'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Michael Cobley
|title=The Orphaned Worlds (Humanity's Fire)
|rating=3.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=The planet Darien, once a lost outpost where earth colonists co-existed with the native Uvovo, is now the focal point of an intergalactic struggle. Hegemony forces are in occupation mode, Earth is standing back reined in by inter-planetary politics, whilst planet-side local alliances are fighting back guerrilla-style. This is the least of the galaxy's concerns, however. It might even get air-brushed out as a little minor difficulty in the history-books-to-come. There is a much bigger problem to worry about.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841496332</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Frances Woodsford
|summary=Two police officers knock on Laura's door. They break the news to her that her 9 year old daughter Betty has been run over and killed. Betty's friend Willow is in hospital. Immediately, I was drawn into this story of a mother's worst nightmare coming true.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571254756</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Linda Strachan
|title=Dead Boy Talking
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=''They say it takes about 25 minutes to bleed to death. I want to scream and yell but there's no one here to hear me and I... I can't breath enough to yell anyway. I'm going to die here, all on my own.''
Josh is lying in the snow in an alleyway in a pool of his own blood. He stabbed one of his best mates yesterday, and now it's happened to him. He knows he's dying and his thoughts turn to how this could possibly have happened. He wonders where Skye is and what she's doing. He hopes Danny is ok. And, as he goes over the events of the day before, which culminated in his stabbing Ranj, his missing brother Gary keeps intruding into the picture. Why did he go? And did his parents' obsession with Gary's disappearance play a part in what's happened?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905537204</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Lee
|title=Who Is Mr Satoshi?
|rating=3.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The novel opens somewhere in the Home Counties and Rob Fossick is attending his mother's funeral. The event in itself is extremely distressing and also depressing for him; factor in that he's become a bit of a recluse lately and I could feel the sheer loneliness creeping into Rob's very bones. Lee describes the event as 'Zimmer frames, bifocals, trifocals, dark grey coats with yawning shoulders. The apparatus of old age.'
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434020419</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Hazel McHaffie
|title=Remember Remember
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The story starts at the end and works back in time. This works extremely well as we see Doris Mannering, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother now living in a residential home. The decision to 'put mother' into a home was very, very difficult and had been put off time and time again. We come to realize that this was a heart-wrenching decision. The daughter and carer, Jessica, will always be asking herself if she'd done the right thing, made the right decision for the right reasons. A veritable minefield. And here is where many an ethical dilemma lies for many families in real-life similar situations.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906817294</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Samantha Mackintosh
|title=Kisses for Lula
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Girls do worry, about all sorts of things. And one of the things they enjoy worrying about most is whether or not they are passing the milestones on life's journey at the same time as everyone else. The fact that they combine this with loud demands to be treated to be an individual is a major reason for stress-related hair-loss and gibbering in parents. Lula is no exception here. Her sixteenth birthday is approaching fast, and unless she gets kissed before then (by pretty well anyone: she's desperate) she is convinced she will be jinxed for life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405249625</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Benedict Gummer
|title=The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Isles
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=The mid-fourteenth century was an unsettled time for England. It was an age which saw the first phases of the protracted Hundred Years’ War with France, and the Scottish war of independence, which came to an end with the capture of King David II. As if these events were not enough, in 1346 there was the first case of a man in Europe contracting an unknown disease that rapidly swept across the continent, claiming the lives of millions, and one medieval chronicler noted that 'the bodies looked like a macabre lasagne: corpses piled row upon row separated only by layers of dirt'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548836</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Colin Cotterill
|title=Love Songs From A Shallow Grave
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Dr Siri Paiboun is about to celebrate his seventy-fourth birthday but it looks as though it might be his last. Instead of being at home with Madam Daeng, his wife of three months, he's in jail. It's not your average run-of-the-mill jail either. Siri is chained to some lead piping and conditions are not exactly five star. Meanwhile Phosy and Dtui are having marriage problems whilst he struggles to investigate the deaths of three women, all skewered by an epee and their thighs showing a letter engraved with a knife.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849160457</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Duncan
|title=Kissing Mr Wrong
|rating=4.5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=Kissing Mr Wrong is the first book I have read by Sarah Duncan and it has definitely given me an appetite to read more. It tells an absorbing tale with many different threads that bind together well and with a main character that I loved. Indeed, it has all of the ingredients for a riveting read – one that I didn't want to put down.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0755345959</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Joanna Simmons and Jay Curtis
|title=The Aargh to Zzzz of Parenting: An Alternative Guide
|rating=4.5
|genre=Home and Family
|summary='All in all, having kids is an intense rollercoaster ride. It plunges up and down, and there’s lots of screaming and vomiting involved.' So that pretty much sums it up. Advertised as: 'a comprehensively unhelpful, advice-free look at life', the authors talk about Antecedents and Behaviour, without (fortunately) going too deeply into the Consequences of several dozen baby-related topics. But this definitely isn’t the rocket science of a parenting manual, or the touchy-feely of a misery memoir, rather a blackly comic gallop round pragmatic parenthood, instantly recognizable by anyone who’s been through the mill themselves.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022408626X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Niven
|title=The Amateurs
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Gary Irvine only wants two things out of life. He'd like to have children and he wants to reduce his golf handicap. Nothing extraordinary there, you might think except for the fact that his wife, Pauline, is planning to leave him for a self-made carpet millionaire and Gary is a dreadful golfer. His handicap is eighteen – but I'm not entirely certain how he got it down to that level in the first place. His family doesn't give him much solace either. His brother Lee is on the fringes of the local criminal underworld and hasn't the wit to keep himself out of trouble with Ranta Campbell, the local overlord. Ranta could be quite likeable if it wasn't for his penchant for a certain type of violence designed to keep the others in line rather than to teach the victim a lesson.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099516667</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kevin Brooks
|title=iBoy
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Tom Harvey is wandering along after school on his way to meet up with his friend Lucy when he hears his name called from up high in one of the tower blocks on his estate. He doesn't have time to look up before everything goes up. Waking up in hospital days later, Tom discovers he has fragments of a shattered iPhone embedded in his brain. And still worse, his friend Lucy has been gang-raped in a brutal attack that Tom had been so closed to walking in on.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141326107</amazonuk>
}}
