'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Kali Stileman
|title=Peely Wally
|rating=3.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=When Peely Wally lays an egg, she's so excited that she jumps up and down. Oh no! The egg rolls out of the branch and lands on Jemima Giraffe! Her egg rolls from animal to animal on an amazing adventure, until finally the egg makes it safely home again.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849410828</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sean Carroll
|summary=Scarcity and Frontiers is an ambitious, fascinating book that examines how the world's economies have developed by exploiting natural resources. Throughout history, states have responded to natural resource scarcity by developing new frontiers, hence the title. The book begins with the development of agriculture along the banks of the Nile and runs right through to the present day, finally questioning whether we are entering a new era of natural resource scarcity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0521701651</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kim Edwards
|title=The Lake of Dreams
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The book opens with a lovely and intriguing sentence - 'My name is Lucy Jarrett and before I knew about the girl in the window ... I found myself living in a village near the sea in Japan.' Who could fail to be drawn into a story after reading that, I thought. I was hooked immediately. Edwards gives us a fleeting taste of life in Japan, particularly the importance (almost reverence) of nature and gardens, public and private. This sets the tone for the novel which is captivating and interesting, but put together beautifully, unhurried.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0142428396</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lindsey Barraclough
|title=Long Lankin
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Long Lankin is a folk ballad about a bogeyman that lives on the edge of society in wild, desolate places and preys upon children. In this story, he lives out in East Anglia in the marshes outside the village of Bryers Guerdon. It's post-war Britain and when Cora's mother suffers a breakdown, she and her younger sister Mimi are sent to stay with their Auntie Ida in the manor house there. They don't know it - Auntie Ida does, though - but Long Lankin is attracted to young children.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0370331966</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nikesh Shukla
|title=Coconut Unlimited
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It is the early 1990's and Amit, Anand and Nishant are three young Asian boys in an all white private school. As such they are considered massively uncool by default. Too bad then that their Asian peers in the North London Gujarati enclave known as Harrow think that they are a bunch of stuck up toffs. Soft. Weak. No street cred whatsoever. Worst of all they are labelled as 'Coconuts' (brown on the outside, white on the inside). There's only one thing for it - start a hip-hop band. The fact that they don't have any songs, talent or initially any idea what hip-hop actually sounds like isn't really a problem. As everyone knows, forming a band makes you 'pretty cool' and after that the girls simply fall at your feet.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0704372045</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=M C Beaton
|title=Hamish Macbeth: Death of a Sweep
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Back in the mid-1990s, despite the encroachment of satellite and cable, Sunday evenings still seemed to be a time to sit down to watch the Beeb or ITV with the family for a dose of gentle viewing. "Drama" is too strong a word for the programmes that aired in that prime time slot (somewhere between 7pm and 9pm). Technically, they ''were'' dramas – but they were laced with humour, protected from over-exposure to violence or sex or the truly dark underbelly of the stories they actually told.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849010218</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ian McEwan
|title=Solar
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ian McEwan's Michael Beard is possibly the most ignoble Nobel prize winner there has ever been. He's gloriously obnoxious and hateful in almost every way. Since winning his Nobel prize he has rested on his Nobel laurels and has traded on his reputation rather than his achievements in his specialist area of physics. When this book starts, he's on his fifth wife having managed to wreck all previous marriages by his compulsive infidelity. He's short, balding, ageing, obese, bigoted, and something of an opportunist, particularly if it means he can be lazy and get away with something. In short, which he is, he's morally vacant. But what makes Beard an effective creation, and what carries us along with him despite his obnoxiousness, is that he knows all these things about himself. He's rather like Shakespeare's Richard III - he's honest with the reader and himself about what he is doing. Sure he would like to change, but talking about it isn't doing it, is it?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099549026</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jane Moore
|title=Love is on the Air
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary='Love is on the Air' is all about trying to find the perfect relationship. Cam knows that things are not right with her boyfriend Dean but after six years together, she is afraid to do anything about it. They are behaving like an old married couple and they are not even married. Therefore, when she goes on holiday with friends Saira and Ella, she is somewhat vulnerable and so it is no surprise that she is attracted to fun loving single dad Tom. After a few drinks one thing leads to another but the next day Cam is racked with guilt. She resolves to forget about Tom and to make more effort in her relationship with Dean.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099505533</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Yangzom Brauen and Katy Darbyshire
|title=Across Many Mountains: Three Daughters of Tibet
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Fleeing your home can never be easy but when you are six, your only shoes are roughly hand-sewn and stuffed with hay, and your route is over the world's highest mountain range then it must be particularly challenging. This was the journey that Yangzom Brauen's mother took with her parents when they fled Tibet after the Chinese invasion of 1959. They were leaving behind all that they knew and travelling to India in the hope that they could find sanctuary in the country where the Dalai Lama was in exile. 'Across Many Mountains' is their story.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184655344X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Janet Mullany
|title=Mr Bishop and the Actress
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Strait-laced Harry Bishop has just started his new job as steward in Lord Shad's ramshackle household when he is sent off to London to sort out Shad's errant relation Charlie and his debts. Here he meets actress Sophie Wallace, Charlie's mistress, who now finds herself set adrift from her protector with only a few dresses and a rather ostentatious bed to her name.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755347811</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Vatsyayana
|title=Kama Sutra
|rating=4
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=''Kama Sutra'', then... What could I possibly say to introduce it that you don't already know or think you know?
For all that Kama Sutra is, it's no longer a guide to the art of pleasure. It's a fascinating historical document, and undoubtedly influential, but it's very much of its time and of its society. Try to follow all its suggestions and at best you'd never get laid again; at worst, you'll be up on a rape charge within a week. (''After sending the nurse's daughter away, he takes the girl's maidenhead while she is alone, asleep and out of her senses...'')
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846141095</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Felicity Everett
|title=The Story of Us
|rating=4
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Back in 1982 there were five girls sharing a house in Brighton. Their course works takes second place to demos, parties and no-strings sex for Stella, Bridget, Vinnie, Maxine and Nell but it's against the background of Greenham Common and the miners' strike that the girls realise that life is not quite as straight forward as they imagined. They will forge friendships in Albacore Street which might occasionally be stretched to the limit, but they'll never be completely forgotten. Having met them back in the eighties we meet them again two decades later when they're struggling to cope with all that life throws at them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099553694</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sara Sheridan
|title=Secret of the Sands
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=It's the summer of the year 1883. William Wilberforce, hero of the anti-slavery movement is enjoying a gentleman's life in London. But, far away in Abyssinia, things are far from rosy for the local people. The situation facing them is ugly and very dangerous - slavers (what a horrible word) are in the area and with the stark sentence 'It takes only seven minutes to capture almost everyone' we get the picture, loud and clear. Sheridan wastes no time in giving her readers the heart-wrenching details: the elderly are separated and treated with very little dignity (they're almost worthless, not worth the bother of transportation), the fit and healthy are singled out and lastly, the young are segregated. They are 'prized' most of all. And into this latter category falls a pretty 17 year old girl called Zena. She is spirited. She will not show any fear. She thinks for a split second of running but is intelligent enough to know that she'd be beaten severely for her sheer insubordination and probably even killed on the spot. But behind her expressive eyes she is thinking and plotting ...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847561993</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robert Arley and Marisa Lewis
|title=Big Big Secrets
|rating=3.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=When Jake's science experiment goes wrong he isn't faced with a room full of bad-smelling chemicals and a D grade as most students would be - instead he discovers that he has shrunk his teacher to the size of a Barbie doll! His friend, Annie, gets roped in to help him take care of his newly miniaturised teacher, keeping it a secret and trying, desperately, to find a way to reverse the process...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0954540263</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Bedford and Rosalind Beardshaw
|title=Mole's Babies
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Morris the mole is about to become a first time dad. Excited and eager to be a good parent he goes looking around the farmyard to see the best way to make his babies happy. He tries to hop like a bunny, splash like a duck, and flap like a bird, but each attempt fails and Morris becomes worried about how he will ever manage to make his little babies happy.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405254181</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Holly Webb
|title=Rose and the Silver Ghost
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=This is the fourth volume in the ''Rose'' series, and its blend of magic, peril and excitement has proved a winning formula. Rose herself is a delightful character, combining the down-to-earth, practical qualities one would hope for in a housemaid with growing magical powers and a mysterious past. In this story, she discovers there may be a way to find out what happened to her mother a decade before, but her path is, as usual, fraught with danger and thrills.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408304503</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kate Brian
|title=Private: The Book of Spells
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Following in her older sister's footsteps after May's return from the exclusive Billings School for Girls to marry the handsome George Thackery III, Eliza Williams is expecting that everyone at the school will remember her sister with affection. But Theresa Billings – as powerful as her name suggests – clearly wasn't a great friend of May's, and Eliza must navigate the rivalries and friendships of school as she tries to settle in. Then the girls find a spell book, and bond over frivolous magic as they help each other and embarrass people they dislike. What could possibly go wrong?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857071297</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Cat Clarke
|title=Entangled
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=The story starts on day three of Grace's imprisonment by a kidnapper. She's been given pen and paper to explain her recent actions, including falling in love with her boyfriend Nat, the ups and downs of her friendship with Sal, her self-harming, and her attempted suicide. As we learn more and more about Grace's life, the one thing we're never quite sure of is where the mysterious Ethan, her
kidnapper, fits into things…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849163944</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alexander Gordon Smith
|title=Furnace: Execution
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=And so to the end. Alex and his closest friends have escaped the Furnace Penitentiary, that mile-deep hell-hole cum nightmare scientific experiment writ large. He's arisen to find the country in tatters, as the nasty creatures born there are in charge and decimating the population. There is only one thing to do - kill the man responsible. And Alex, eight feet tall, with an obsidian blade for an arm and muscles upon his muscles, will still face his hardest battle yet.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571259405</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lesley Fairfield
|title=Tyranny
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=As Tyranny shakes her - ''I '''TOLD''' you not to eat! You are '''TOO''' fat!'' - Anna thinks back. She used to take joy in life. She used to dream of a bright future - a career, boyfriends, children - but it all went wrong when she hit puberty. She wasn't keen on on the curves of her new, more womanly body. When she looked in the mirror, she didn't see an hourglass figure developing; she saw fat and flab. Deaf to the warnings of her parents and her boyfriend, she listened to Tyranny and entered into the desperate, downward cycle of anorexia.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1406331139</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tim Murgatroyd
|title=Breaking Bamboo
|rating=3
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Summer 1266, Nancheng in Central China and Doctor Shih is struggling to cope with the monsoon season, when he gets a midnight summons to Peacock Hill: ancient palace complex and now home to the Pacification Commissioner, his wife, concubines and various officials and hangers on. Wang Ting-bo's only son and heir is apparently dying and all the great and good of the medical guild are unable to save him. They recommend the employment of magicians in the hope of driving out the evil spirits.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905802382</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jaye Wells
|title=Sabina Kane: Green-Eyed Demon
|rating=4
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=Sabina Kane is on a mission. Her evil grandmother Lavinia, Alpha Domina of the whole vampire race, has kidnapped her twin sister from beneath Sabina's nose, and Sabina isn't about to let her get away with it. Not this time. Sabina knows time is short if she's to rescue Maisie alive and put an end to Lavinia once and for all, but before she can storm in and kick ass, she has to find her. And that's no easy task.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841497584</amazonuk>
}}