A marriage of inconvenience: The Bride Stone, by Sally Gardner, reviewed
His capricious father’s will leaves a young English doctor needing to find a wife within two days and seven hours of his return home from revolutionary France
Who’s deceiving whom?: The Art of the Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, reviewed
A struggling widow hooks up with a serial confidence trickster in a novel as witty and ruthlessness as its Georgian setting
Rather in the lurch: Small Bomb at Dimperley, by Lissa Evans, reviewed
In 1945, a dilapidated Tudor manor risks being demolished – unless an impoverished evacuee with a gift for organisation can galvanise its despairing owner
Tabloid fever
A tabloid journalist desperate for a scoop pursues a young Irish mother whose daughter is rumoured to have killed a child. But is there any truth in the story?
Addicted to love
Ruth, the narrator of Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, is both the child of a single mother and a single mother…
Life and death decisions
Thanks to the Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan is probably the only Tasmanian novelist British readers are likely to have heard…
The house on the Heath
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
Run for your life
Lydia and Luca are hiding in the shower room of their home while 16 members of her family are murdered.…
As Lyra grows up, Philip Pullman’s materials grow darker
Two years after Philip Pullman published La Belle Sauvage, the prequel to His Dark Materials trilogy, we have its long-awaited…
My agonising vigil over my twins’ fight for life
Memoirs about giving birth, a subject once shrouded in mystery, have become so popular that another may seem otiose. We…
