Grannies come in for a lot of negative press. Absent-minded geriatric, witch with a black cat, spoiling the kids, always getting it wrong ... you know the stereotypes. Well I’m fighting back. I latched onto this book, of course, as a granny. And in this neatly rhyming story, Granny, as seen through the practical eyes of her small grand-daughter, is all these things as well as being notably peculiar. Tracey Corderoy has pretty much got us metaphorically taped!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857631314</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Prajwal Parajuly
|title=The Gurkha's Daughter
|rating=5
|genre=Short Stories
|summary=Parajuly is the son of an Indian father and Nepalese mother hailing from Gangtok in the Indian Himalayas, but spending most of his time somewhere between New York and Oxford. His insight is therefore something we should probably trust.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780872933</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Siobhan Rowden
|title=The Revenge of the Ballybogs
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Not much has changed in Barnaby's world since the [[The Curse of the Bogle's Beard by Siobhan Rowden|first book in this series]]. His grandmother is still smelly, burpy, purple and a pickler on an industrial scale. Barnaby is at last working alongside her as opposed to hating her, but not everything is running completely smoothly, and Barnaby still doesn't know everything there is to know about his heritage – either the pickle factory he is supposed to inherit, or the bogle blood his unusual background has left him with. These short, dirty, hairy, stinking critters live in a world of their own underneath an unusual nearby bog – when they're not invading people's homes and causing mischief. Once again, however much Barnaby is reluctant to, he is forced to enter their world in an effort to solve a major calamity in his family, but this time without the help of his mother – for someone or something has kidnapped her…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407124900</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver
|title=How To Scare The Pants Off Your Pets (Ghost Buddy)
|rating=3
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Billy is the only person who can see the ghost of Hoover Porterhouse the Third that he shares a bedroom with. While nobody else knows about the phantom's existence, Billy certainly knows about his character – his arrant braggadocio and the many self-serving rules he demands he lives his afterlife by. The problem is that that same lack of respect and responsibility is what is keeping Hoover in Billy's life and not moving on, and his attitude is so bad he's been grounded by the Higher-Ups in charge of such things. Billy's not one to live with an annoyance like that, though, and decides to prove the Hoove can be responsible – and caring for a pet should be the obvious proof with which to start…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>140713230X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Yan Lianke
|title=Lenin's Kisses
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Yan Lianke's 2004 novel, ''Lenin's Kisses'', newly and beautifully translated by Carlos Rojas, is a rare and fascinating example, not just of Chinese fiction from a writer living and working in China, but also a book that has won literary awards (the prestigious Chinese ''Lao She Literary Award''), now available in English. In many respects, the fact that this book won such a literary prize is somewhat surprising - not I hasten to add because of any lack of quality - but because Lianke, who has previously sailed too close to the political wind for Chinese censors, here presents a not altogether flattering view of Chinese politics. It's a book that is literary with a capital L, and while the core of the plot is relatively simple, what makes this book so interesting is the structure and way the story is told.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701188073</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Morpurgo
|title=Little Manfred
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=In The Imperial War Museum, a little wooden dog stands in a glass display case. He was donated to the museum in 2005 by a family who lived at a farm in Kent. The little dog was made from cast-off apple boxes by a German prisoner of war who worked at the farm.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007491638</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tom Watson
|title=Stick Dog
|rating=3.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary='I Can’t Draw, Okay?' Tom Watson apologises in the opening chapter of ''Stick Dog''. He then goes on to lay some ground rules with the reader, explaining that:
'....this Stick Dog story (with the bad pictures that my art teacher doesn’t like) will also be told in a way that I like (but my English teacher doesn’t).'
'Good deal?'
'Excellent. Let’s move on.'
'This is going to be fun.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007494823</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Carolyn Mathews
|title=Transforming Pandora
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=When we first meet Pandora Armstrong in the spring of 2003 she's grieving for her husband, Mike, who had died just a few weeks before. It hadn't been his first heart attack and he had reduced his workload but this attack was fatal. He was only in his fifties and Pandora feels that he'd been snatched away from her as they'd only been married for a few years. When a friend suggests that she goes with her to an Evening of Clairvoyance she runs out of excuses to refuse and although she's not exactly ''convinced'' by what she hears there's a lingering doubt. A spirit voice mentioned her children and Pandora was adamant that she didn't have any children - it's actually quite a sore point - but that wasn't true of Mike.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780997450</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Patricia Watkins
|title=The Wayward Gentleman: John Theophilus Potter and the Town of Haverfordwest
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=In 1778 John Theophilus Potter (Theo to his friends) came to Haverfordwest from Dublin with a group of actors to put on two performances of ''Romeo and Juliet''. A careless accident left him unable to return with the other players - and then he met Elizabeth Edwardes, from a family of local gentry. Friendship turned to love and whilst some in the town wondered (in a rather loud voice) that the Edwardes should allow Elizabeth's friendship with an actor, Theo was no strolling player without a penny to his name. He was a 'gentleman player' with a considerable fortune and a very respectable income. He was also a restless man, constantly driven to achieve.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0957210442</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matthew Pearl
|title=The Technologists
|rating=4
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=The year is 1868 and Boston is under threat from an evil genius who seems to have the uncanny ability to manipulate matter itself. The city has already experienced two attacks; the chaos in the harbour when the navigation instruments went awry and the eerie spectacle in the commercial quarter when every item of glass, including windows, eyeglasses, clocks and watches spontaneously melted. But are these attacks a prelude to something greater?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099512769</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jan-Philipp Sendker
|title=The Art of Hearing Heartbeats
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Sendker is German-born (Hamburg 1960) and worked as American correspondent for ''Stern'' (1990 to 95) and then as its Asian correspondent from '95 to '99. He now lives in Berlin. This probably gives him enough global insight to write about a US-born high flyer with an Asian heritage heading off to Burma to find out the truth of her father's disappearance. It probably also gives him the language skills to do it in English without recourse to a translator.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184697240X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Gillian Flynn
|title=Gone Girl
|rating=5
|genre=Thrillers
|summary=There’s a distressing moment in any long-term relationship where you realise that, in practice, happily ever after looks a lot like an eternity of small, snarling arguments about who forgot to buy food, who should take out the rubbish and who is responsible for that mouldering pile of clothes in the corner of the bedroom. Domestic bliss is often more like very polite guerrilla warfare between two people who love each other so much that they want to spend the rest of their lives fighting about it. You and your partner are absolutely in each other’s pockets – but no matter how close you are, there’s always one last barrier you can’t break down. You aren’t them, and they aren’t you, and so you can never truly know what’s really going on inside that well-known head.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0753827662</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chloe Hooper
|title=The Engagement
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Chloe Hooper's gothic, psychological thriller concerns an affair between a thirty-something English girl, Liese, working in Australia at her uncle's real estate business and a blandly handsome Australian farmer, Alexander. Set over one weekend as Liese is heading to Alexander's remote family farm for the first time for a weekend of passion, this is a classic 'girl trapped in spooky house and situation' story with a dark, sexual twist. Liese, who trained as an interior architect, met Alexander while showing him around exclusive Melbourne properties and, has somehow managed to get herself into a situation whereby Alexander pays her for her attentions, believing that she is some kind of prostitute. He's even paying her handsomely for her time at the weekend. With debts of her own, Liese willingly encourages this perception with little idea of the problems to which this fantasy will lead.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224096346</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jack Sheffield
|title=School's Out!
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary= The beginning of September 1983 starts a new academic year for the village primary school of Ragley-on-the-Forest. Headmaster Jack Sheffield starts the autumn term with a skip in his step as he and wife Sally enjoy their new baby, John William despite the broken nights. What else will the year bring? The advent of a new teacher and a tragedy that strikes sorrow in the heart of the village reduces Jack's skip a bit but there are always moments to lift the mood; for instance, whatever it was that little Madonna Fazackerly did in her cat's ear. It's all there in the school's daily log; perhaps not the one that the inspectors see, you understand, all is explained in living detail here in Jack's memoir of life as a teacher and villager.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552167037</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Pam Jenoff
|title=The Ambassador's Daughter
|rating=3.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=In 1919 the Great War - the First World War - was over and all that was left was to work out the terms of the peace treaty. Margot Rosenthal accompanied her father, a diplomat, to Paris, where he was part of the German delegation and in the invidious position of being disliked by the French because he was ''the enemy'' and mistrusted by fellow members of the delegation because he was Jewish. They'd previously been in England where they'd simply been the enemy. Margot could have gone home to Berlin but that would have taken her back to her fiance, who'd been seriously injured in the war. She'd rather fallen into the engagement, feeling that it was what she ought to do. Passion played no part.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848452039</amazonuk>
}}