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{{newreview
|author=Alex Woolf
|title=Chronosphere: Time Out of Time
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=It's the 22nd Century, and finally the ideal gap year is available. Before being forced into a career prescribed him by his big society, Raffi buys his way into the Chronosphere, whereby his body will live in stasis for one minute in general time, while passing a year of sunny hedonism, with sports, shopping, girls and partying in a perfect idyll of mod-cons. But of course all is not well in paradise. His peers have a habit of vanishing without trace, and who knows? - even his newly-found friends may have something to do with it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907184554</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Emma Henderson
|summary=''The Times'' says on the front cover that Bennett is 'clearly a writer to watch' so I had high hopes for this novel. We meet two of the central characters, American policeman Garvey and Englishman Hayes. Garvey's working cv is straightforward enough - he carries out police work, some of which is pretty grisly. But what about Hayes? He appears to be all things to all men but at the end of the day well, he's 'The Company Man' which gives the book its title. And so a complex scenario starts to unravel ...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841497924</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Anthony Bateman and Jeff Hill (Editors)
|title=The Cambridge Companion to Cricket
|rating=4.5
|genre=Sport
|summary=Cricket has an international reach which can be rivaled by few other team sports, and this book looks at the history of the game going from England around the world to the other major Test-playing nations. While it's packed full of initially rather dauntingly dense prose, none of the 17 chapters are particularly long – most weighing in at a little under 20 pages – and the writing styles of all of the various authors are very accessible.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0521167876</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Justin Richards
|title=The School of Night: Creeping Terror
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=When a boy and his father enter a village asking for directions, the unexpected happens. They find all the inhabitants observing a WWII blackout, and thinking it's 1943. But it's definitely 2011. Luckily the lad belongs to the School of Night, an arcane institute of ghost-hunters where merely talking to the shade of your dead sister could come across as a fail. It will still take a lot of pluck and smarts from staff and students to solve the problem of the ghost village of Templeton, and the evil barriers surrounding it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571245099</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Charles Lamb
|title=Great Food: A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig and Other Essays
|rating=4
|genre=Cookery
|summary=''A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig'' is a collection of food-related essays from the early 19th century, with a humorous bent. They're but a few pages each - a light read to bring a smile to your face, then on to the next little foodie treat.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951003</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Jo Verity
|title=Not Funny Not Clever
|rating=4.5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Elizabeth was rather looking forward to her trip to Cardiff. She and Diane hadn't got together for a really good chat for a long time and with Laurence being away on a cookery course in France it seemed like the ideal opportunity to take advantage of Diane's invitation. She had visions of girly chats – if you can still have girly chats at nearly fifty. But her plans were going to be disrupted. Her son blessed her with his partner's teenage son 'for a few days in an emergency' and she had no option but to take Jordan in – and then to take him to Cardiff with her.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906784248</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Justine Kilkerr
|title=Advice for Strays
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=If you have ever fancied a grown up version of [[The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr|The Tiger who came to Tea]], the cover of this Vintage edition should hook you into reading Justine Kilkerr's first novel. Here sits a sad and patient-looking lion, and the female figure beside him, hidden by an umbrella, has that same vulnerable look of mother and child in Judith Kerr's classic children's picture book. At first this seems like a ridiculous connection, but thinking about it later I'm struck with the analogy, not to mention the similarity in authors' names.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099535262</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Patricia Leitch
|title=Jinny at Finmory: The Summer Riders
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=On the first day of the summer holidays Jinny was looking forward to riding her horse, a beautiful Arab mare called Shantih, over the moors for the summer and life seems just about perfect when she meets a girl of her own age who's camping on the beach with her family and her pony. What could spoil that? Well, Jinny's father used to be a probation officer and he's agreed to take a boy and a girl from the city to give them a holiday for a couple of weeks. The boy has been in trouble with the police for stealing and the girl walks with a limp. Just having them around is going to be bad enough, but there's worse to come.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846471125</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Heather Gudenkauf
|title=These Things Hidden
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Golden girl Allison Glenn was living the perfect teenage life until she was imprisoned for a monstrous crime. Now she's twenty-one and has been released from prison to live in a halfway house. Allison is keen to put the past behind her, but when she returns to her home town of Linden Falls she soon discovers that no one has forgotten her crime, least of all her parents and her little sister, Brynn.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>077830437X</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=John Burnside
|title=The Summer of Drowning
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The story is narrated in the first person by the daughter a decade or so after the tragedy. So, she has a healthy dose of hindsight which shows itself time and time again with sentiments such as ... if only I'd have known back then ... and ...I thought it was a bit strange at the time ... if you get my drift. Burnside takes his time to set the scene (spartan) and his characters (a mere handful). His chosen location is the arresting emptiness of somewhere deep in the Arctic Circle so straight away he's caught my imagination - with his.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022406178X</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Esmahan Aykol and Ruth Whitehouse (translator)
|title=Kati Hirschel Murder Mystery: Hotel Bosphorus
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Kati has a lot to impart to her readers. She burbles on right throughout the book about all sorts of things which are on her mind. So we learn about her colleagues, friends and neighbours which all gives a nice hint of the Turkish way of life. As a German national, Kati can stand back and take a cool look at all things Turkish. But does she like what she sees all of the time? She soon tells us. She's not slow to highlight stereotypical German traits - the lack of humour, the discipline etc which can be at odds with Kati now living amongst the more laid-back Turks. We also find out that the locals are passionate about the telephone and mobile phones in particular. Forever glued to an ear apparently. So much so that she thinks 'Alexander Graham Bell must have had Turkish genes.' She also likes to go on and on about the terrible parking in Istanbul informing us that 'It takes thirty minutes to get from home to the shop, on foot or by car. I go by car.' I particularly liked that line.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904738680</amazonuk>
}}
 
 
{{newreview
|author=Ali Sparkes
|title=Unleashed : A Life and Death Job
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=A new series about what happens when Britain's most important and secret assets - teenagers with paranormal abilities - get a week's holiday. In book one, Lisa gets involved with kidnapping and assassination attempts. And she only wanted to go shopping at Harvey Nicks!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192756060</amazonuk>
}}