of manners and unrequited love among the genteel middle classes are charming and quietly poignant. She creates an idiosyncratic …

I’ve been meaning to get back to reading Barbara Pym, and what better time than #SpinsterSeptember, hosted by @pear-jelly. Pym fills her novels with ‘excellent women’ spinsters, although the charac…

Anita Brookner was a prolific writer and a master of both comedy and tragedy. Over the course of 28 years, she wrote 24 novels, winning the Booker Prize in 1984 with Hotel du Lac. But where should you...

Sometimes a book crosses your path at exactly the right time, and that happened to me recently when I was browsing in a British Heart Foundation charity shop. As I mentioned in my August round up, …

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

One of the books I picked up last month when we were having our little shop to celebrate mum was by an author I’ve read before – Seishi Yokomizo. Back in 2020 I reviewed his “The …

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

Stephen Benatar’s remarkable, deeply unsettling novel features one of the best depictions of the inner life of an unstable woman I’ve ever encountered in fiction. There’s a long tradition of female…

I was in a small independent bookshop in Clapham when I came across Opening Night (2026) by Sara Baume. I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t leave an independent bookshop empty-handed &#82…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

In this week’s slightly shorter wind up I focus on books read and reviewed, keep up with a variety of literary anniversaries (including Read a New Book Month, National Read a Book Day, Roald Dahl D…

It’s been a little while since I picked up a book from my my various casual and ongoing reading projects; however, I recently felt the need for something familiar and which I knew I could pro…

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

Born in Saint Petersburg in 1901, Nina Berberova emigrated from Russia to the Weimar Republic in 1922, where she lived for three years before moving to Paris. While in France, Berberova wrote poems…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the mythology of vampires began with Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” published in 1897. However, as “Vampire Tales”, a fantastic new …

Book reviews, snippets of book news, and alerts about books outside the glare of the publicity spotlight.

I had seen the film adapted in the year 2000 from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), so I knew the story arc and its tragic ending but I still found reading the novel immensely enjoya…

While I was reading Kafka’s “The Castle” recently, I checked out the bibliography in the back and saw mention of an interesting sounding title – “Kafka’s Other T…

This week I turn to books newly read and discussed, wander through some of the most engaging literary writing to appear on the blogosphere, revisit earlier posts worth rediscovering, note a handful…

First published in 1958, The Bell was Iris Murdoch’s fourth book, a sophisticated, richly textured novel that explores complicated feelings between complex individuals, encompassing faith, guilt, r…