WELCOME TO MY BOOKSHELF

There are some books that just seem to split humanity into two camps – and Stoner by John Williams is certainly one of them. Reading this...

Perhaps my favourite author discovery of the year is Claire Keegan. I read her Booker Prize shortlisted novel Small Things Like These in...

‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.’ I love a good opening line. And how true, describing 2016, the year of chaos and...

Unrest is spreading over Jidada. The Old Horse has fallen, the revolutionary government is replaced by a new self-proclaimed liberation...

Kiara is seventeen and desperately trying to pay the rent that has been increased yet again. After her father’s death and with her mother...

Lia’s carefully calibrated life is about to be turned upside down yet again. The cancer she battled years ago is back. And spreading....

At the beginning was Sappho, who spoke of her lovers and for sapphic women centuries on. Women – artists, writers, dancers, actresses –...

Joe is watching time pass by, measuring his days by Noony, the train that comes past his window once a day. He is all alone in his house,...

Maali Almeida is dead and has just woken up in the afterlife, though he does not know yet. For how he still believes he is having a weird...

Money, Mississippi does not hold what its name promises but is home to an interesting set of characters who wake up to a series of brutal...

The author GMB, interested in psychiatry and one prolific 1960s psychiatrist in particular, is trusted with a set of notebooks kept by...

Two men make their way to a tiny Irish island. On uncertain and uneasily, the other more self-assured. Mr Lloyd crosses the sea from...

Karen Joy Fowler’s new book is but isn’t the story of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Is but isn’t because it tells the...

What do a novel, an unfinished autobiography, the manuscript for a ghost-written memoir, and a diary have in common? They are all parts...

I’m starting my series of posts about this year’s Booker Prize longlist with a double review as I squeezed in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name...

I finally listened to everyone telling me this was their favourite book and read The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Does this...

In For Who the Bells Tolls Hemingway takes us back to another European war: this time the Spanish Civil War. His hero, the American...

Michael Pollan is one of my favourite discoveries of recent years. This is Your Mind on Plants is his most recent book, consisting of...

Without Warning & Only Sometimes author Kit de Waal’s childhood memoir. She up with an Irish mother who, as a Jehovah’s witness forbid...

BBC talk show host George Beverly and his family live a comfortable life in their London home – until the trolls and woke people on...