'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Andre Dubus III
|title=Townie: A Memoir
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=The book opens with Andre and his father taking a jog. Seems a normal and natural activity - what's to write about here, you could be asking. Well, I'll tell you. By this time the father no longer lives in the family home, the mother is struggling to pay the bills and to put food on the table - and the author, Andre is too embarrassed to admit to his father that he doesn't own a pair of jogging shoes. He's borrowed his sister's even although they're about two sizes too small, he's in agony seconds into the jog but is he going to own up? Nope. Bloody feet and pain are a by-product of precious time with his father. So straight away, I'm getting the gist of the book and the relationship between father and son.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393064662</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=Gilbert and Sullivan were the Rice and Lloyd Webber of the late Victorian era. Some might regard their work as slightly dated these days, especially the satirical lyrics which were so much a product of their time, but their appeal has never really faded and it surely never will.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752455893</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alison Bruce
|title=The Siren
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=I recently read and reviewed Bruce's [[The Calling by Alison Bruce|The Calling]] and thoroughly enjoyed it so I was hoping that this book would be equally good. The location is once again Cambridge. Two young women hastily meet up after hearing a local news item. A male body has been discovered in a gruesome and sorry state and has sent the two women into a right old flap. Although both are now in steady relationships and Kimberly is a mum, they obviously share a shady past together. 'It was a joke between them: Kimberly gets them both into trouble, Rachel gets them out.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849016070</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Caryl Hart and Leigh Hodgkinson
|title=Don't Put Your Pants on Your Head, Fred
|rating=5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=This is a gem of a book. Fred just can't get to grips with his underwear; pants and vests alike, it's taking him most of the day to get dressed and it's going to take much more than his sister's endless advice to help. Caryl Hart and Leigh Hodgkinson have made a great job of turning what is just a nice premise into a brilliant book. Though some might suggest that pants have been overdone in the world of picture books, I think I could find a few thousand five year olds who would disagree.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408309165</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kevin Mitchell
|title=Jacobs Beach: The Mob, the Garden, and the Golden Age of Boxing
|rating=5
|genre=Sport
|summary=Despite not being a particular fan of the sport of boxing, Kevin Mitchell's compelling knowledge of the personalities involved in the fight game in the 20th century, coupled with a staccato writing style which got my attention quickly and kept it to the very last page, meant this book actually rose far above my expectations.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224075098</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Cynthia Hand
|title=Unearthly
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Clara wants what ordinary teenagers want: friends, good school grades, a boyfriend. Only Clara isn't an ordinary teenager – she's part angel. She's fluent in all languages, naturally gifted academically and in sports. All the good stuff comes with a price, but even that's not so bad. Clara has a Purpose, an angelic calling, to save a mysterious boy from a forest fire, revealed to her in a series of visions that can strike any time of day or night.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405259647</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=S J Watson
|title=Before I Go To Sleep
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Rather ironically, 'Before I Go To Sleep' is not a book that you will forget in a hurry. Imagine, if you will, waking up every morning with no memory of who you are, where you are, or who the person lying next to you in bed is. You can remember things during the day, but once you go to sleep, your mind is effectively wiped clean. This is the slightly unusual form of amnesia that the narrator, Christine suffers from in Watson's first novel that is a daring and gripping literary thriller.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857520172</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ira Levin
|title=The Stepford Wives
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary='It can't be a coincidence that Stepford women are all the way they are' says Bobbie, Joanna Eberhart's only friend in Stepford. Joanna has recently come to live in the idyllic suburban town of Stepford with her husband and two children. She is an independent woman with her own part-time career as a photographer, is intelligent, liberated and has a keen interest in feminism.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849015899</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Bob Hartman and Krisztina Kallai Nagy
|title=The Lion Storyteller Book of Animal Tales
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=If you want to know how the turkey got its spots, or what advice was given by a lion, or even why the tortoise has no hair, then this is the book for you. It holds a collection of thirty six enchanting stories that will answer these questions and many many more. There are well known fables from Ancient Greece such as The Fox and The Crow and The Boastful Toad, and many other traditional tales from countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Peurto Rico, Syria and India to mention just a few. As you would expect, with tales from so many different parts of the world, there is great variety within this collection which also enables children to read about many different cultures, beliefs and ways of life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0745961312</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Steven Connor
|title=Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things
|rating=4
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=...In which our author considers the smaller, less noticeable items in our lives. He finds such objects as sticky tape, combs and keys magical, because "we can do whatever we like to things, but magical things are things that we allow and expect to do things back to us. Magical things all do more, and mean more than they might be supposed to." Principally these are the little flotsam that wash up on our desks, the handy things we keep in our pockets and about our person, and never think about - wave about, flick about, fiddle with, but never think about.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846682703</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Summer Wood
|title=Wrecker
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=I found the book title intriguing and wondered if I'd got caught up in some demolition yard story by mistake. Wood, at some stage in the book does give her readers the explanation. It's a boy's name apparently and the detailed explanation is rather charming - and apt. But it's also just a tad over-the-top (in terms of credibility I'm thinking) and by the time I'd finished the book I was heartily sick of this name which had short-term appeal for me. I was muttering to myself saying silly things like - why can't he be called Billy, for example. But I'm not writing the book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408809311</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eli Pariser
|title=The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You
|rating=4.5
|genre=Business and Finance
|summary=In a world where websites are increasingly personalised, and your Facebook profile seems to pop up left, right and centre on sites you're visiting for the first time, there's a rapidly shrinking amount of webpages where your experience is the same as the next person's. Having always ignored Google's targetted adverts, I naively thought the actual search results produced by the site were one of the few places where I'd see the same thing as a random user in, say, Australia did. Eli Pariser shatters this myth immediately in his book as he tells us about the fifty-seven signals Google uses to build on the company's knowledge of us and choose which
results to show us.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>067092038X</amazonuk>
}}