'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Wolfren Riverstick
|title=A Cat Called Ian
|rating=3.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=The lad was trouble. He was a bully, a thief and a liar. We've all known someone like him – the company into which you hope that your own child doesn't fall. He's cocky with it too, convinced that he can do whatever he likes and get away with it – and that's when we meet him on his way to climb the great white oak at the top of Sunrise Hill, despite the fact that his mother has told him he's not to. It was a difficult climb and it wasn't long before he remembered the old story that some people climbed so far up the tree and then were never seen again.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0955431409</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Robert Jackson Bennett
|summary=dad in Rochdale, Lancashire. Two months ago their mum was killed by a bomb which fell on her shop. Lizzie is being bullied and taunted at school and on the way home, because her dad won't join the army. He is a conscientious objector who doesn't believe it's right to kill people. As conscription has been introduced making nearly all men aged 18-51 liable to be called up for military service (and therefore required to fight), this means he is breaking the law and may well be treated as a criminal. Dad has decided they are going to move to Whiteway, a Colony (a sort of alternative community), for people who don't believe in war, in Gloucestershire.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849392498</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Rosalie Warren
|title=Coping With Chloe
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Anna and Chloe are twins who share everything. If anything, the terrible accident Chloe suffered has brought them closer. Apart from teacher Miss Tough and new boy Joe, though, everyone seems worried by Anna's references to her twin. They seem to think Chloe's dead – but can't they understand the two girls are just sharing a body? Then Chloe falls for Joe, who Anna likes herself, and Anna is left trying to see how this could ever work…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907912029</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Lodge
|title=A Man of Parts
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The man of parts in question here is HG Wells in this fictionalised biography. He was indeed a man of many talents and interests, although the parts that most exercise the interest of David Lodge are the great author's private parts. You see, not only was HG a prolific writer of fiction that incorporated a staggering amount of visionary ideas (tanks, airborne warfare and atomic bombs) - although admittedly some of his ideas have yet to come to pass such as time machines and Martian invasion - but he was also something of a political philosopher and idealist, being a central figure for a while in the Fabian movement, and an ardent practitioner of the concept of free love.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846554969</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anne O'Brien
|title=Devil's Consort
|rating=5
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=In the year 1137 fifteen year old Eleanor of Aquitaine is an orphan. Just before her father's death he asked King Louis VI of France to take care of her, and the unscrupulous Louis took advantage of this request to marry her to his pious son Louis VII. When her new father in law passes away, the young woman becomes Queen of France and is determined to safeguard her precious lands from all who want to take them – even if it leads to conflict with her weak-willed husband. Then she meets the Count of Anjou, Geoffrey Plantagenet, and his son Henry…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0778304272</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=George Makana Clark
|title=The Raw Man
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Prologue opens bang up to date: 2011. The language is poetic, lilting, evocative but tinged with sadness and sets the tone for the rest of the book. Lots of unanswered questions hang in the air throughout. The location is South Africa and section headings such as 'The Earthworks of the Universe' and 'The Story-Ghost' give a flavour of its contents.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090461</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Naomi Wood
|title=The Godless Boys
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Britain. 1986.
The country became a theocracy during the 1950s and since then outbreaks of secular terrorism have been dealt with by exile. The atheists have been sent to the Island where they can burn churches as they please. Aside from a weekly boat bringing donated supplies, the exiled must shift as best they can on a remote snippet of land in the North Sea.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330530127</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephanie Williams
|title=Running the Show: Governors of the British Empire 1857-1912
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=For some, the glory days of the British Empire were the closing years of the Victorian era and the 19th century. Government ministers in London, and doubtless Queen Victoria herself, would glance at a map of the world and bask in reflected glory at the generous expanses of land coloured red, 'the empire where the sun never sets', to use the old cliché.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918040</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elizabeth David
|title=Great Food: A Taste of the Sun
|rating=4
|genre=Cookery
|summary=There are three people to whom I owe my ability to put imaginative and tasty food on the table: [[:Category:Nigel Slater|Nigel Slater]] for taking away the mystique, [[:Category:Jane Grigson|Jane Grigson]] for teaching me that food was deeply interesting and [[:Category:Elizabeth David|Elizabeth David]] just for being who she was. Initially I found her a little daunting but once I realised that cookery books were about far more than recipes I appreciated her true worth. In the wonderful ''Great Food'' series Penguin have given us a selection of her writing and a demonstration of how she changed the way that post-war Britain thought about food.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0241951089</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Margaret Powell
|title=Below Stairs: The Bestselling Memoirs of a 1920s Kitchen Maid
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=''Below Stairs'' was first published in 1968, and it's no exaggeration to claim Margaret Powell as the trailblazer for the memoir genre. This book encouraged hundreds of autobiographies of common life, and spawned a whole generation of tv programmes. In its vernacular and popularist way, it was probably as influential as Mayhew's 'London Labour and the London Poor'. Before her, only famous people wrote their stories, and that without too much regard for reality. Unless they were literary writers, achievements were downplayed and emotions hidden away, in the stilted style of the British stiff upper lip. Not so Margaret Powell, who became a publishing sensation when she blasted through with a robust Voice rather than a polished narrative, in the first-ever tale of an ordinary servant writing about everyday life below stairs. Imagine being talent-spotted from an evening class and invited to write your memoir: those were the days!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0330535382</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Barrie
|title=Loose-Limbed
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Captain Franck Guerin of the Brigade Criminelle was about to learn a lot more about ballet than he ever expected or wanted to know. Sophie Duval was a leading dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet – an etoile – and she was murdered in her home. A chord had been wrapped three times around her neck and then she had been strangled, but why? It seemed simple to rule out professional jealousy and she seemed to have little life outside of the ballet. The Opera Ballet is a tight-knit and dedicated world, but it's not long before it's a world of terror, because Sophie Duval is only the first person to die.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956251846</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephen Mark Norman
|title=Meklyan and the Fourth Piece of the Artefact
|rating=3
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=Four billion years after our Sun has become a red giant and died, taking all life with it, there are still humans in the universe. How so? By man-made panspermia. When Earth's civilisation realised it couldn't master long distance space travel in sufficient time to avoid annihilation, it sent out DNA probes filled with bacteria far out into space, to planets in the temperate zones of solar systems; planets that could potentially sustain life. And on eight planets, sustain life they did.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956202713</amazonuk>
}}
