Reviews and Comments

Ben Hinshaw: Exactly What You Mean (2022, Penguin Books, Limited)

Beautiful, complex, absorbing

This is an extraordinary novel, a series of short stories linked in wonderfully inventive and intricate ways. The reader is taken through the decades, seeing choices and consequences. Betrayal, passion, love, tenacity, brittleness, and love... Everything is underpinned by that.

I loved this book. It absorbed me into different times and worlds, and left deep impressions in a number of ways.

Isabella Tree, Eric Schlosser: Wilding (2019, New York Review Books)

This a blow by blow and month by month account of how a well-managed, but …

A beautiful and inspiring book

I loved this book. Taking as the starting point an unsustainable agri-business model that will be familiar to anyone who follows 'contemporary' British agriculture practice, the book charts the progress of a farm towards a nature-friendly destination.

The writing is quite beautiful in its description of nature, in hundreds of different ways. The passion of the author clearly shines through, and I hope that other land owners have been inspired as a result.

I finished this book on a trip to the Abergavenny area, like much of Wales over-grazed and an ecosystem desert. There is so much for us to learn and appreciate from nature, and this book has been an amazing insight into possibility.

Shari Lapena: Not a Happy Family (2021, Transworld Publishers Limited)

Another enjoyable page-turner

I can't help but enjoy these sorts of book. Not challenging but interesting and amusing. Good for when you just need some light escapism.

reviewed Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Children of Time, #2)

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Ruin (Paperback, 2020, Pan Macmillan)

The astonishing sequel to Children of Time, the award-winning novel of humanity’s battle for survival …

Complex, entertaining and fascinating

It's not an idle read, but the concepts are intriguing and there is plenty of humour in the writing. A worthy successor to Children of Time

Peter james: Looking Good Dead (Paperback, Macmillan)

Ludicrous plot, energetically written

I don't mind a suspension of reality for many different types of novel, but for a crime novel the central premise has to be self consistent. Not for this novel; but it careens along on a reasonably entertaining track.

Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone: This is How You Lose the Time War (Paperback, 2019, Jo Fletcher Books)

Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange …

Beautifully written and inventive; but not my cuppa

For all this book's beautiful, poetic narrative, and hugely imaginative premise, I couldn't engage with it fully. I was too impatient for the plot, and I had to make myself read it rather than jump eagerly in for the next installment.