|summary=Denver, who was extremely rich, lived in Berton Manor. He was so rich that he was able to employ a chauffeur, a cook and some gardeners. When he invited friends to dinner he was able to employ more people to serve all of the food. This was very good for the village of Berton as he was paying the people who live there. Not only that, he always did his shopping in Berton, presented prizes at the local school and, at Christmas, dressed up as Santa and handed out presents. It seems quite obvious that many people in the village were able to benefit from his wealth.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849393893</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Frances Hardinge
|title=A Face Like Glass
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=It would be hard to imagine any book by Frances Hardinge being anything but excellent. She has a knack for creating bizarre characters whose actions, somehow, make sense because they live in utterly fantastic but well-structured worlds. If you then add to the mix, as she does, a determined and thoroughly endearing young heroine for whom you simply have to stand up and cheer, then you are guaranteed a pleasurable and thought-provoking read.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230748791</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lou Kuenzler
|title=Shrinking Violet
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Violet is very excited. She has finally grown sufficiently to be eligible for a scary ride called Plunger at her family's local theme park. She persuades her parents to take her there, accompanied reluctantly by her teenage sister... then, just as they are about to get on the ride, the fulfillment of Violet's dreams, she starts to shrink. And finds herself staring face-to-face with a worm.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407130048</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Henning Mankell
|title=The White Lioness (Kurt Wallander)
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Louise Akerblom was a young housewife, a mother, pillar of the local Methodist church and an estate agent. It was the last which would cause Kurt Wallander to investigate her disappearance and which would gradually bring to light a chain of events which led back to South Africa, to renegade members of the South African Secret Service and an ex-KGB agent who would do ''anything'' to live in South Africa. What they have in common is a determination to halt Nelson Mandela's rise to power even if the result is a blood bath. It didn't seem quite so complex on that Friday afternoon in 1992 but it would be one of Wallander's most complex cases and one which could cost him very dearly.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099571692</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=A F Harrold
|title=Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away from the Circus (and Joined the Library)
|rating=3.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=The number of times the fictional cliche of the boy who ran away to the circus has been used are beyond count. Here though is the boy who appears, from his clown mother and strongman father's point of view, to have run away FROM the circus. The truth, of course, is more unusual. In trying to return a dropped library book, Fizz gets enamoured of the opportunity at his local branch, but this captivation leads to a captivity of a more physical kind...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408830035</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Andrew Martin
|title=Underground Overground: A Passenger's History of the Tube
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Although he was born in Yorkshire, Andrew Martin has long been enthralled by the London Underground. His father worked on British Rail, and Andrew himself therefore had free travel on the system as well as a Privilege Pass which entitled him to free first-class train travel on the national rail network. Having lived in London for twenty-five years, commuting to various newspaper offices in his employment as a journalist, a job which has included writing a regular magazine column, Tube Talk, he is well qualified to write this entertaining and enlightening social history of the world's most famous underground railway.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846684773</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=A C Gaughen
|title=Scarlet
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Everyone knows the story of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. But what if they weren't all men? What if Will Scarlet, the violent youngster who can throw a knife with the same accuracy as Robin shoots a bow, was a girl?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408819767</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kitty Aldridge
|title=A Trick I Learned from Dead Men
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Kitty Aldridge's ''A Trick I Learned from Dead Men'' is a touchingly written, quirky story set in the world of funeral homes. The narrator is twenty-something Lee Hart. He's not the sharpest tool in the box, but his life has been tough. His father left when he was young and his mother has recently died of cancer leaving him, his step-father, a sofa-bound television make-over show addict and his deaf and wayward younger brother, Ned to fend for themselves. Lee lands a job as a trainee at the local funeral home helping Derek prepare the dead for burial or cremation. Far from being a dead end job though, it is here that he learns, ironically, about life and love, in the form of the delivery girl from the local florists.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224096435</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Quinn, Eloisa James and Connie Brockway
|title=The Lady Most Likely
|rating=3
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Hugh, the Earl of Briarly, has acknowledged his mortality after a nasty accident, and has decided to take a wife. Not being a very sociable person - he likes horses better than people - he asks his married sister Carolyn to produce a list of eligible young ladies. She does so, and then invites them and various other friends to a house party.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>074995776X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roland Vernon
|title=The Good Wife's Castle
|rating=5
|genre=Crime
|summary=We start with a father's suicide, a child watching as he steps of the chair in the milking room with the noose around his neck. A father who died for shame.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552775533</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Green
|title=Bringing the Summer
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Freya is returning home from a summer spent with her grandparents, ready to start her A levels. The train she is travelling on stops suddenly and Freya is horrified when she realises that a girl has committed suicide on the line. A sense of obligation leads her to attend the girl's funeral. There, she meets Gabes, a gorgeous boy who goes to her college. Freya is instantly attracted, not just by Gabes, but by his whole, slightly bohemian, family, so different to her own. But there's also a more dangerous attraction. Theo, Gabes's older brother, makes his own interest in Freya very apparent. Theo is very different from Gabes - unpredictable, dark, wild.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408819589</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jill Abramson
|title=The Puppy Diaries: Living with a Dog Named Scout
|rating=4
|genre=Pets
|summary=Jill Abramson had a dog whom she adored - a White West Highland by the name of Buddy - and after his death she wasn't certain that she wanted another dog. Would she bond with the newcomer? Would she always be comparing the pup with his predecessor? But - times change - and in 2009 Jill and her husband Henry brought home a Golden Retriever by the name of Scout. Over the following year Abramson wrote a column about raising Scout for the New York Times website and it's this column which forms the basis for 'The Puppy Diaries: Living With a Dog Named Scout'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444720635</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gill Lewis
|title=White Dolphin
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Things aren't going too well for Kara. She's mocked at school for her dyslexia. Her father is struggling to find work and they're cooped up living with judgemental Auntie Bev. And, worse of all, Mum is not around. A marine biologist, she disappeared on an expedition along with several of her colleagues and no bodies were ever found. Kara clings on determinedly to her belief that her mother will return some day, much to the frustration of everyone around her, and her only solace is sailing in her father's boat, Moana.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192756222</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Lukens
|title=Going Too Far
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Adults of a certain age remember a time when kids were respectful when you met them in the street. They certainly didn't answer you back, skateboard on the pavements and take drugs, so the idea of electing a sheriff - the man in overall charge of the police in a town - who pledged to get tough on these kids appealed to them. In fact, what's not to like about the idea? It takes crime off the streets, makes the town a safer place and it must be better that kids are taught to obey the law. Common sense, when you think about, isn't it? Well, there is another side to the story. What if these kids are just having a bit of innocent fun in an area that was little more than a traffic island? What if the drug taking is hardly serious? What if one of the kids dies?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>B007TX65UK</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alasdair Wickham
|title=The Black Book of Modern Myths: True Stories of the Unexplained
|rating=3
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=A collection of 'Modern Myths' from around the world, Wickham's Black Book covers a wide range of phenomenon, from ghosts to liminal creatures, poltergeists to demons. As an aficionado of all things paranormal, this should have been right up my street. However, I found myself struggling to get into it, and putting it down for something else on more than one occasion.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099533626</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sinead Moriarty
|title=Me and My Sisters
|rating=5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Louise, Sophie and Julie. Three women. Three sisters. One a successful business woman. One a successful trophy wife. One a successful mother of four. All of them seem to the others to have it all. All of them have more troubles than the others could ever imagine.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241950589</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Bond
|title=Paddington Races Ahead
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Far be it from me to suggest that a bear we all know and love is cashing in on the London Olympics AND the Jubilee, but here he is on the front of a rather splendid book, racing along - and waving a Union Jack. He's a bear of good intentions, but somehow they seem to get him into difficult situations which are always of his own making. There was the matter of the shaving cream which it ''should'' have been possible to get back into the tube - and for something which cleans it shouldn't make such a mess. We won't even discuss why the London bus had to be evacuated or what happened when Paddington was mistaken for a Peruvian hurdler.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007458843</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maria Goodin
|title=Nutmeg
|rating=4.5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Meg was rather underdone when she was born. Her mother ate lots of eggs during pregnancy, in the hope of giving her a good glaze, but instead she came out clucking like a chicken, and was fortuitously caught in a frying pan by the gas man...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908248246</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Charlotte Rogan
|title=The Lifeboat
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Charlotte Rogan's debut novel ''The Lifeboat'' takes an unexpected look at life on a lifeboat of a sunken liner, midway between the sinking of the ''Titanic'' and the ''Lusitania''. In many ways, a lifeboat presents an ideal situation for a novelist. You have a set number of characters and clear boundaries. But there's only so much interest in 'we were scared' and 'oh, look here comes another big wave'. Her solution is to take the story as one of moral and ethical choices rather than an out and out adventure. As her narrator, Grace Winter, concludes 'it was not the sea that was cruel, but the people'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844087522</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Zoya Pirzad
|title=Things We Left Unsaid
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Life in Iran is good for Armenian Clarice Ayvazian. She lives comfortably in an oil company town, devoting her middle class life to her engineer husband, teenage son and young twin daughters. Her mother and sister, Alice, drop in from time to time during the course of the day, but are perfectly manageable for her (in small doses). However, when an elderly woman, her middle-aged son and his tween-age daughter move in across the road they bring turmoil in their wake and Clarice's perception of her happiness is torn apart.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1851689257</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Daniel Stashower
|title=The Harry Houdini Mysteries: The Dime Museum Murders
|rating=4
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=There are two things you need to know about Stashower's Harry Houdini. Firstly, he is a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes. Secondly, and much more importantly, he is utterly certain of his own ability to do whatever he sets his mind to. Therefore, when he finds himself involved, albeit in a minor way, in a murder, he immediately decides it is up to him to solve the case. It never occurs to him that he might fail, because that is simply not an option for the Great Houdini.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857682849</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mark Haddon
|title=The Red House
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Richard and Angela - brother and sister - are reunited at their mother's funeral. Richard is well-to-do and recently remarried with a teenage stepdaughter. Angela is the main breadwinner in her family as her husband scrapes a wage by working in Waterstones and somehow they and their three children get by. Richard is aware that he hasn't much left in the way of family and tries to build some bridges with Angela by way of offering that the eight of them should have a week's holiday in a cottage on the Welsh borders. So, there's four adults, four children and a lot of emotional baggage. Oh, and there's Karen - Angela's stillborn daughter who would have been eighteen that week.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224096400</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Grant
|title=Fear
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Darkness is falling in the FAYZ. The dome that isolates the children from the outside world is turning black, and Sam, Astrid and the rest know that this could be the worst thing yet to happen to them. I'm leaving the plot summary there, because it deserves to be read with as few spoilers as possible.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>140525761X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Satoshi Kitamura
|title=Pot-San's Tabletop Tales
|rating=3.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=We love all things Japanese in our house having visited the country a few times and come home laden with books and movies and general cute knick-knacks galore! So I was excited to read this story to my little girl all about Pot-san, a teapot, and his other tabletop friends who have lots of adventures together!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849393788</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lissa Evans
|title=Big Change for Stuart
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=In Stuart's [[Small Change for Stuart by Lissa Evans|previous adventure]] we saw him discovering his Uncle's magical secrets. Now that Tony Horten's tricks have been found, Stuart is able to investigate how they actually work. During these investigations he discovers that they are rather more magical than you might initially think, but the magic of each item lasts for only one adventure each...will Stuart and April be able to uncover all of the secrets of the tricks and discover who their rightful owner is?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>038561828X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ian Bremmer
|title=Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World
|rating=4
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=We're all used to terms like 'G7' which then became the 'G8' - the group of countries which met periodically to thrash out global problems - frequently with America being expected to take the lead where military muscle or finance was concerned. We even nod knowingly at the mention of the G20 - formed with the good intention that a larger group would be able to tackle such issues as climate change. We know where good intentions generally lead but there wasn't even sufficient agreement amongst the nations to all head off in the same direction. So when a point was reached where America was no longer financially able or politically willing to play global policeman what was left?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670921041</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Knud Romer and John Mason (translator)
|title=Nothing But Fear
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Danish writer/actor Knud Romer has a gallery of fascinating relatives which collectively feature in ''Nothing But Fear''. This biographical novel is a collection of memories from his grandparents' era, moving forward, to that of his parents, including World War II and his own childhood in 1960s and 70s small town Denmark. The vignettes aren't in chronological order but that's because memories normally aren't. The stories are narrated almost as if they're fresh from the mind, ensuring a natural flow. The interesting thing is that no matter how fascinating his other relatives are my mind's eye always seemed to return to one: his mother, Hildegard.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687144</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lucy Robinson
|title=The Greatest Love Story of All Time
|rating=2.5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=It was the blurb on this one that had me interested, mentioning Fran’s 30th birthday (mine’s a few months away) and the fact she’s bluffed her way into a very posh job (something some might say I’ve just done too). I thought we might be kindred spirits and even if we weren’t, I thought I might be signing up for some fun, flirty chick lit which is never a bad thing.
Until now.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241952980</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=H L Dennis
|title=Secret Breakers: The Power of Three
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=The back cover of this book says it is the 'Da Vinci Code for kids' and that's not a bad description. Secret messages, codes, helter-skelter journeys to well-known places, and baddies lurking round every corner . . . plenty of action and adventure, mixed in with generous dollops of facts and information which will definitely appeal to readers who enjoy having their brains challenged as well as their imaginations. The legend of King Arthur, the house where the famous Enigma code was cracked and a fabulous sea-side building created for a prince are only a few of the clues the three teenagers will encounter on their journey towards the truth.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340999616</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gwendoline Riley
|title=Opposed Positions
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=There is a reason why Gwendoline Riley has something of a cult following. She is technically innovative and very good at what she does, but the subject matter is invariably dark and downbeat which prevents mass market appeal. In that respect Opposed Positions is very much business as usual then. The subject matter most evident here is misogyny and the damaging impact it has both directly and indirectly on people. It's painful to read at times; it feels as if the narrator, an occasional novelist, Aislinn Kelly, is picking at the scab of her life and her family in a way that feels shocking and, for all the wry observations, remains uncomfortable to read.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224094238</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Aidan Chambers
|title=Dying to Know You
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Karl is seventeen and hopelessly caught in the throes of first love. The object of his affections is Fiorella, a girl who seems above him so many ways. Fiorella's family is both healthy and wealthy, while Karl's father is dead and his mother gets by but not much more. Fiorella is a bright girl on her way to university, while Karl is dyslexic and has left school to work as a blue collar apprentice plumber. Fiorella is articulate, while Karl is reserved.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0370332369</amazonuk>
}}
