'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Mick O'Shea
|title=Amy Winehouse: A Losing Game
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a sad book. Writing this review some five months after her death, now the immediate smoke has cleared, it is apparent from this book (as well as other general sources) that she was a gifted performer, with a jazz voice which could have qualified her for a lengthy career long after scores of aspiring X-Factor contestants had given up singing and opted for less glamorous, more steady careers. After all, her idols had been not only near-contemporaries like Michael Jackson and Missy Elliott, but also those of an earlier generation such as the classic 1960s girl groups, as well as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, with whom she was thrilled to record a duet four months before she died.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0859654826</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Brenna Yovanoff
|summary=At the age of five Almodis de la Marche was taken as a hostage - a guarantee of her family's good behaviour - and she remained there until she was of marriageable age. It was all the harder for Almodis as it meant that she was separated from her identical twin. The situation was not hostile although she didn't get on well with her foster mother, Agnes - and never would. Her first marriage was to Hugh of Lusignan and Almodis felt something akin to love for this gentle man, but the sexual relationship between the two was tenuous to say the least and Almodis was determined that she would create her own dynasty. At a time when marriages were put aside if they were not producing the required heirs, Almodis decided that she had to move on. Her next marriage - to Pons of Toulouse - would be more productive but far from happy.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907605053</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jennifer Johnston
|title=Shadowstory
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Polly grows up in an Anglo-Irish family in the years following World War II. Her father died in the war. Her mother sends her off to spend school holidays with her grandparents at Kildarragh, a great house in the countryside, far away from Dublin.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755383478</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dave Shelton
|title=A Boy and a Bear in a Boat
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=''A boy and a bear go to sea, equipped with a suitcase, a comic book and ukulele. They are only travelling a short distance and it really shouldn't take too long. But then their boat encounters "unforeseeable anomalies"... Faced with turbulent stormy seas, a terrifying sea monster and the rank remains of The Very Last Sandwich, the odds soon become pitted against our unlikely heroes.''
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0385618964</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn
|title=Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia. a Father and Son's Story
|rating=4.5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=In February 2002 Patrick Cockburn was in Kabul, reporting to The Independent on the fall of the Taliban. While he was there he called his wife Jan at home in England, and was shocked to learn that their 20-year-old elder son Henry had been rescued by fishermen after coming close to death while swimming, fully clothed, in the icy waters of the Newhaven estuary. The police had decided that he was a danger to himself, and he was now in a mental hospital.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847377033</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
|title=The Little Book Of Perfumes
|rating=5
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary=I have always admired people who seem to know about scent, those whose dressing tables are littered with bottles none of which flaunt the name of a major (or increasingly, minor) celebrity. Some of the bottles might be works of art in themselves, but the general understanding is that they’ve been bought not for their vessels, nor for their exclusive advertising campaigns, special offers or celeb endorsement, but for their evocative scent. Perfumery is clearly an art and a science and if your skills aren’t as honed as they might be, this is a wonderful little book to sink your teeth into as you’re guided through the field by two people very much in the know.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846685192</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Barnes
|title=Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed: an introduction to birdsong
|rating=4
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=
One of my best-ever auditory memories is waking up in a tent to a dawn chorus, sung in the middle of Ireland in spring. It was a high-decibel effort and seemed to involve hundreds of birds. I'm ashamed to say that I couldn't begin to identify the multitude of species I heard that morning. So I suppose I chose this book expecting it to be a field guide that could at long last help me get a handle on birdsong. But it isn't yet another handbook, but a much more interesting book than that, which I thought would make a great present for a new birdwatcher.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907595473</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Adele Geras, Anne Fine, Henrietta Branford, Jacqueline Wilson, Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman, Tony Mitton, Alan Garner, Berlie Doherty, Gillian Cross, Kit Wright, Michael Morpurgo, Susan Gates and Linda Newbery
|title=Magic Beans
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=I was attracted to this book because it features stories from [[:Category:Jacqueline Wilson|Jacqueline Wilson]], [[:Category:Philip Pullman|Philip Pullman]], [[:Category:Michael Morpurgo|Michael Morpurgo]], [[:Category:Alan Garner|Alan Garner]] and many other prominent children's writers. I thought it might make a great Christmas or birthday present (and it would). There's a selection of stories from traditional sources such as Hans Christian Andersen, and Aesop, and I imagine that the authors were inveigled into writing for publisher David Fickling with a free choice of original stories. So don't expect a collection or compendium, but rather an anthology of tales that have entranced and inspired these writers in their own childhoods – magic beans indeed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857560433</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Neil Monnery
|title=Safe As Houses? A Historical Analysis of Property Prices
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=Neil Monnery was asked to become a trustee of a local charity with most of its assets in local residential property. Over the years this had yielded good results and the charity was concerned as to whether or not they should continue on the same basis or diversify and Monnery said that he would look into this. That discussion was the genesis for this book as he began to research the history of house prices – in the UK and elsewhere – for as far back as he could go to establish whether or not house were, well, as safe as houses.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907994017</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Steve Backshall
|title=Predators
|rating=4
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=Many readers would probably know that on the simple count of humans they helped to dispatch, mosquitoes may be the most deadly animals ever. But did you know that if you take into account the success rate of hunts, diversity and spread, ladybirds are more successful predators than tigers?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444004174</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Lammy
|title=Out of the Ashes: Britain After the Riots
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Just about everyone in the country was shocked as pictures of the 2011 riots (which began in Tottenham and spread to other major cities in the UK) unfolded on our television screens. Everyone, that is, except David Lammy, MP for the area. He might not have known when it would happen or what would trigger the riot, but a year before, he said that it would happen. This wasn't a lucky guess: Lammy was born in Tottenham and brought up on the Broadwater Farm Estate as one of five children raised by his single-parent mother and he knows what's happening on the ground.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0852652674</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Fabrice Humbert
|title=The Origin of Violence
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Fabrice Humbert's French Orange Prize winning 'The Origin of Violence' has a young French teacher as a narrator who, while leading a school trip to Buchenwald concentration camp, sees a photograph of a Jewish prisoner taken in 1941 and is struck by the similarity in appearance of the man to his own father. However, he discovers that not only does the man in the photo have a different name to his, but the man died in 1942. Clearly there are dark family secrets afoot that he sets about discovering.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687500</amazonuk>
}}