The good, the bad and the bookish

Anonymous Lawyer is a hiring partner at a large, prestigious law firm. Despite his partnership, spacious home, sound marriage, and children ...

I know, I only read the first Weather Warden book a short time ago, and vowed to hold off buying more. But I am weak and, like all dieters, ...

On-air talent Isabel Murphy is starting to go places. She’s reported on Grammy Awards, hurricanes, the crash of TWA flight 800, President Cl...

A young wizard, apprenticed to an ineffectual master, teaches himself advanced magic. When a powerful wizard humiliates him, he summons a dj...

Iris Lockhart’s life is far from straight-forward – she has a business to run, a tightrope act to negotiate with her married lover, a compli...

Seventeen-year-old Jasmine (Jas to her friends) is tall, flat chested, attracts bizarre happenings, and - much to the distress of her protec...

I loved A Maiden’s Grave , the first of Deaver’s novels I read, and since then he’s been one of my buy-on-sight authors. Due to my (theoreti...

This is yet another Amazon-recommended book that I found locally. I do hate when a computer-generated program is able to accurately match my...

I found this slender hardback on a remainder table not too long, and have been dipping into the learned J. Burnside Esquire’s “field notes f...

Tom Hurst is delighted to be offered a position as junior tutor (Transgression and Pathology) at the world’s premier college for fictional d...

As you can by the labels, in general I tend to stay away from Literature in favour of plot and accessibility. However, as I am not immune to...

CF Wong is a feng shui master writing “Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom”, an inspirational guide to life based on the teaching of past sage...

Araminta Humble, better known as Minty, is preoccupied by the mysterious door she’s discovered in the lane – it looks ordinary enough but it...

I really need to be more careful when I decide to delete a draft version, because on this occasion I managed to delete a completed review sa...

This is the final of the Magic trilogy, which once again employs a triptych of perspectives from Reason, Tom and Jay-Tee. The problem with t...

An avian Watership Down , One for Sorrow tells of Birddom, a land where birds once lived in harmony with one another, governed by the Coun...

Subtitled Philosophy Behind the Headlines , this book by British philosopher (and relatively prolific author) Baggini attempts to explain bo...

The second book in the Magic trilogy continues Reason's story. Despite her flight from her grandmother, and from the discovery that she...

The only interesting about 17 year old Ginny Blackstone is her eccentric aunt – several months ago her phone stopped working: she’d moved to...

Subtitled From the Inner Mind to Outer Limits , this comprehensive collection has gathered quotes from 1851 (the first use of the term ‘scie...

The first in a trilogy (reviews of the rest of the series will follow shortly), Magic or Madness tells the story of Australian teen Reason C...

I was attracted to this book both because it was on the three-for-two table at Borders and because of its subtitle: my year of cooking dange...

Sark has a unique style in all her books – they are joyful, brightly coloured, hand written rather than set with a font, simply illustrated,...

Despite my determination to no longer buy trade paperback-sized books, with some authors the wait is just too long. I was going to keep The ...

This book sat on my shelves for a while as I waited to be in the right intellectual head space to tackle it. Finally I picked it up not beca...

As is evident from this blog, I generally read populist fiction rather than Literature, and despite the commercial success of Tyler ( The Ac...

Subtitled Short stories about teenagers making tough choices , this ten-year-old collection includes some of the best YA writers then around...

A family lets a house for the summer in an idyllic seaside town not knowing it is supposed to be haunted. Soon the daughter starts to hear s...

Every week Guardian writer Crase composes a 500-word-or-less summary of the book that has garnered the most media attention, written in the...

Lynn and I share a taste for ‘freak’ books, so titled because of both their content and the contribution to the field by the work of the apt...