Reviews 

The kindle book that briefly died. The first in another series of detective/procedural novels, this time featuring DS Aector McAvoy, and...

A strange book, based among the poor working and criminal class in Modern Cork city. Couldn’t really work out the genre; crimes, but no...

The book referred to above. I think it is brilliant, but, as I thought before when I first read it, the conclusion left me baffled (or...

A present from JG, as a bonus on top of the book (also by Mankell) that he lost and replaced. A short and slight book about a young girl...

This has sat in the house for years. Origins unclear; published by The Women’s Press, a female private eye (well she’s not, she is a...

I found this quite hard work; it was a bit like watching the news. Basically an attempt to explain a lot of both history and the modern...

A library book by a writer I had never heard of; apparently a prominent modern Spanish novelist. The narrator is a very verbose young...

Needed something lighter, so reverted to a McBain. He is a very good writer; I had forgotten having read a few many years ago. Unusually,...

I found this hard work. If I had wanted to read a biography of George Eliot, I’d have done so. By the end of it, I felt somewhat...

A much later book than no.304, and much longer and more ponderous. The central conceit is quite clever (an apparent murder, which...

Haven’t read one of these for years. This is an early book (1959) and surprisingly good. The story is beautifully constructed, as the...

This is totally different; a kind of 17th century 'Brokeback Mountain'. It is huge in scope, covering bloody bits of the civil war which...

This is extremely good, but long and hard work and I am not doing it justice. I am going to break the habit of this record and return to...

Merton is a very funny man, but not a great writer; the prose is pretty plodding, and the intersected jokes are mainly visual. I didn’t...

Another very short book, a Wallander novella, previously unpublished in the UK. Poor old Kurt looks at a house to buy but finds a couple...

This was a bit of a challenge as it is similar to this site. A book about the challenge he set himself to read 50 books, chosen I am not...

Paddy recommended this; I didn’t like it at first, but enjoyed it more and more as it progressed. It is a semi-fictionalised biography of...

Thriller with two parallel time lines; modern day Canada and the Highland land clearances in the mid 19th century. The two plot lines run...

If I have read Thomas Mann before, it was 'Death in Venice' 40 years ago. This, especially the first half, was a wonderfully stately...

Couldn’t get ‘The Man Without Qualities’ on a Kindle so this as a substitute. Typical German early 20th century expressionist (is this...