|summary=It's the early 17th century and Issy is living in Lancashire with her foster father Nat and foster brother Ghyll. Nat is a cunning man - a herbalist and healer - and Issy keeps house while Nat plies his trade and teaches Ghyll how to follow in his footsteps. It's a hard life and there is little to spare. And the family live on the edge of suspicion. Convinced he's being plotted against by Scottish witches, the King has unleashed witch-hunts on a deeply superstitious and fearful country. Healers like Nat are working in the grey areas of persecution and are only ever an accusation away from torture and trial, while time is running out for self-professed witches like Demdyke and her family.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849393974</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Michael Holroyd
|title=A Book of Secrets, Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Picture the crowded atelier of the renowned sculptor, Rodin or perhaps the dimly lit corridors of Lord Grimthorpe's mansion. Perhaps you might prefer to frequent the brightly lit splendour of the balconies of the coastal villa at Cimbrone above the magnificent Gulf of Salerno. The inhabitants of such places led their tangled lives, sometimes enduring painful losses or by contrast, energetically inspired to passionate love affairs. In these stimulating environments we catch glimpses of the famous, like E.M.Forster, Virginia Woolf, sometimes accompanied by her close confidante, Vita Sackville West and then there was that tempestuous iconoclast, D.H.Lawrence. Many such lives were inspired by both landscape and lust, fashioned by each other's creative energies and endowed with artistic talents of all kinds. Here we learn of talents and beauty that inspires artistic endeavour, like the many charms of Eve Fairfax. She, who after brief affairs was gradually forced into a stoic suspension which she recorded with thoughts from her friends in the pages of annotated diaries which became ''A Book of Secrets''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548941</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Justin Yifu Lin
|title=Demystifying the Chinese Economy
|rating=4
|genre=Business and Finance
|summary=The success of the Chinese economy, and as Lin makes us aware, a success which contrasts strongly with what appeared major failure in the recent historical past, is something which needs explanation. No one can ignore it, and we are confronted with the effects of it from the ownership of Thames water to the faces of tourists in London and Stratford on a daily basis. And in the roots of its success are the potential seeds of future change, a change that now more than ever is crucial to the way the world economy works.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0521181747</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roman Krznaric
|title=The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary='How should we live?' asks author Roman Krznaric. To answer this ancient question, he looks to history. 'I believe that the future of the art of living can be found by gazing into the past', he says. Creating a book which is as full of curiosities as a Renaissance 'Wunderkammer', he has a stab at the big questions: love, belief, money, family, death. The result is a pot-pourri of delights which left this particular reader stimulated and invigorated.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846683939</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Cara Hoffman
|title=So Much Pretty
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Haeden, New York is a small town of the type where nothing really happens. When 19 year old Wendy White goes missing, the local reporter, Stacy Flynn, thinks she’s found her big break, but her investigations lead her to a wall of silence which proves highly distressing to break through. Hoffman’s observations of small town life and small town personalities are compelling. No aspect is left unexamined, from the painful tedium to the quite contentment experienced as part of a whole spectrum of emotions experienced by visitors and residents alike.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846059704</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=R J Anderson
|title=Swift
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Ivy lives in an abandoned Cornish tin mine with the rest of her piskie clan. The piskies live in fear of kidnapping spriggans and so it's a closed life, with the females of the clan rarely going above ground. It's just too dangerous. This weighs heavily on Ivy, who has an independent spirit and sense of wanderlust. And Ivy has other sadnesses: her mother disappeared years ago, taken by spriggans, and she was born without wings so cannot fly like the others.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408312638</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Val McDermid and Arthur Robins
|title=My Granny is a Pirate
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=It seems the pirate phase is something all small children go through at some point. My daughter spent several months dressed as a pirate, completing her outfit with a knitted eye patch, which she asked my mum to knit for her, swiftly followed by a knitted parrot! It is rather fun to run around shouting 'Arrrrrrrrrr me hearties!' actually, so I can see the appeal. Anyway, this story caters beautifully for all the little wannabe pirates out there and tells of one little boy's granny and her secret life story.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408309262</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Giles Andreae and Vanessa Cabban
|title=There's a House Inside My Mummy
|rating=5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=The arrival of a new sibling can be a tricky time in any child's life, but this lovely book helps ease the way for a new baby and explains about pregnancy in a very easy, funny way that is perfect for sharing with toddlers. The idea of there being a house inside mummy's tummy is a clever one, and instantly understandable by small children, and the loving family relationship that is depicted in the story is wonderful to see.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408315882</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jo Owen
|title=Leadership Rules
|rating=4
|genre=Business and Finance
|summary=Owen's latest addition to the management self-help canon is subtitled ''50 Timeless Lessons for Leaders''. Fifty lessons in under 250 pages? You have to know that the genuine newness of the insights might be on the disappointing side of fabulous. That's not to completely write off ''Leadership Rules''. I enjoyed reading it. Given its structure of short sharp snipes which might be aimed at the dip-in-and-out brigade, I can also say that it reads well as a sit-down-and-consider book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857082388</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=James Palmer
|title=The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Welcome to China, where the populous are busy leaving a rural country full of prosperous mineral resources and coal mines, and shoddily-built hydro-electric dams in environmentally dubious locations, for the burgeoning, mechanised cities. But this isn't the birth of 2012, it's the dawn of 1976. Chairman Mao is dying, Premier Zhou Enlai has just died, and the cauldron of power is being stirred as never before. Among the momentous events of the year however will be a huge earthquake directly centred on the city of Tangshan, which will kill something like two thirds of a million people.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571243991</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Caroline Brothers
|title=Hinterland
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Aryan (14) and his brother Kabir (aged 8) are refugees, fleeing the horrors of their homeland, Afghanistan. Equipped only with some money sewn into a belt and stories of a promised land called England, they learn about desperation, misplaced trust and other lessons normally kept from children.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408817756</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dominic Barker and Hannah Shaw
|title=Max and Molly's Guide to Trouble: How to Build an Abominable Snowman
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=I'd like you to meet Max and Molly Pesker of Laburnum Avenue, Trull. They're twins, with red hair and bright, fun-loving natures to match and this time they have a real problem on their hands. Laburnum Avenue is snowed in and Mum can't get to the supermarket. Until the road is cleared they're going to have to live on the supply of EMERGENCY BEANS which their father has been storing in the cellar. There's also a humanitarian aspect to their problems. The Goodley children (could children ever have had a more appropriate surname?) from across the street eat tofu but have never tasted toffee! That can't be allowed to continue, now can it?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408305216</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Tony Ross
|title=A Fairy Tale
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=In Balaclava Street Bessie was bored. Even her book wasn't helping. It was about fairies and she didn't believe in them, ''obviously''. And even if they did exist they'd have more sense than to live in the gloomy streets around the mill, wouldn't they? Playing with her ball in the back yard she encountered her next-door neighbour, Mrs Leaf and a strange friendship developed between the old woman and the young girl. It was difficult for Bessie to work out if Mrs Leaf actually believed in fairies, but it seemed strange that as Bessie got older, Mrs Leaf seemed to get younger. And who ''exactly'' was Mrs Leaf?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849393559</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jon McGregor
|title=This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The clue is in the Christopher Brookmyre-styled title. If the events, characters and circumstances in these stories are known to you, then you have my sympathies. A man causes an embarrassment trying to watch his daughter's first school nativity play. Another has a phobia of eggs containing an avian foetus when he puts knife and fork to them. There's a car crash here - and there, a drowning, some arson, some theft... and a lot of clues that point to some national disaster. Take all those clues as one and you eventually see this is more than just a collection of disparate short stories, but a very fractured, obfuscated novel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408809265</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Ruffle
|title=Sherlock Holmes and the Lyme Regis Legacy
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=Dr Watson is happy to be returning to Lyme Regis, and the woman he loves. He gets more than he bargained for, though, as he is quickly embroiled in a series of killings which bear strange resemblances to some of the cases he and Holmes have been involved in. The great detective joins him, with Lestrade following to assist in their investigations, and the trio realise that they are dealing with a haunting figure from their past...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780921004</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Garen Ewing
|title=The Rainbow Orchid: Adventures of Julius Chancer v. 3
|rating=4
|genre=Graphic Novels
|summary=Here we are, then, ten years after the debut of this graphic novel on the Internet, and finally the print trilogy is complete. At last we can see if our hero Julius, his chums, the shady Government people, and his enemy’s beautiful assassin aide who remains impossible to shrug off, manage to get anywhere near the fabled titular plant in its secret Himalayan location, and just how important it has been for all those many people left back in England. It’s been a rollercoaster ride, and it’s been worth it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405255994</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wendy Jones
|title=The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals
|rating=5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=It's Spring 1924 in South Wales, and young undertaker Wilfred is going to learn the hard way how serious the trivial can be. Fascinated by a girl's dress - worn very seductively by Grace, who he has met but twice as an adult - he blurts out a marriage proposal. As much as wants to take it back, she won't let him. He tries to move on, leaving her disappointed, especially when he falls for the daughter of a man he buries, but... There are things dangerously spoken, dangerously left unsaid, and a complex web of divided loyalties and enforced connections, in this brilliant debut novel.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780330561</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Watson
|title=Up Pohnpei: A quest to reclaim the soul of football by leading the world's ultimate underdogs to glory
|rating=4
|genre=Sport
|summary=I'm a huge fan of both football and reading, so a book about football is always likely to appeal to me as the best way of combining the two. Recently, I've read books set at the pinnacle of the game in [[Life with Sir Alex: A Fan's Story of Ferguson's 25 Years at Manchester United by Will Tidey]] and about one man's struggle to bring football to a foreign land in [[Bamboo Goalposts by Rowan Simons]]. ''Up'' ''Pohnpei'' is firmly in the latter category, treading very similar ground to Simons' book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668501X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Ruffle
|title=Sherlock Holmes and the Lyme Regis Horror - Expanded 2nd Edition
|rating=4
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=Taking a rare holiday on the Dorsetshire coast, Dr Watson manages to persuade Sherlock Holmes to join him. Delighted to spend time with his old friend Godfrey Jacobs, and charmed by widowed boarding house proprietor Mrs Heidler, the good doctor is set for a pleasant and relaxing stay – until mysterious events occur, pointing to an unimaginable evil, and the game’s afoot once more!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780920563</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Charlie Price
|title=Desert Angel
|rating=3.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Fourteen-year-old Angel is alone in an open desert. The man who killed her mother is relentlessly tracking her, and determined to see her buried. Just as she resigns herself to death, the local community suddenly take her in and give her a new identity and an opportunity to hide with a normal family. They believe that she'll be safe, but Angel knows better. She knows Scotty, and she knows that he won't give up so easily. Her constant paranoia threatens to drive a wedge between her and the family who have taken her in, but she is convinced that it is the only thing keeping her alive, and she might just be right.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552563366</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Auxier
|title=Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=From the very beginning of this delightful book you are left in no doubt about the extraordinary and magical adventures you will experience with Peter Nimble and his friends. As a baby Peter is found floating in a basket across the sea. The magistrates give him a name, as the law requires, then leave him to fend for himself. He is raised for a while by a cat, then adopted by Mr Seamus, a beggarmonger who trains him to steal and beats him regularly to ensure he learns his lessons well.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407120646</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sandra Horn and Ken Brown
|title=Tattybogle
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=At the start of this story, Tattybogle stands in the middle of the field in which he has stood for a long time. He is made of sticks and sacks, wears the farmer's old clothes and his head is full of straw and cheerful thoughts. It would seem that this scarecrow's life is a very good one especially when the wind blows because he likes a bit of a dance. He also likes the rain and when the stars twinkle at night.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1842706853</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Fadi Azzam and Adam Talib (Translator)
|title=Sarmada
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary='Sarmada' is small and remote village in the Northern hills of Syria, close to the Turkish border. And for much of Azzam's novel it seems a forgotten village, lost in the rituals and mysticism of ancient Druze belief and folk tales that inform the collective consciousness of the place. For the novel weaves the tales of three Syrian women and their relationships with each other, the men of their lives and the fabric of a life almost caught in the timeless past of the Middle East.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1906697345</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Derek Keilty
|title=Will Gallows and the Thunder Dragon's Roar
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Because this series revisits traditional western genre stories, this volume concerns the problems caused by settlers muscling in and making demands on the land and resources of the natives. Because it is also a fantasy series, the settlers are humans fleeing an earthquake-raddled territory for new lives where elves live, and if the cavalry are summonsed to take sides they'll do it on flying horses. And because this is a very enjoyable series, the fix half-human, half-elf Will Gallows - who could also qualify as a young member of the sky cavalry - finds himself in is a most compelling plot.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849393281</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Victoria Eveleigh
|title=Katy's Wild Foal
|rating=3.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=It snowed on Katy's birthday but something even more magical was going to happen that day. When she went out onto Exmoor she discovered a tiny newborn foal and its dam. With wobbly steps the foal walked right up to her and she was spellbound. It wasn't easy but she persuaded her father that the mare and foal needed help and he got them some hay. Katy couldn't ride but she still longed for that foal. ''Katy's Wild Foal'' is the story of the next year in Katy's life - and the life of the foal - and what a roller coaster it was going to be.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444005413</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ali Shaw
|title=The Man Who Rained
|rating=5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Do you remember being a child who had only just learned how to read? Do you remember the very first time you read a fairy story that no-one had told you before? Can you recapture the joy of entering a truly magical land and (for a time) believing it was real?
No? Then I recommend that you read Ali Shaw's second novel 'The Man Who Rained'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857890328</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Colin Grant
|title=I & I: The Natural Mystics
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=
Just mention the word reggae, and the name that nearly always springs to mind is that of Bob Marley and the Wailers. The music has always been very much a product of the Jamaican culture, nurtured in years of turbulent history. In this book Colin Grant, born in Britain of Jamaican parents, goes back deep into its roots, and in the process examines the childhood lives of the Wailers’ three main personalities, namely Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Neville Livingston, better known as Bunny Wailer, to provide an account of the group – but much more than that.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099526727</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Celia Rees
|title=This Is Not Forgiveness
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Jamie falls hook, line and sinker for Caro the moment he runs into her at the Rendez. He knows she's bad news. Everyone knows she's bad news. But he just can't help himself. Caro is strong, vital, secretive and beautiful and Jamie is a moth to her flame. He suspects there's someone else in her life but it doesn't make a difference. No matter what everyone else thinks, what his sister Martha says, Caro is not like any other girl Jamie knows. She's worth any risk, despite the disappearances, despite the odd tattoos and scars from self-harm. And there's also Rob. Back from Afghanistan with a shattered leg, Jamie's older brother is descending into a world of drink and drugs. He just can't fit back into small town life. Jamie wants to help him, but Rob is too unpredictable and unstable to reach.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408817691</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Anthony McGowan
|title=The Donut Diaries: Revenge is Sweet: Book Two
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Only the other week I was reviewing and enjoying a book styled as a young lad's diary, where the greatest insult was to call someone a doughnut. Here, the hero of a book styled as a young lad's diary, calls himself Donut. He does eat a lot of them, for one, and as a result has a bit of a muffin-top going on. His schoolfriends call him Donut too - those few friends he could gather together into a gang of outcasts and oddments in the first book of this series. In this first sequel, covering a couple of months in his second term, there is a very nasty problem, as Donut is framed for leaving unsavoury messages about the school.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0552564397</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Philip Palmer
|title=Artemis
|rating=4.5
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=With every novel, Philip Palmer is going from strength to strength. I've not always enjoyed his writing style, but his eye for a story is wonderful and his imagination is seemingly endless. Every time I open one of his novels, I wonder when he will find the limits of his inventiveness and it's never that time. ''Artemis'' is no exception to that rule.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1841499455</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Margo Lanagan
|title=The Brides of Rollrock Island
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=On Rollrock Island, the fishermen find their brides from the sea through the usurial offices of the witch Miskaella. They're selkies; seal women who shed their skins to become human. Their husbands are obsessed by them and the men without a selkie will risk anything to become part of the enchantment, even their human wives and children and half their lifetime earnings. Soon there are no human women left on Rollrock - the adults to the mainland and the female selkie babies to the ocean. There are just dads and mams and little boys.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857560336</amazonuk>
}}
