Alexander McCall Smith is a prolific author of fiction and academic texts, and he is best known as the writer of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. His latest release, A Distant View of Everything, is the eleventh in a series of novels known as the “Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries”. Like the Jessica Fletcher character Read More
Sylvia Patterson’s I’m Not with the Band describes a three-decade long love affair with music. The esteemed journalist’s turbulent life is set against the highs and eventual lows of pop music and the media business she worked in. Her writing, like her first job in music journalism, magazine Smash Hits, mixes silly anecdotes (the favoured Read More
The Secret Chord in the title of Geraldine Brooks’s latest publication about the life of David is the same Secret Chord celebrated in songwriter Leonard Cohen’s very successful song, Hallelujah, the first lines of which read: “I heard there was a Secret Chord That David played and it pleased the Lord” In tackling the telling Read More
“Then using the dead as step-stools, I climbed out of the ground.” The protagonist of Sara Nović’s debut novel Girl at War is the beautifully-drawn tomboy narrator, Ana, who would be six years older than Nović herself. Unquestionably, this book’s research has not all been done from a library seat. In a search for more Read More
