Nothing to do with Inspector Morse’s sidekick, these three novels are set on the Hebridean island of Lewis, the most northerly of the archipelago. The setting of a small community where everyone knows everyone else is not unusual in crime … Continue reading →
An entertaining and thought-provoking personal account of the highs and lows of living life as a single woman.
Continue reading →The subtitle of this book is “Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World”. It presents a series of case studies supporting the author’s belief that what we think is ‘history’ – what we think we know about the … Continue reading →
The author is well-known and successful in the world of endurance cycling – people who cycle 200 or more kilometres a day, day after day, across continents, grabbing a few hours sleep here and there, eating what and when they … Continue reading →
With regret, this is the least satisfactory of the Robert Harris thrillers I have read. Set in Geneva and based on the financial markets’ “flash crash” in May 2010, Harris’s usual comprehensive research allows him to write in detail about … Continue reading →
These are the first three of a six book series of mystery thrillers set in the late 16th century. Elizabeth I is Queen of England, Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries is still a recent … Continue reading →
Suggested to me by an afficionada of the spy genre, I must admit that this book didn’t impress me at the start; the basis of the story seemed too improbable. But as I got further in it won me over … Continue reading →
The story of Pericles has been told and re-told many time over the centuries, or even millennia. Although the play, generally accepted as written by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, may be the best-known version in the English language there … Continue reading →
Intriguing, imaginative, inventive, impressive. Claire North’s character Harry August and his fellow kalachakra live Groundhog lives rather than Groundhog Days. Unlike we normal ‘linear’ folk their lives are both sequential and repetitive in time. Like the Ouroboros continually swallowing its … Continue reading →
The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper The stories of the lives of these five women have one thing in common: they show how desperately hard life was for working-class women in mid-Victorian times, and how … Continue reading →