Filling her days has become a problem, so when a series of grisly murders begins, Catherine is drawn to the mystery of the Man of Crows in a way that seems bound to change her life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951399</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Katy Darby
|title=The Whores' Asylum
|rating=3.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=The Whores’ Asylum, a debut novel, is a tale of friendship, love, sin and criminality set in late 19th century Cambridge and Oxford. The comparison to one of my favourite historical novelists, Sarah Waters, also caught my attention. Sadly, I was a little bit disappointed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905490801</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eric Orsenna
|title=The Indies Enterprise
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=As soon as you pick up a novel about Columbus's discovery of the Americas, certain expectations come to mind. Orsenna however is much more than your average writer and he manages to subvert almost all of these by delivering a quiet, scholarly account of what seems at first a diversion, the art of map making. But this book is not about Columbus himself, but rather his brother Bartholomew, and how he is swept into the excitement and ambition of his older sibling.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906598932</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael J Sullivan
|title=Rise of Empire
|rating=4.5
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=''Rise of Empire'', the second volume in The Riyria Revelations, starts a year after [[Theft of Swords by Michael J Sullivan|Theft of Swords]] finished. The Imperialist forces are encamped across the river from Melengar, biding their time before they rout and capture Alric’s kingdom. However, it’s ok as Princess Arista has a plan. She will send Hadrian Blackwater and Royce Melborn to enlist the help of the nationalists. Oh, and Arista wants to go too... and Hadrian is getting fed up with an adventurer’s life and wants to retire... and Gwen, Royce’s girlfriend, has had a premonition of death surrounding the enterprise... so what could possibly go wrong?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0356501078</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Brodi Ashton
|title=Everneath
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=When I got this book I was dubious and it took me a while to work myself up to starting it. Once I did I devoured it. Wow. This book blew me away – original, suspenseful and captivating. It follows Nikki Beckett, who six months ago followed an Immortal called Cole into the Underworld, Everneath, where for a century she was his battery, feeding him life. Most humans after a century of having their lives sucked away are nothing but shells of their former selves, but not Nikki. After waking from the feed she decides to leave the Everneath to go back to the surface, to her family and to Jack, her boyfriend.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857074571</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Helen Schulman
|title=This Beautiful Life
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Richard and Liz are new in town which is always a bummer, except this town is Manhattan so really nothing else could ever compare. They’ve only moved from upstate New York but it seems a world away now. Liz has given up her post at the university to concentrate on kids Coco and Jake and is finding juggling their social lives a full time job in itself but is just about making a space for herself among the other mothers at the school gates. Things are going ok. And then, one day, their nice, comfortable world starts to crumble. Jake receives an explicit email from a classmate and in disbelief, forwards it straight on to a friend. Except rather than coming back to him with advice on what the heck to do next, the friend chooses to send it on to another friend, who does the same. Round and round it goes, round the school, round the city, round the online world. Everyone knows where it came from and soon Jake’s academic future, his father’s career and his whole family’s social standing are hanging in the balance.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857896237</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kes Gray and Mary McQuillan
|title=Pedro The Penguin (Get Well Friends)
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=It is a beautiful Polar morning. The sun is shining, the icebergs are glistening, and Pedro decides to start the day with an early morning swim! He gets ready to dive in, tucks in his tummy, point his beak to the sky, and dives high, high, high into the air. But oh dear. He forgot to break the ice before diving in! CRUNCH! But don't worry, with a little help from Nurse Nibbles and his Get Well Friends, he'll soon be feeling better.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444900226</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kes Gray and Mary McQuillan
|title=Zoe the Zebra (Get Well Friends)
|rating=3
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=It was a beautiful day in Africa. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and all the zebras were peacefully eating their lunch. All except for Zoe who is so busy looking out for big, scary animals that she isn't looking where she is going and trips up over a teeny-tiny tortoise! However, Nurse Nibbles is on hand and with the Get Well Friends it seems that Zoe will soon be on the mend.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444900250</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paige Harbison
|title=New Girl
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=There’s a new girl at the exclusive Manderley Academy. Everyone knows, though, that she’s only there because Becca Normandy… isn’t. Becca disappeared mysteriously at the end of the previous school year, and the new girl is taking her place. Both in school, and with Becca’s friends – and perhaps even the boys in Becca’s life. Perhaps she shouldn’t get too comfortable, though… because the rumour keeps going around that Becca’s coming back.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0373210426</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ellie Daines
|title=Lolly Luck
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Lolly really is called 'Luck'. Her first name is Lollyanna but everyone who knows her calls her Lolly or, just occasionally, Lollipop. And she really is lucky, winning magazine competitions, raffles and scratch card prizes - but all this changes on her eleventh birthday when she goes home from school expecting that the family is going to have a great evening at a local restaurant and hat she'll be given the bike she's been dreaming about. She gets the bike, but her dad has bad news. He's been made redundant. At first it's not too bad but then the reality of long-term unemployment kicks in and the family lose their home. Then Lolly overhears an argument between her parents and discovers something which will change her life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849393966</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maudie Smith
|title=Opal Moonbaby
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Martha has decided that she will never have a friend again. She and Chloe used to be very close, but then Colette came along and suddenly Martha was out in the cold. If she doesn't ''do'' friendship than there is no way that she can be hurt again. Life isn't easy at home - it's just her, her mother and her younger brother, Robbie - as money is tight. Her mother has gone back to hairdressing (or ''head refurbishments'' as her employer calls it) and would like Martha to spend time with Chloe during the day. Martha has other calls on her time though. She's met an alien.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444004786</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Courtney Sullivan
|title=Maine
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The Kellehers' beach-front holiday home in Maine was built on a plot of land won in a bar-room bet at the end of World War II. It's not in the same league as the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port but there are a couple of substantial properties on the plot and there's still room to spare. It's a place of indulgence, secrets and the sort of burning cruelty which you only get in families who care for each other - some of the time. ''Maine'' is essentially the story of a summer at the property - but the seeds of what happens were, of course, planted long ago.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>085789496X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chad Harbach
|title=The Art of Fielding
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=''The Art of Fielding'' is basically a US-style campus novel featuring baseball. There are similarities in style between this and many of John Irving's works, with baseball substituting for Irving's wrestling focus. This, to the UK-reader, raises the first potential barrier as we are, as a rule, largely ignorant of the US fixation with the intricacies of baseball. Certainly you don't need an in depth knowledge to appreciate this story - it is really a story of friendship, ambition and the sporting dreams of youth - but despite a loose understanding of the sport I felt that I would have benefitted from more knowledge particularly towards the end when there is a climactic baseball match. You kind of get the point, but I certainly felt that I was missing out on a little of the tension, in much the same way I'd expect a US reader to be perplexed if the story had been based on say, cricket. It's a minor flaw though and it would be a shame if potential readers dismissed it for this reason.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007374445</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Monica Carly
|title=The Golden Thread
|rating=3.5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=It was a sad day when Claudia Hansom retired as headmistress of Kingdown School. The staff respected her, despite the fact that she was always somewhat distant and the children did well under her charge. She was a stickler for discipline and the pupils accepted this – but once again there was no ''love''. No, the sadness was all Claudia's, for what was she to do with the rest of her life as the ex-head teacher living alone with her cat? Her mother had died when she and her sister were teenagers and her father not long before she retired. There hadn't been any contact with her sister was forty years. She might imagine doing some writing, but the reality was that the life ahead of her was empty.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780880162</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dave Cousins
|title=15 Days Without a Head
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=
Laurence is fifteen years old. Ever since the day his father died in a car crash, his mum has sunk into depression and alcoholism. But now she has disappeared, and he has no idea where she is, or even if she is still alive. He has a mischievous six-year-old brother to look after, no money for food, and a home that is barely fit for living. He could just call social services, but there is no guarantee that they'll keep him and his brother together, and he can't let go of the hope that his mother will return. But even if she does return, just how much longer can he keep their dysfunctional family together?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192732560</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Colin Thubron
|title=To a Mountain in Tibet
|rating=4
|genre=Travel
|summary=This must go down as the least apposite indefinite article in a book title yet. Yes, there are many other mountains dotting the plains of Tibet, but calling this one just 'a' mountain, when it is sacred to a fifth of the world's religious people... Hindu and Buddhist faiths alike venerate Mount Kailas, and devotees are supposed to visit and circle round it to cleanse a lifetime's sins. Thubron takes us on his own pilgrimage, from impoverished cliff-side villages in Nepal, through to Chinese-occupied Tibet and to the sacred route around the mountain.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099532646</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Eowyn Ivey
|title=The Snow Child
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The heart of Alaskan native, Eowyn Ivey's debut novel is a re-telling of the Russian fairy tale ''Snegurochka'' or ''The Snow Child''. Set here in Alaska in the 1920s, Jack and Mabel have moved from the East coast to start a new life, apart from anything to help Mabel get over the grief of having lost her only child in childbirth. Life in Alaska is tough and Jack struggles to farm his new homestead. Then in the first snowfall of the season, a playful snowball fight leads to the couple building a snowman, or more accurately a snowgirl. The next morning the snowgirl has vanished along with the mittens and scarf that adorned her and Jack sees a ghostly figure, possibly a young girl, running in the woods. Can they have created a snow child? Is this their longed for daughter?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755380525</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Hendrickson
|title=Hemingway's Boat: Everything he loved in life, and lost, 1934-1961
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=This substantial volume is not exactly a full biography of Ernest Hemingway. In fact, it might almost have been subtitled ‘The rise and fall’. Its theme is more or less the second half of his life, from 1934, when he returned from an African safari and took delivery of his boat Pilar, to his tragic death 27 years later. Hendrickson intends it to be an account of the writer, bringing together the different elements of his life – fishing, friendship, wives and family - and above all, naturally, his writing.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847921930</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=C J Sansom
|title=Winter in Madrid
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Despite being injured at Dunkirk Harry Brett was still willing to do his bit for his country. The deafness from the bomb which killed the man standing next to him on the beach - and the resulting panic attacks had begun to recede and he was willing, if not keen, to go to Spain to do some work for the ''sneaky beakies''. He wasn't a spy by nature or inclination but he was one of the few people who might be able to make contact with - and report back on - Sandy Forsyth who'd been at his public school. There's another old Rookwoodian who's left some history in Madrid. Bernie Piper went to Spain to fight for the International Brigades in the Civil War and was thought to have been killed at Jarama but his body had never been found. The school is not the only link though. Barbara Clare was Bernie's girlfriend - she was a Red Cross nurse - and now she was living with Sandy Forsyth.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330411985</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sam Hay
|title=Archie the Guide Dog Puppy: Hero in Training
|rating=4.5
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=I don't often pick up a non-fiction book for the 7+ age group, find it riveting reading and informative about a subject with which I'm already familiar, but that was the case with ''Archie: Hero in Training''. Archie is a puppy destined to be a guide dog for a blind person and he's just one story in a book about the pups-in-training, the working dogs, the adults who have guide dogs, or struggle to learn the techniques - or even what happens to the dogs who don't turn out to be what's needed. There's a full range as well as information about what a guide dog costs - and it's not cheap!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>033053792X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sam Hawksmoor
|title=The Repossession
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Genie Magee hasn’t seen her boyfriend Rian all summer. In fact, she hasn’t seen anyone all summer – apart from the creepy worshippers of the Church of Free Spirits, whose leader Reverend Schneider has persuaded her mother she’s possessed, due to her strange mystical gift. Rian hasn’t stopped thinking of her, though, and has hatched a daring plan to rescue the love of his life and escape the town of Spurlake – but their escape will lead them into a situation more dangerous than they could ever have imagined.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340997087</amazonuk>
}}