Louise

The Pact – Episode 1

In Victorian times the serialised novel was the height of fashion, popularised in particular by the huge success of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. Across Europe stories such as Madame Bovary, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo…

The Quality of Silence

It’s the middle of the British summer, some days have been lovely, others have been fairly dreadful. While the perfect books to read during the summer are typically regarded as light, frothy novels set on the beach I spent a few days in the chill of an Alaskan winter…

Tenacity

One of my main bugbears with a lot of police procedurals is that the main character is always “damaged” in some way. Alcoholic, bad with the opposite sex, poor family life – no fictional top cop is ever well balanced and happy with their life. I understand completely that it offers an extra dimension to the narrative…

Boyhood

When I first heard about Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, the story of a family told over a span of 12 years and filmed over that same timeframe, I was thoroughly excited. It was such a bold idea and had the potential to be a generation defining narrative…

The Woman Who Fed The Dogs

There are some crimes which are so hideous that they attract world-wide attention, names of (mostly) men who have committed acts so wicked that they spread beyond the borders of their own countries. One of these men is Marc Dutroux, a Belgian paedophile and child murderer…

Little Black Lies

Can you imagine taking the life of another person? Would you have the ability to deliberately kill someone? That’s the question that Catrin Quinn, one of the three main characters of Sharon Bolton’s Little Black Lies, asks herself on the very first page…

The Rosie Project

Since starting this website, I’ve been lucky enough to receive a number of proofs and review copies of books from publishers and there’s something a little bit exciting about seeing lists of the best recent releases and knowing that I’ve either read them or (more normally) have a copy just waiting to be read…

The Temporary Bride

I learned a new word today – sonder. It’s the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. It’s a lovely word and feeling. We walk past people on the street and we know nothing about their lives, they don’t exist in full form to us the way that our friends and families do…