I’m back in famine-era Ireland this week (or slightly after), this time fictionalised though based on true events. If you haven’t read Emma Donoghue’s latest I strongly advise that you don’t google it beforehand because if, like me, you’ve read nothing about the background to this story you’ll be properly gob-smacked by the mystery at its centre. 
7 or so years after the last potato blight devastated the area, word is spreading from a small-holding near Mullingar that 11 year-old Anna O’Donnell has been subsisting for months without food. Could she be a saint, a miracle, a true wonder? Before

If you’ve read any of Hannah’s other books you’ll know what to expect here; a well-setup premise, various intriguing and seemingly unrelated characters, red herrings (or are they?) abounding, and tangents going off in all directions. Sophie Hannah’s thrillers are busy, to say the least.

I have to be honest, having binge-read her earlier Culver Valley novels I stopped after about the fifth, feeling they weren’t good for my health – to me they’re the equivalent of bad TV – you just want to shout “You cannot be serious!” at the screen, sorry book, half-way through, such is your frustration at the

If you love Golden Age crime fiction then you will enjoy this entertaining foray into the early years of the Detection Club, which counted Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie as founding members. The author is not only a crime writer himself, but also the current president of the Detection Club, who has been delving into the annals of the crime writers extraordinaire. Having said that, it transpires that precious early records of the London based club disappeared during World War II (perhaps hardly surprising). Nevertheless, Edwards still has much material and has talked to relatives of

This gothic chiller, first published in 1942 was re-issued in 2015 by Tramp Press as part of its Recovered Voices Series. I have been meaning to read The Uninvited for a while and I am glad that I have finally got around to Macardle’s tale of mysterious goings-on in a beautiful old Devonshire house. She scores points (for me at least) for setting the story in an elegant, well-proportioned jewel of a house in a scenic coastal location, instead of the more predictable turreted, crumbling, gloomy pile in the middle of a desolate misty moor.

The story begins with siblings Roderick and Pamela

House MD is a comedy medical drama of exceptional originality. Stop right here if you think you're in for the usual ER patients, chatty nurses and dramatic doctors who care about every patient like their own children. No, House is a cynical, arrogant, pill-popping cripple and expert diagnostician with a love for puzzles and a talent for wreaking havoc, a tortured genius who refuses to take any case that doesn't spark his interest with unusual symptoms (such as luminous green urine or the sudden inability to form speech), cases no ordinary doctor can diagnose. House, along with his rotating

Australia is a country of extremes, that’s for sure. The last book I read set in Oz (Truly, madly, guilty by Liane Moriarty) began during a rainy spell lasting weeks - this one knocks that out of the water (excuse the pun) by having the farming community of Kiewarra driven half-mad by a drought that has lasted two years and shows no sign of ending. So arid and barren has the land become that the river, central to the history of this place, has just disappeared. It’s not that much of a surprise then to the struggling community that local farmer, Luke Hadler, took the desperate decision to end

An inventive and exhilarating novel set in an astonishing world.

A dark and gripping and imaginative novel.

A brilliant and blackly funny collection of short stories

A sumptuous exploration of human relationships and our connection with the land.