BOOKLOVES

An enticing double mystery with paranormal elements set in the New England summer Loretta Marion’s Haunted Bluffs series of standalone mystery novels set on Cape Cod is now in its third instalment with Legacy Of The Bluffs. It extends a warm welcome to first time readers and a real pleasure to returning fans. Cassandra Mitchell […]

New town, new school, new powers. Learning to navigate two worlds is the least of Ellie’s problems in this thrilling YA sci-fi. Settling into a new school is stressful enough. 15-year-old Ellie does not need the added pressure of glowing hands.  Ellie is used to starting afresh. With a dad in the military, she’s done […]

The briefing room has seen murder boards, autopsy photos and serial killers’ letters. This afternoon it gets a lasagna and a slideshow. Cassie’s grandmother has commandeered the screen to present her case: exhibit one is a ball of dough two FBI agents kneaded together at Thanksgiving, exhibit two is a red onion sliced down the […]

A fourteen-year-old boy escapes the claustrophobic 1960s Midwest in pursuit of the unfettered American Dream and a wider selection of footwear in this impressive literary novel. Henry Cato knows his Mother’s love well. He knows the sting of her switch, the slam of her cellar door, and her generous words of vitriol and admonishments. Governed […]

Kafkaesque and self-referential, this sophisticated collection of short fiction hits home hard. In The Museum Of Lost Things, Dennis Pahl shows interest in both straight realism and the unconventional, surprising, and fantastic. An academic who has previously published on nineteenth-century American literature, Pahl brings heaps of knowledge to bear in shaping his own fictional situations. […]

An inspiring memoir about surviving what you can’t control and choosing yourself anyway What does it mean to choose yourself when so much of your life has been decided for you? Michael Grayson’s Blades of Resurrection explores this question of autonomy through a story that was forcefully shaped by poverty, childhood trauma, neurodivergence, addiction, grief, […]

Stranded between history and myth, a young man must fight for survival in a strange land in this dreamlike historical fantasy. There’s nothing like a good survival story. Strip away the comforts of civilization, maroon a character in an unforgiving wilderness, ensure there is an abundance of potentially deadly flora and fauna, and the essentials […]

A four-year-old named Esme sits on the bottom stair, tugging on a pair of Frozen wellies, while her grandmother fetches a carrier bag of kitchen scraps. They walk out past thatched cottages to a farm on the edge of the village, sing a song from Mary Poppins, and tip the scraps into a pen of […]

Sixty years after her father died, Judi Dench went back to the house in York where she grew up, and found it covered in scaffolding. A builder waved, knocked on the door, and the owners invited her in. Up the narrow stairs, past the half-landing lavatory with the same door it had in her childhood, […]