The good, the bad and the bookish

Rule has concentrated on cosmetic surgeon Anthony Pignataro here, but has also collected a series of vignettes about other (primarily sadist...

Bo and Prosper, a pair of orphaned brothers, fleeing to Venice, the Italian city their late mother loved. Their uncaring aunt only wants the...

Essentially a collection of cutesy animal depictions, this "saccharine mouthful of super cute" (the subtitle) is witty and amusing...

Sharon Plunkett looks the way she sounds - flat, dispirited, and a fat (UK) size 18 - 20. Her job at an advertising agency, surrounded all d...

Twelve year old Lois Bates is miserable - her dad died of a mysterious (to her) illness when she was five and her mum's now remarrying a...

Lorna's so deep in debt her power's been cut off, but the Bruno Magli sling backs she just bought are worth it. Helene sublimates th...

A teenager is marked as a fledgling vampire and sent off to a school where she will learn what it is to be an adult vampire-if she survives ...

Promising young archaeologist Callie Dunbrook is on what could be the dig of her career - a pre-Neanderthal site discovered during preparati...

Twelve year old Amir has known Hassan all his life - the son of his father's lifelong servant, Hassan is Hazara, a second-class citizen....

British author and journalist Poole's thesis is that, "in the tradition of Orwell", the use of weasel words – words and phras...

Paul Bradley's having a little trouble navigating his way around Edinburgh - he hadn't factored in the festival and ensuing crowds. ...

This collection of updated information refuting commonly accepted beliefs about history ranges across a variety of events and periods, from ...

In this autobiography, subtitled A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper , Cody (better known as the writer of the film Juno ) honestly d...

NHS physician Goldacre writes a column for The Guardian about bad science, and maintains a website on the same topic. Bad Science the boo...

This somewhat fictionalised diary account of Pemberton’s first year of medical practice conveys a strong and clear picture of the unexpected...

Although her marriage, to a man she still loves, is ending, something in Emma Watson’s life is going right – she’s finally going to particip...

This is for Lynn, devotee of the sport. For those of you unaware of EI, it began in Leicester just over a decade ago. Ironists combine “the ...

Juno and her half-French husband Manny fit into their Chester neighbourhood perfectly – Juno is able to effortlessly whip up a gourmet meal ...

Teenagers looking for thrills get more than they bargained for when an exclusive party turns out to be a vampire feast and they are on the m...

Published in 1998, Gay Erotica gathers short stories from the previous fifteen years, with the intention of incorporating a broad cross sec...

Cassie Palmer’s not your usual twenty-something – she’s clairvoyant, can talk to ghosts, and was raised by vampires. Well, until she discove...

Dave Gorman is well known, at least among oddballs like me, for his two previous books based on carrying through with apparently ridiculous ...

Paksenarrion Dorthansdottir told her father she didn't want to marry but he promised a dowry to a the family of a neighbouring farmer no...

Stephen Fry's fiction is like the man himself, at least as he appears to the casual-but-interested observer - wry, amusing, quintessenti...

Archer is best known for his earliest work ( Kane and Abel was a deserved best seller) and for his imprisonment on perjury charges. This is...