I've not really been blogging much since milo was born. But spam comments keep coming and beeping in the inbox. The best thing seems to ...

Young adult fiction has to do a couple of things to work well. It needs to grab you from the off and it needs to maintain a pace until the...

Occassionally you will see children interviewed for some lifestyle programme and they are asked what their favourite subject is. When aske...

One of the numerous attractions of reading is the way that a book can transport you to a different world and give you a mental break from ...

What holds most crime books together is the personality of the detective leading the hunt for the killer. Think Morse, Holmes or Maigret ...

before I manage to finish something new i'm going to try to get round to posting some of the reviews of books i finished a while ago but...

apologies for the absence but having another child has rather changed my reading routine. In some ways it's not a lack of sleep but just...

This is late in the day but the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP) was awarded to Blooms of Darkness, which I reviewed recently. Per...

Having read some Peter Ackroyd before the technique of overlapping history in different parts of London is not something unfamiliar. Bu...

This starts with a biblical come fairy story and the magical imagery of angels, demons and the supernatural stay throughout. Set in someti...

You get to the end of this book and its not until you read the bits and pieces that are usually things you skip that you realise the sheer...

Over the past few weeks I've been reading a selection of books that were longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Along wit...

Language, specifically the names of things, is a theme from all angles in this book which manages to unsettle the reader until the last word...

This story gives an account from an  11 year-old boy into what it's like to hide from Germans at the height of the holocaust. Hugo's...

In between reading some books that are on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist I have also been getting through The Names by Don ...