A Review By Georgina Wilson

During the course of an evening sitting in overly-pretentious restaurant with his wife, brother and sister-in-law, Paul Lohman remembers moment by moment the events which led to his son and nephew committing a violent crime. Both Paul and his wife believe the other to be unaware of their son Michael’s actions, and we are challenged to come to some moral judgement about the family as they both strive to protect him from the repercussions.

At the same time we are allowed to delve in to Paul’s own past, where mental illness led him to his own acts of violence. Coming to the end of his tether as a history teacher, Paul challenges his students about whether the victims of violence should be held up and remembered as such, regardless of the possibility that they were, as he harshly suggests “rapists and murderers”. In turn we are forced to confront these moral dilemmas, and are kept thinking until the very end.

Overall a truly perceptive book portraying the subtle relationships within families. Highly recommended to be consumed in one sitting.

To Be Published August 2012.

A Review By Keith Smith

In summer 2010 Simon Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north, from Edale in the Peak District to Kirk Yetholm, the other side of the Scottish border. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born.

Travelling as a ‘modern troubadour’ without a penny in his pocket, he stopped along the way to give poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep. “Walking Home” describes this ordinary, yet in many ways extraordinary, journey.

It’s a story about Britain’s remote and overlooked interior – the wildness of its landscape and the generosity of the locals who sustained him on his journey. It’s about facing emotional and physical challenges, and sometimes overcoming them. It’s nature writing, but with people at its heart.

I read it one sunny Sunday afternoon (when other things beckoned) all in one sitting so hooked was I. It’s just a really lovely story, and like all good stories it has an ending that is totally unexpected. I also loved all the detail Simon put in about the difficulties of staying with people he didn’t know, and about the vagaries of author events…will anyone turn up, will anyone enjoy themselves?! The kind of book that restores faith in humanity and in our terrific countryside. Highly recommended. To be published in July.

A Review By Keith Smith

When Amber Hewerdine consults a hypnotherapist as a desperate last resort, she doesn’t expect that anything much will change. She doesn’t expect it to help with her chronic insomnia …She doesn’t expect to hear herself, under hypnosis, saying words that mean nothing to her: ‘Kind, cruel, kind of cruel’ – words she has seen somewhere before, if only she could remember where …She doesn’t expect to be arrested two hours later, as a result of having spoken those words out loud, in connection with the brutal murder of Katharine Allen, a woman she’s never heard of …A typical Sophie Hannah plot line - if there is such a thing - in that the very ordinary turns to the extraordinary in the blink of an eye. That’s what makes Sophie’s psychological thrillers so frightening, compulsive and multilayered.

A brilliant author, I did however find this one a bit of a struggle. Perhaps that goes with my late-night reading, and the difficulty each night of trying to regain charge of a difficult and ever-changing plot. It did just go on and on with a multifarious list of characters most of whom were difficult to empathise with. I felt it needed editing to be a bit tauter, less rambling. But does that type of editing go on these days? One wonders. My thoughts are born out by the mixed bag of reviews this particular novel has received. But that’s no reason to give up on Sophie Hannah…far from it. I await her next with interest.

A Review By Keith Smith

Set in and arround locations in Warwickshire you’ll know, (surely enough of an enticement to read this book), you’ll also take to the characters and be gripped by the plot. Everything you’ll want then in a psychological thriller…………. ‘The Sick Rose’ tells the intertwining tales of Paul who wants to escape the life of petty crime he has fallen into due to his background, and Louisa older and wiser but with a dark secret of her own which she tries to forget in her unceasing labours restoring the Elizabethan garden of a tumbledown mansion near Kenilworth.

A tender relationship develops between them, and Louisa starts to believe she can recover what she thought she had lost and start to live a little again, but Paul’s previous entanglements catch up with them both and bind them into a tightening knot. The story or stories are told partly in the present and partly in flashbacks – an author’s trick which very often can be very irritating, but not here where it adds to the sense of unfolding drama and leaves plenty of occasions for cliffhangers which keep your interest going to the last. The style is direct rather than literary, but this suits the genre as it does Sophie Hannah and Nicci French. If you like those now well-established authors, you’ll like Erin.

‘Can books conduct electricity?’ ‘My children are just climbing your bookshelves: that’s ok…isn’t it?’ A John Cleese Twitter question ['What is your pet peeve?'], first sparked the “Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops” blog, which grew over three years into one bookseller’s collection of ridiculous conversations on the shop floor. From ‘Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?’ to the hunt for a paperback which could forecast the next year’s weather; and from ‘I’ve forgotten my glasses, please read me the first chapter’ to ‘Excuse me…is this book edible?’ This full-length collection illustrated by the Brothers McLeod also includes top ‘Weird Things’ from bookshops around the world.