Inventive, twisty thriller with dark academia vibes: The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz ★★★★½
Books about the writing world are catnip to me. Combine that with one of my favourite genres, the psychological thriller, and I am the perfect audience for this inventive, twisted story about success, creativity, and the limits of both. 30-year-old Alex has ‘risen up the…
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Intriguing and pacy family drama: The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell ★★★½
Lisa Jewell’s author note reads that she has always been adverse to writing sequels. I am also adverse to reading sequels – especially when I’m not sure I can remember what happened in part one (thank goodness for reviews for jogging my memory!) It turns out…
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Propulsive and unsettling literary suspense: Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka ★★★★½
The hours are ticking down until Ansel Packer’s execution. And as he awaits his grim fate – in passages ingeniously told in second-person present, making it impossible to look away – the story of how he comes to be sitting on death row in a Texas prison…
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Murder mystery in Oxford’s hallowed halls: The It Girl by Ruth Ware ★★★
I was very excited to receive an advanced copy of The It Girl. Ruth Ware is an auto-read author for me, and this one has dark academic vibes that I couldn’t wait to dive into. It’s the late noughties and Hannah has just started at…
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Privilege, envy, twists & turns in The Other Passenger by Louise Candlish ★★★½
If you were able to commute by riverboat, wouldn’t you? Gliding along the Thames with the wind whipping your hair, instead of crammed onto an airless tube hundreds of feet underground? It certainly sounds like the appealing option for Jamie, whose panic attack on the…
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Book review: page-turning and emotional thriller ‘Then She Was Gone’ by Lisa Jewell ★★★½
Ellie is about to sit her GCSE exams. Smart and kind and bubbly, she has her whole life ahead of her. So when she vanishes without a trace, it’s hard to agree with the police assessment – that she probably ran away from home. Her family…
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Book review: ‘Girl A’ by Abigail Dean – a transfixing story of rebuilding a life after horror ★★★★½
I almost stopped reading this book a few pages in. But I’m glad I didn’t.
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Book review: ‘The Heights’ by Louise Candlish, a slow-burn domestic noir about motherhood, retribution, and obsession ★★★★
How far would you go to protect your children? To what lengths would you pursue justice for anyone who did them harm? Ellen Saint is less than thrilled when her golden boy, Lucas, is matched as a ‘buddy’ at sixth form with Kieran, whose foster-home…
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Book review: ‘Verity’ by Colleen Hoover – a sinister thriller exploring the twisted mind of a writer ★★★★
Verity is an accomplished writer – at least she was. Lowen is a struggling writer facing eviction – at least until the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself. Verity is involved in a tragic accident that leaves her unable to complete her crime-thriller series, and…
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Book review: ‘Behind Her Eyes’ by Sarah Pinborough ★★
I think this book was a bit of a case of the sunk cost fallacy. It was long (was it? Or did it just feel that way. I’m not sure) but I kept going with it, thinking that all might be redeemed by some hair-raising…
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Book Review | Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson
It was time for a gear-shift around here, after the emotional upheaval of last week’s reading.
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4 upcoming releases I’m excited for
It’s a funny old time. Not much is known for certain – I’m finding it hard to think much beyond the next 2 months! But in this great age of uncertainty, I find it comforting to know that there are new book releases on the horizon…
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Book Review | Magpie by Elizabeth Day
28-year-old Marisa may not yet have reached thirty, but she’s keen to settle down and start a family. When Jake, a decade her senior, walks into her life, she feels that everything is falling into place as it should. They’ve only known each other a…
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Book Review | The Dinner Guest by B. P. Walter
Rachel, working a dead-end job at a garden centre, is mindlessly scrolling Instagram. And then she sees something which makes her sit up. She quits her job, ends her lease, and moves to London – intent on finding the family she saw in the photo. And as…
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Book Review | The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
“The facts, such as they were, were simple: Alicia was found alone with Gabriel’s body; only her fingerprints were on the gun. There was never any doubt she killed Gabriel. Why she killed him, on the other hand, remained a mystery.” Alicia Berenson has been…
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Book Review | The Truth Hurts by Rebecca Reid
Yesterday, hurricane Zeta knocked out the power across our state. I just about made my way through a work presentation in the morning, wedged into a corner of our living room, clinging to the 2 bars of signal and 25% left on my battery. By…
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Book Review | The Guest List by Lucy Foley
Jules and Will are set to be married on a secluded island off the Irish coast. For Jules, a magazine editor-in-chief, it is all about ‘creating the right optics.’ The problem is, reaching the island involves crossing choppy seas, miles from the mainland – and…
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Book Review | One by One by Ruth Ware
When you think that tech start-ups have come up with everything, in comes Snoop. Snoop is the brainchild of Topher St Clair-Bridges and Eva van den Berg – two millennials just as monied as their names would suggest. The concept: tune into whatever anyone else…
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Book Review | The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley
Ah, old friends. The sort with whom you can slip back into your old roles, share in-jokes, drink an irresponsible amount of alcohol and imagine yourself eighteen again. There’s something about those longstanding ties of friendship that keeps the characters at the heart of The…
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Book Review | The Body Lies by Jo Baker
A move from clamour of London to the idyll of a university town was the chance for a fresh start for our unnamed narrator. Having survived a sexual assault by a stranger, she was desperate to leave the city with her toddler son, Sammy, while…
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Book Review | Darling Rose Gold by Stephanie Wrobel
Rose Gold was a sick child. Wheelchair-bound, chronically underweight and unable to go to mainstream school because of a mysterious ‘chromosomal abnormality’. Of course, Rose Gold wasn’t actually sick. Her mother, driven by an obsession with control and misguided devotion, poisoned her daily until she…
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Book Review | The Vow by Debbie Howells
Here are all the elements of a stock psychological thriller: an eerie rural setting, a shady past, an unreliable narrator. And the premise is intriguing: a jilted woman, weeks before her wedding day – her fiancé missing, her a prime suspect. There is a clever…
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Book Review | The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
No one does creepy, claustrophobic settings quite like Ruth Ware. She has a way of describing places that gets under your skin, her knack for drawing a picture of a place and then confining her characters there, prison-like, as the story unfolds. The locale in…
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Book Review | When I Was Ten by Fiona Cummins
Catherine Allen has spent the best part of twenty years pretending the formative decade of her childhood didn’t exist. But when her sister goes on live TV, talking about how her parents – Dr and Mrs Carter – were brutality murdered with a pair of…
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Book Review | The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
Libby Jones has waited her whole life to find out who she is. Adopted as a newborn baby, she was found by police in her cot in a Chelsea mansion, while three dead bodies lay on the kitchen floor downstairs. Now 25, she receives a…
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Book Review | Those People by Louise Candlish
Lowland Way, a suburban London enclave, has earned itself a reputation. With ever-rising house prices and the invention of ‘play-out Sunday’, a no-cars rule designed to transform the urban street into a 1950’s child’s utopia, it’s a reputation they’ll go far to protect. But just…
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Book Review | Snap by Belinda Bauer
Jack, Joy and Merry wait anxiously in their mother’s car, stopped on the hard shoulder, in August 1998. The summer heat is stifling, and desperate for fresh air, 11-year old Jack gets out with his younger sisters, carrying baby Merry. The glaring sun beats down…
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Book Review | The Death of Mrs Westaway by Ruth Ware
Twenty-one-year-old Hal tells fortunes on Brighton pier. She ekes out an existence – just about enough to continue to pay the rent on the small seaside flat that she shared with her mother, who died three years ago. With no family or friends to speak…
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Book Review | All the Beautiful Lies by Peter Swanson
Harry Ackerson, the only child of Bill Ackerson, rushes home from college one fateful afternoon to the small coastal town in Maine where he grew up – to find himself an orphan. His father has plunged to his death on the path of his favourite…
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Book Review | The Light of the Fireflies by Paul Pen
A boy lives with his parents, brother, sister and grandmother in a basement underground. The only reprieve from the darkness and artificial electric light is an anaemic line of sunlight that feeds through the bars in one of the only windows in the basement. For…
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Book Review | Our House by Louise Candlish
Trinity Avenue is your typical suburban, leafy London street. Well, typical in the sense that the houses are worth several millions of pounds – one of the most coveted postcodes in the area. Properties on this street are gold dust; once you have one, you hang…
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Book Review | Our Kind of Cruelty by Araminta Hall
Mike loves Verity – V – more than anything. Since they met at university, they’ve been inseparable, and Mike can’t imagine life without her. Their relationship isn’t, perhaps, what you’d call conventional – one of their favourite pastimes is a game they play, called the Crave.…
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Book Review | The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
Anna Fox is a prisoner in her own home. Suffering with severe agoraphobia, she hasn’t left the Harlem brownstone for the best part of a year, and instead passes her days self-medicating on a diet of merlot and pills. Unable to exist in the real…
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Book Review | Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry
As she’s done a dozen times before, Nora takes the train out from London into the countryside town where her sister, Rachel, lives. Walking up the path to her secluded home, she opens the front door, ready to enjoy an evening of home-cooked food and…
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Book Review | The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware
Cruise ships have a certain eeriness about them. Stuck out in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from land, often in enclosed, windowless cabins, the ceaseless rhythm and roar of the water beneath you. But for journalist Lo Blacklock, a trip aboard the…
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Book Review | I Know Where She Is by S. B. Caves
“The hard work was already done, the difficult choices made. There was no going back now, she realised. It was all or nothing. Find Autumn or die trying.”
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Dear Amy by Helen Callaghan
‘I was trying, desperately, to keep a hold on my world – my job, my vanished husband and my column – but I was disconnecting. The ties to my ordinary life were loosening, snapping, and the dark world of Bethan Avery was becoming more real…
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My Sister’s Bones by Nuala Ellwood
“She is safe now. Free from her demons. Her final resting place is still and tranquil, a little watery pocket of calm…”
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Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant
“It was a wet day, one of those grey, drizzly London afternoons when the sky and the pavement and the rain-streaked buildings converge…”
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NOVELS AND TEACUPS 