Fiction

The Garden of Evening Mists

Bring up the Bodies

In Bring up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s much anticipated follow-up to the multi-award winning Wolf Hall (2009), we explore one of the most unsettling episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn. As the author points out in a note at the end of the book, however, this new novel is not about the Read More

Huracan

Diana McCaulay’s new novel, Huracan, tells the story of her Jamaican homeland through three separate narratives, two of them historical and the third set – more or less – in the present day. The primary narrative is that of Leigh McCaulay, who returns to modern day Jamaica after the death of her mother. Alienated as Read More

Ghosts

Families and familial relations are where feelings such as love, desire, anger, hurt, anguish, betrayal, guilt, frustration not infrequently reach a tipping point. The bonds that bind parents, children, siblings are so overdetermined that it often becomes impossible to think and see clearly, and even more so when their circumstances are infused with tragedy. Family Read More

Brighton Belle

Given that it boasts a chic, Glenlivet-supping heroine ostensibly named after one of the architects of the post-war British welfare state, it is not surprising that Sara Sheridan’s Brighton Belle is difficult to pin down in any satisfactory way. Sheridan’s new period mystery, the first of the Mirabelle Bevan series, demonstrates that the boundaries between Read More