'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
__NOTOC__
{{newreview
|author=Adrian Tinniswood
|title=Pirates Of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the 17th-Century Mediterranean
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=In the early 17th century the North African coast was a particularly dangerous place to sail near due to the prevalence of pirates there ready to plunder the cargo of ships. In this truly captivating account author Adrian Tinnisworth looks at these corsairs – focusing on Englishmen such as John Ward, who became so renowned that plays about him and Dutchman Simon Danseker managed to outsell
King Lear!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099523868</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Amanda Brookfield
|summary=Mummies are good for lots of things - wiping noses, singing in the car, helping with wee-wee's! This sweet story tells us the best things about mummies from a baby's point of view.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408309572</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alex Butterworth
|title=The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=In deciding to write about political upheaval across Europe, including Russia, Alex Butterworth has chosen a massive topic for this entertaining book. So massive, in fact, that when I tried reading it without first looking through the pen pictures at the start of the main players I was quickly completely lost. My mistake – the short, sharp, pen pictures, which cover sixteen pages and detail all the major anarchists and secret agents are completely invaluable and helped my reading of the book enormously.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099551926</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Neil Griffiths and Peggy Collins
|title=Fatou, Fetch the Water
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=is waylaid by various friends who have gifts and messages for Fatou to take for her mother. As the gifts pile up in Fatou's arms, and the messages for her mother crowd her head Fatou, somehow, forgets to get any water!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1905434162</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=M C Beaton
|title=Hamish Macbeth: Death of a Valentine
|rating=4
|genre=Crime
|summary=Remembering ''Hamish Macbeth'' from the 1990s TV series, in the person of Robert Carlisle, accompanied by a Westie called Wee Jock, I'm only just beginning to get to know the real Hamish as brought to paper by M C Beaton. More robust in appearance than your man Carlisle, with a shock of red hair, he's accompanied on his rounds by an indeterminate hound called Lugs and a wildcat called Sonsie. That both animals are referred to by the locals as the beasties, and only a special few of said locals are willing to look after them in Hamish's absence, says something about their temperament. Hamish would call it exuberance. Or loyalty.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849015090</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sylvia Broady
|title=The Yearning Heart
|rating=3
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=It is 1941 so when an unmarried Frances Bewholme becomes pregnant she is shunned by her family and sent to an isolated farm to live and work. To add to her shame and disgrace Fran's unborn baby is not just any man's; it is her brother-in-law's. Victor Renton, home on leave from the war takes advantage of Fran one night when she comes home, upset and heartbroken.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0709092113</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Allen Ginsberg
|title=Howl: A Graphic Novel
|rating=4.5
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=I first came across Howl as a short film animating one of Ginsberg's own recordings of it. If memory serves, it was a scratchy, jazzy piece, full of spiky, spunky shapes and movements, and low on colour. Now for 2011 and for Penguin Modern Classics' first ever 'graphic novel' comes a very different animation. OK, the real moving animation is only to be seen in the movie Howl, but to call this merely an illustrated companion to the film is to be very unflattering.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0141195703</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tim Pears
|title=Disputed Land
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=In this engaging novel, Tim Pears tackles many challenging themes: sibling rivalry, time and change in the countryside, facing terminal illness, reflections on the isolation of academic life and undertaking risky financial investment. This is not a portrayal of a rural idyll although much of the most lyrical writing concerns the colours of the Shropshire countryside and this is strengthened by reference to the layers of the archaic past that underlies this disputed borderland territory. In attempting such a multi-layered narrative in a relatively short novel, it is not surprising that for instance, the traumatic shocks in the epic tale are diminished by random, experimental shifts in the tone of the narrative.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0434020818</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Maaza Mengiste
|title=Beneath the Lion's Gaze
|rating=4
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=Ethiopia 1974. Emperor Haile Selassie is an old man barely clinging on to power. Still thought of, even by those rebelling against him, as a demi-god that they daren't disrespect let alone challenge he has held the country in thrall to his aristocratic government supported by the violence and repression of the army and the police.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099539926</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Will Hill
|title=Department 19
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Jamie Carpenter lived a normal, happy, suburban life until the night strange creatures arrived at his house and men in black combats with strange, ultra-violent weapons burst in and executed his father. Since then, Jamie and his mother have lived in a succession of miserable, dour little houses and Jamie has become less and less interested in a succession of miserable, dour little schools. He resents his mother, like all good disaffected teenagers do.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007354452</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Baddiel
|title=The Death of Eli Gold
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Eli Gold is recognized as the 'the greatest living writer' - although his claim to this is slipping by by the day as he is on his death bed. He's not a nice character - his attitudes to his five wives and his children are deplorable and he has been bound up in his own 'genius'. He's a bit like the best and the worst of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer combined. Now dying in hospital in New York, the book explores this event from the perceptive of four people in his life; his eight year old, precocious daughter by his current wife; his first wife watching on the news from an old people's home in England; the angst-ridden son of his third marriage, himself a pale imitation of the author that his father is; and a mysterious fourth character who appears to have a very different motive for seeing Gold snr and who may be linked to Gold's fourth wife who died in a mutual suicide pact with her then-husband, from which Eli survived. (In fact his identity is revealed in the publisher's blurb on the jacket, but I'll let you decide if you want to know this or to let the story unfold as I did).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007270836</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Denis Kehoe
|title=Walking on Dry Land
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Ana has grown up mostly in Portugal, but now lives in Dublin where she teaches film studies and is writing her PHD. However, she was born in Anglola (then a Portuguese colony), the result of an extra-marital relationship of her father, who then adopted her with his wife. When her adopted mother, Helena, dies, she decides to trace her birth mother in Angola, where her brother now lives, but has nothing much to go on but a photocopy of a photograph of two Angolan girls, one of which may, or may not, be her mother, and a name: Solange Mendes. We follow Ana as she attempts to trace her real mother while in alternating chapters exploring her parents' developing relationship and ultimately how her unusual past evolved.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687810</amazonuk>
}}
