|summary=The main character in this novel is Frank Allcroft. Husband, father, son and also a bit of a minor celebrity as he's beamed into the region's television screens nightly, presenting the local news. Make that minor with a small 'm'. He comes across as a likeable, middle-aged man, content with his lot and with his home life. But he does have some personal issues to attend to. In particular, his grumpy, sometimes forgetful, elderly mother who is now living in a retirement home. Mother and son give each other lots of grief on a regular basis.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918555</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Iain Pears
|title=Stone's Fall
|rating=4.5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=I read Iain Pears' ''The Portrait'' a year or so ago and loved it so I was really looking forward to reading this novel. The front cover is strikingly handsome and hints of good things to come between its covers. The novel is divided up into sizeable chunks of three. Three different decades and three different locations. Pears then dips in and out of the main characters' lives, telling the reader basically what makes them tick.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099516179</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Zachary Mason
|title=The Lost Books of the Odyssey
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Zachary Mason suggests that Homer's ''Odyssey'' was merely one particular ordering of the events of Odysseus' return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. 'Echoes of other Odysseys', he suggests exist, including a forty four-episode variation in a 'pre-Ptolomeic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhnchus' and this is what is 'translated' here. So we are presented with these forty four often very short stories that reconstruct elements of the Odyssey in a kind of alternate reality, asking 'what if it were slightly different', and what emerges is a non-linear, mosaic of stories. If Homer had decided to present his book in DVD format, these would be in the 'extras' of alternative 'takes' on things. The result is like a jazz riff on the original stories.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090224</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sherrilyn Kenyon
|title=Infinity
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Nick Gautier, scholarship kid teased for his poverty and his mother's job as a stripper, finds life hard enough even before three of his friends try to kill him when he stops them from mugging an elderly couple. But when the man who rescues him turns out to mix in seriously weird circles, things get really bizarre. If anything, really bizarre is a massive understatement. Nick goes on to meet demons, zombies, shape changers, and a host of other mysterious beings, many of whom he already knew in human form as his schoolmates. He ends up on the frontline of a battle against zombies who are running riot in his home of New Orleans.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>190741021X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mary Beard
|title=The Parthenon
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Despite the proliferation of populist historians in print and on television, Professor Mary Beard continues to be a voice apart. Her conversational style of writing belies the academic research at its heart. This is serious history written as engagingly as a detective story.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846683491</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Garrett Keizer
|title=The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=What is noise? Do we count birdsong at sunrise as noise? And if so, what different term would we use to describe a jet aircraft taking off? Why do we respond so differently to the two? Even more intriguingly, would our response change if the birdsong woke us from an exhausted sleep but the aircraft was taking off to jet us on a long awaited holiday?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1586485520</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mario Puzo
|title=Six Graves to Munich
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=In the dying days of the Second World War Michael Rogan, an American Intelligence officer was captured and tortured by a group of seven men, most of whom were senior Gestapo officers trying to obtain the secrets which Rogan could give them. His wife was in another room and he could hear her screams. Ten years later, when he had recovered from the appalling injuries he suffered he made up his mind that he would avenge the death of his wife at the hands of the seven men. It's no easy task as he doesn't even know who they are.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184916276X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kishwar Desai
|title=Witness the Night
|rating=2.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The book opens on a disturbing dream sequence (or is it a memory?) that sets up the murder which is to be at the centre of this book. Durga, a young girl living in Julundur, is instructed by a mysterious male character to return to the house from which she has just fled, the house in which her whole family lies dead- poisoned, stabbed and partly scorched. There Durga is tied up, having been attacked and raped.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905636857</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Ridpath
|title=Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Magnus Jonson was in some difficulty in Boston. He'd overheard another detective getting himself involved in something illegal and when he reported this he found that even the good guys weren't terribly fond of him – and the others would prefer to see him dead before the case came to trial. The solution was simple but unusual: Jonson was born in Iceland although he'd mostly grown up in Boston and the police in Iceland wanted someone to give them some help in beefing up their murder squad. Jonson disappeared from Boston, telling no one where he was going and resurfaced in Iceland. Simple? No.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848873972</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Douglas Rushkoff
|title=Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back
|rating=3.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=The author of this book was mugged outside his apartment one Christmas Eve. He posted a note online to warn his neighbours to be extra careful, and was promptly berated for doing something so public that could potentially damage property values in his local area. This is a thought-provoking snippet, and if the whole book was like this, I'm sure I would have been gripped.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099516691</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Lane
|title=England 'Til I Die - A celebration of England's amazing supporters
|rating=3.5
|genre=Sport
|summary=To start with, an admission. I am an English fan of football, but I am not a fan of England’s football squad. Hardly ever would I prefer to see the Three Lions triumphant. I never got into the habit, partly because I never saw the singularly English habit of supporting the underdog as making any sense. Plus you'll never get me standing up and singing that awful tune before the match. But here are testimonies from twenty or so people who see things completely differently to me.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906796505</amazonuk>
}}
