Book Review: We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2011
Whenever a film is made of a book I cringe a little. I have very seldom seen a film that is as good as, let alone better than, the original book. I have taken to avoiding film adaptations of books, and whenever a new movie in this genre appears I resolutely look away, or in [...]
continue readingBook review: Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
Posted on Saturday, November 26th, 2011
Esi Edugyan is a renowned Canadian author of Ghanaian descent. Her newest novel Half-Blood Blues was published earlier this year and has found itself on the short lists of many celebrated awards from the Man Booker Prize to the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and it walked away with one of Canada’s leading literary [...]
continue readingBook review: We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen
Posted on Friday, January 28th, 2011
The author and political commentator Carsten Jensen hails from the Danish town of Marstal, in the South of Funen Archipelago, and it’s the people of this coastal town, and their relationship to the sea, that forms the central thread of the novel.
continue readingBook review: Before the Frost by Henning Mankell
Posted on Sunday, December 12th, 2010
Henning Mankell has been busy lately writing about the recent Swedish election and experimenting with new thriller formulas such as his latest novel, The Man from Beijing.
continue readingAdvance review copy: Selected Shorts and Other Methods of Time Travel
Posted on Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
“To Travel in Time”! What does it mean? And how does it feel? We all wonder about it and consider it to be impossible. But is it really impossible to experience it?
continue readingBook review: Broken by Karin Fossum
Posted on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010
Karin Fossum’s Broken is blessed with weird locations, insightful art knowledge and a fantastic heroin addict personality. On the downside, the main character, Alvar Eide, is a tad dull and the plot is thin.
continue readingBook review: Roseanna, A Martin Beck Police Mystery
Posted on Friday, November 19th, 2010
Written in 1965, this is the first of ten novels centred around the Swedish detective inspector Martin Beck. But don’t let the date put you off: the book has aged beautifully, the writing still feels fresh, and the finish stays with you long after turning the last page – it’s like a good quality claret.
continue readingBook Review: The Snowman by Jo Nesbo
Posted on Monday, November 1st, 2010
The book is the fifth in the Harry Hole detective series to be translated into English. Jo Nesbo (50) is a Norwegian novelist and musician who is fast becoming one of the bigger names in the competitive and crowded marketplace for Scandinavian crime fiction.
continue readingBook review: The Pawn by Steven James
Posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
In today’s book review we are talking about The Pawn, a book written by Steven James. The pawn is a Psychological thriller and the first of a planned trilogy, called ‘The Patrick Bowers Files’. Special Agent Patrick Bowers is the main character in this book. He’s an FBI agent specialized in environmental criminology, tracking lawbreakers [...]
continue readingBook review: Freedom, a novel by Jonathan Franzen
Posted on Saturday, September 11th, 2010
Starred Review from Publishers Weekly – Nine years after winning the National Book Award, Franzen’s The Corrections consistently appears on “Best of the Decade” lists and continues to enjoy a popularity that borders on the epochal, so much so that the first question facing Franzen’s feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own [...]
continue reading