'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Anna Sheehan
|title=A Long, Long Sleep
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=This is a book set in the future, with hover-cars and eye-scans and travel to other planets. But make no mistake – that's not what this book is about. Sixteen-year-old Rose has been asleep for far longer than she intended; in the meantime the world has almost come to an end in a terrible plague, and her stasis tube has been abandoned in a basement. If Brendan had not come exploring, she might never have been found at all. But how is that possible? How could the daughter and heiress of the most powerful couple in the galaxy have been forgotten? This book is about her awakening, and the slow, painful unfurling of the real facts of her early life.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0575104724</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Jenkins
|summary=The Red Thread Adoption Agency has been successfully placing abandoned Chinese girls with loving American families, desperate for children, for many years when we join them. Named for the mythical Chinese belief that people who are destined to be together are connected by an invisible red thread, an immense amount of work goes in from both countries to make the process as smooth and straightforward as possible, and to ensure the matches are, if not magical, then at least perfect. Maya, the agency’s owner, knows all the children she has placed and spends a great deal of time with the prospective parents before they come anywhere near their potential daughters.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393339769</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sheila Kohler
|title=Becoming Jane Eyre
|rating=2
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=There is no denying that the Brontë family lived an interesting life. While some authors' lives are shrouded in mystery, with their characters far better known than they themselves are, that's not really the case with the Brontës. Various biographers have, over the years, provided a clear picture of 19th century Yorkshire life thanks to a wealth of original letters and diaries preserved from the time. This makes Kohler's choice of topic slightly odd. Rather than an attempt to imagine the unknown lives of the sisters, it is a cobbling together of facts and assumptions that have been in the public arena for some time. For anyone who knows anything about the Brontës, it really is nothing new, and that's a shame.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849010862</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roger Moorhouse
|title=Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital, 1939-45
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Berlin at War is an account of the day to day lives of the ordinary people of Berlin, the then capital of Nazi Germany, during the Second World War. Berlin was heavily bombed throughout much of the war, and suffered greatly as the symbolic target of Allied forces at the end.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099551896</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Laini Taylor
|title=Daughter of Smoke and Bone
|rating=4.5
|genre=Fantasy
|summary=Karou's friends think she's normal. They assume, however often she tells them that her bright blue hair grows that colour, that she dyes it. They think her frequent errands are just normal everyday things to earn money. They believe the snake-bodied being she draws in her sketchbook is a figment of her imagination. They're wrong.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>144472262X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matt Armendariz
|title=On A Stick!
|rating=4
|genre=Cookery
|summary=There's something rather fun about eating your food off a stick. The first thing that springs to my mind is candy floss (I never buy it when it's in a bag...sacrilegious!) but if you think about it there are lots of things you can eat off a stick, both savoury and sweet. And the author of this cookery book would have you believe that everything tastes better when it's eaten off a stick!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1594744890</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Phil Rickman
|title=The Secrets of Pain
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's a freezing winter's night and a couple of the locals are driving home when they come across a strange and disturbing incident. They don't know what to make of it but as the SAS have a training presence in the area Gomer and Danny put it down to exercises and breath a sigh of relief. It's anything for a quiet life round these parts and thanks to Rickman's excellent writing, we soon see that these men, Gomer especially, are characters in themselves. Plenty of personality. Once seen, difficult to forget. And I didn't want to forget them. They also speak in the local dialect which comes across very well indeed.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848872739</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jasper Rees
|title=Bred of Heaven: One man's quest to reclaim his Welsh roots
|rating=3.5
|genre=Travel
|summary=Jasper Rees is a Welshman in his dreams. Despite his surname, he was born in England, but wishes he was from Wales. Seeking to find his inner Welshman – he's sure he has one as he had Welsh grandparents – he journeys around the land of his fathers trying to work out what it means to be Welsh.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846682991</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Erin Morgenstern
|title=The Night Circus
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The Night Circus moves from town to town; appearing with no warning, no announcements. The attractions seem impossible – a carousel with breathing animals, handkerchiefs that turn into birds in front of the watchful eyes of the audience, doors that appear and disappear. In the middle of it all are Celia, the daughter of a famous illusionist, and Marco, the apprentice of a mysterious magician. From a young age the lovers have been destined to compete against each other using their unusual skills to win a prize that neither of them understands; and an end that will leave only one standing.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184655523X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alyxandra Harvey
|title=The Drake Chronicles: Bleeding Hearts
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Things in Violet Hill are not looking good at the moment. The small town is practically over run by the vicious Hel-Blar vampires: not the civilised, friendly (and hot) variety that Lucy is used too – these are feral, and attack indiscriminately, humans and vampires alike.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408814978</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dorothy B Hughes
|title=The Expendable Man
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Dorothy B Hughes (1904-93) took a journalism degree in Kansas City, Missouri and started her distinguished career with a prize-winning book of poems. Her first hard-boiled thriller appeared in 1940 and it was followed by more than a dozen in the next decade. Three were made into noir films and in 1944 Hughes went to Hollywood to assist Hitchcock on his film, ''Spellbound''. Here she met Ingrid Bergman and consequently Humphrey Bogart came to buy the film rights to one of her novels.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1903155584</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ian Mathie
|title=Man in a Mud Hut
|rating=5
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Ian Mathie deserves a wider audience. I can't understand why he hasn't been leapt upon by Radio 4 , Saga Magazine, the Sunday papers, the Daily Mail, Uncle Tom Cobley and all since the publication of ''Bride Price'' in January. Here is a fine new Voice who is completely his own man. His writing is spare, uncomplicated and unassuming. Now Ian Mathie has taken a dusty-dry civil servant and turned him into a hero. Desmond's first visit to Africa is the theme of the dramatic ''Man in a Mud Hut'' story. Set in the 1970's, the intrigue and suspense sort of reminded me of [[The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre|The Spy who came in from the Cold]] - and it all happened.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>190685209X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Lodge
|title=The Campus Trilogy
|rating=4.5
|genre=Humour
|summary=Somewhere along the line the word "vintage" stopped meaning simply the wine crop of any given year, and started to mean the wine of a particularly good year, and then to mean anything of a past year that was (is) of outstanding quality. Such is the mutability of language.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099529130</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jacqueline Percival
|title=Elbow Grease: How our Grandmothers and Great-Grandmothers Kept House
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=Sometimes I look at the housework that needs to be done and it seems like a mountain that has to be climbed. It's not until I look back at the work that my mother, her mother and even my great grandmother had to do to keep the house clean and free of pests as well as doing all the laundry that I realise that my problems are more of a molehill and a lot less strenuous than their daily grind ever was. Jacqueline Percival has taken a look back at the way that things really were for the women who went before us – and in those days housework generally was down to the woman in the house.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0956559530</amazonuk>
}}
