Sophie Hannah (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006); pbk £7.99. The overall premise of Little Face, one of Sophie Hannah’s first novels to feature her now well-known characters, Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer, is promising. New mother Alice Fancourt lets her daughter out of her sight for the first time in the three weeks since Florence’s birth. Read More
Andy McNab (Corgi, 2010); pbk £1.99. To say that Andy McNab’s book Last Night Another Soldier… is a quick read is to put it mildly. Short, sharp and to the point it most certainly is. If you are looking for literary or thought provoking prose, look elsewhere. If you are young, (probably) male and inspired Read More
What is it with teenage fiction these days that it seems not to shirk from addressing some the most pressing ethical problems of the day, and in highly imaginative ways? Their sheer thematic ambitiousness – the Holocaust, betrayal complicity and guilt, disability, violence, war, terrorism and even planetary consciousness – has led to crossover audiences; Read More
John Wagner, Alan Grant, Brian Bolland, Brent Ewins, Cliff Robinson, Robin Smith (Rebellion, 2012; pbk, £6.99) Judge Dredd: The Dark Judges, a collection of four stories featuring Judge Death and his “Lawmen of the Apocalypse” (Judges Fear, Fire and Mortis respectively), acts as the perfect sequel to 2012’s underrated (and unfortunately under viewed) DREDD 3D. Read More
Victoria Hyslop (Review, 2005); pbk £7.99. “At last-a beach book with a heart.” When I read this quotation from the Observer, my heart sank. I did not feel inclined to read, far less review, a novel in the holiday fiction genre. However, the extraordinary setting of a real-life twentieth-century leper colony makes The Island a Read More
(Ireland, 2013) 12 – 18 April, DCA Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s Good Vibrations is based on the real-life story of Terri Hooley (Richard Dormer). Hooley is described as “The Godfather of Belfast Punk”; the movie centres on his introduction to the punk rock scene during the Troubles in the 1970s. Hooley already has Read More
Tracy Chevalier (Harper, 2006); pbk £7.99. Girl with a Pearl Earring is a fictional narrative of the titular girl in Johannes Vermeer’s famous seventeenth century painting of the same name. Set in the Dutch city of Delft, the novel is beautifully written and well-researched, with vivid descriptions of the markets and streets of the city. Read More
In the opening pages of her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson makes clear that this is much more than a “re-make” ofOranges Are Not The Only Fruit, her earlier fictionalised account of similar territory. This memoir is much bleaker, darker and, in the end, more redemptive. It is about the Read More
Even those who have never read Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling tale will be familiar withTreasure Island to some degree. The story about parrot-adorned be-crutched villains, mutiny and buried treasure has become the quintessential pirate adventure from which many others have been informed. As one of a selection of twenty books chosen for the 2013 World Book Night event, Read More