The subject of the several women in the life of Charles Dickens might at first glance seem an unusual theme to build a biography around, but this fairly brief but penetrating book serves its purpose well. The author’s foreword begins by telling us that Dickens was a man who 'craved a love so unconditional that the yearning was unlikely to be satisfied in this world, a man in thrall to a vision of a womanhood so idealized that it was incompatible with everyday domesticity'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1441107207</amazonuk>
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{{newreview
|author=Luke Harding
|title=Mafia State
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=
Luke Harding set himself a difficult task when he took up his post as the Guardian’s main man in Moscow. He had already put his name to a front page story which appeared in the Guardian in April 2007. This was an account of an interview with the arch-oligarch and Kremlin critic, Boris Berezovsky. Harding was not at the interview but added background to the article from Moscow. However, to be in any way associated with Berezovsky was sufficient to incur the wrath of the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB – the successor to the KGB. The offending account was entitled, 'I am plotting a new Russian revolution - London exile Berezovsky says force necessary to bring down President Putin'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>085265247X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mary Norton
|title=The Borrowers: The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=
Most people will be aware of the story of the Borrowers. First published in 1952, it has been dramatised several times, most recently as Arrietty, the beautiful Studio Ghibli animated film. A little girl called Kate is told a story by an elderly lady, Mrs May, who lodges with her parents. Her brother was sent as a small boy to stay with an elderly great-aunt in a large house near Leighton Buzzard, a market town in the Home Counties. He is recovering from a serious illness. The house is an ideal place for the Clock family, tiny people who survive by 'borrowing' from humans (even their names - Pod, Homily and Arrietty - sound as though they're repurposed from human names. However, the boy spots Arrietty, and this leads to disaster for the Borrowers.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444005812</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ian Ridley
|title=There's A Golden Sky: How 20 years of the Premier League has changed football forever
|rating=5
|genre=Sport
|summary=Twenty years ago the Premier League was founded, changing English football irreversibly. Also 20 years ago, journalist Ian Ridley wrote the classic ''Season In The Cold'', a snapshot of the game at the time. Since then, clubs have risen and fallen, players have become legends, and Ridley himself has become chairman of not one but two non-league clubs – first Weymouth, from 2003-2004 (and again briefly in 2009) and more recently St Albans City. In this stunning follow-up to Season In The Cold, Ridley explore the effect that the changes in the sport have had at all levels.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408130408</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kerry Jamieson
|title=The Forgotten Lies
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In the mid-thirties, the golden age of Hollywood, three aspiring starlets shared a studio house on Lantana Drive as they waited to hear if they were going to have a career in the movies – or not. Charlotte (soon to be Carlie for acting purposes), Verbena, known to her friends (and ''only'' her friends) as Bee and Ivy were desperate for the role of a lifetime, which would put their name in lights. There was an added appeal. Whoever won would star opposite Liam Malone – good looking, charismatic and ''very'' married with six children. It wasn't just a case of being able to act. Their lives would be under intense scrutiny.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141026049</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ed Vulliamy
|title=Amexica: War Along the Borderline
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=More than 38,000 people have been killed in the last 3 years in what Ed Vulliamy argues is an unacknowledged war, on the long border (2,100 miles) between Mexico and the United States. The war is between drug trafficking gangs over control of the lucrative drugs trade from Mexico to the US. In this compelling and disturbing work of reportage Vulliamy travels through the borderlands meeting some of the people affected.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099546566</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Conny Braam
|title=The Cocaine Salesman
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Picture a world of hellish exclusion, nightmarish noise and images, and horrid violence. Picture one person trying to live through the sleepless nights, the isolation among his peers, the permanent sense of dreadful threat. Picture him needing drugs. His best friend might even be called Charlie. But don't picture an inner city slum, 2012, but a man on the front in World War One.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907822054</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jennifer Hayashi Danns and Leveque Sandrine
|title=Stripped: The Bare Reality of Lap Dancing
|rating=3
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Before I can start, I should qualify that I have never been, nor tried to be, a lapdancer. Nor have I ever gone to a lapdancing club, nor ever tried to. I have no opinion on the matter, save that I can't imagine, in the world of free internet porn, paying some averagely attractive woman to wiggle her semi-nudity in the general direction of my face, and thinking it erotically arousing. So I come to this academically-designed volume on the matter with no prejudice. If only that were the case with the creators.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905570325</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James McKnight and Mark Chambers
|title=Only Nooglebooglers Glow in the Dark
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Farmer and Mrs McDoogle are throwing a party for all their friends and for the people who visit the farm throughout the year. The barn has been decorated, Mrs McDoogle has prepared plenty of food and one of the monsters, Diggle, is acting as DJ and playing all of their favourite music. Soon the guests and some of the better behaved monsters start arriving. However, just as the party is getting into full swing, calamity strikes with the music stopping and all the lights going out. The machine that turns poo from the gogglynippers into electricity has broken down.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849564515</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bruce Duffy
|title=Disaster was my God
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The life of Arthur Rimbaud must be one of the most outrageous in literary history, more scandalous than Wilde, more self-destructive than Malcolm Lowery, Rimbaud was the boy poet and iconoclast who took on the literary establishment at end of the nineteenth century and won. So Duffy's fictional account, based closely around the actual facts of Rimbaud's life, was bound to be an exciting and furious, and he doesn't disappoint. This is a difficult book to put down.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846685273</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Helen Dunmore
|title=The Ingo Chronicles: Stormswept
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Morveren and her twin sister Jenna live with their parents in an isolated community on an island off the coast of Cornwall. A causeway leads to the mainland at low tide but at high tide they are cut off. Music is intrinsic to the islanders and Morveren's little brother Digory has a special talent for playing the violin. One day, he will play the special violin of island legend, but for now, Conan's fiddle sits high on a shelf waiting for him.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007424922</amazonuk>
}}