|summary=American travel writer Julian Wells walks out of the house he shares with his sister, wanders down to the garden lake, rows himself out to the centre and slits his wrists. He dies alone as he silently watches his life drip into the water. Devastated, his friend and frequent travel companion Philip Anders, tries to come to terms with the loss the only way he can: by attempting to understand. Julian dedicated a book to Philip, mentioning a 'crime' that Philip had witnessed. Philip had always thought it to be a flip reference to his comment from years before that it would be a crime for Julian to waste time writing a certain piece, but, in the light of tragic events, is this actually the case? Is there a crime in the author's past? As Philip retraces the essence of Julian through his words, the places they visited and people they encountered he slowly uncovers secrets and a dangerous obsession.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908800143</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kylie Fitzpatrick
|title=The Silver Thread
|rating=4.5
|genre=Crime (Historical)
|summary=It's 1840 and Rhia Mahoney, daughter of an Irish merchant specialising in local linen, has a comfortable life. All that changes, however, as her father's warehouse burns down, taking his faltering business with it, ensuring Rhia must make her own way in the world. Via family connections she comes to England and the home of Quaker widow Antonia Blake. The idea is that Antonia will protect Rhia whilst she seeks a position as governess in bustling, alien London. But rather than residing in a sanctuary, her problems worsen as she's enveloped in a mystery leading to transportation despite her innocence. The only things holding her life together are the letters she writes to her dearly departed grandmother, her artistic skill and a determination to discover who wants her gone.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908800127</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Antonio Caluccio
|title=A Recipe for Life
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Antonio Carluccio is a name you know well if you've any interest in food and particularly Italian food. He's well known as a cook, restaurateur, deli owner, television personality and author. In everything he's done he's concentrated on the flavour of the food - this isn't the man to turn to if you're interested in fine dining as there's a lack of frills and ostentation - and he has his own phrase to describe his vision. 'Mof mof' stands for 'maximum of flavour and minimum of fuss'. He's a man after my own heart but when I thought about it I realised that I knew little, beyond the occasional news item, of Carluccio the man. His autobiography came at just the right time.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1742703925</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephanie Burgis
|title=A Reckless Magick
|rating=5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Kat's sister Angeline is about to be married, and the twelve-year-old witch is off to the wedding. But where Kat goes, chaos quite often follows, and this is no exception - can she fight off smugglers, make sure the wedding goes off smoothly despite Angeline's fiance's mother's objections, deal with the person following her, prepare for her Guardian initiation ceremony and find out the truth about her mother? I genuinely wasn't sure when reading this - as wonderful as Kat is, there are rather a lot of challenges there! It was a tense read which had me desperately hoping Kat would make it through.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848774850</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Diana McCaulay
|title=Huracan
|rating=4.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=1986 – 30-year-old Leigh McCaulay (''White gal!'') is returning to Jamaica, the land of her birth. Her mother is dead and there is an estate to be settled. Her estranged father is somewhere on the island. Her brother is in England. This isn't the closest of grieving families. Leigh doesn't even know how her mother died. Indeed, she's a bit surprised to find out she'd gone back to Jamaica. The residual family had left the island not long after the father's desertion.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845231961</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Crossan
|title=Breathe
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=When the trees were all felled to make crop land to feed an exploding population, oxygen levels on Earth fell. Eventually, the air became unbreathable. A government lottery decided who would live inside the life-saving Pod created by Breathe. Those left on the outside died. Years later, Pod society is divided into Premiums, who have easy lives, plenty of air and positions of power, and Auxiliaries, who labour at endless shifts and pay through the nose for enough oxygen to get by. A resistance group is trying to replant the Earth and reduce dependence on the Pod, but Breathe and the Pod Minister will stop at nothing to crush them.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408827190</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Sally Gardner
|title=Maggot Moon
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=There are certain books that you know, right from the first pages, are destined to be classics. There is something about the phrasing, about the concept and about the main character which chime so perfectly together that they cannot fail to move you, to open a window in your world and show you another, deeper truth. Such a book is 'Maggot Moon'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1471400042</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Jones
|title=Fifty Years In The Fiction Factory: The Working Life Of Herbert Allingham
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Herbert Allingham was one of the most prolific authors of his time. Between 1886 and his death in 1936 he was a busy writer of melodramatic serial stories in the mass-market halfpenny papers which flourished at the turn of the century. Yet nothing he wrote was ever published in book form with his name to it, and the magazine proprietors made fortunes while their authors were the unsung heroes of the trade.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1899262075</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Doggett
|title=The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The 1970s
|rating=4.5
|genre=Entertainment
|summary=With hindsight, it’s difficult to argue with the oft-expressed opinion that David Bowie was the single most important rock musician of the 1970s. Having been a perpetual ‘one to watch’ from around 1966 onwards but with only one hit during that decade, ‘Space Oddity’, from 1972 onwards he went through several remarkable self-reinventions in musical style, with an uncanny knack of being able to pre-empt the next big trend. In examining his whole career but focusing largely on his work throughout that particular decade, Peter Doggett looks specifically at every song he recorded, including cover versions. There are also boxed-out features on each album, and articles on related topics such as ‘The Art of Minimalism’ and ‘The Heart of Plastic Soul’. He concludes that by 1979 the man’s extraordinary creativity was more or less spent and his subsequent output, successful though it may have been, was in effect treading water up to his ‘elegant, unannounced retirement’ in 2007.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548879</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Elisabeth Beresford
|title=The Snow Womble
|rating=5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Bloomsbury have been doing a fabulous job bringing the equally fabulous Wombles to a new - and hopefully more environmentally aware - children. And they haven't forgotten either Christmas or the littlest members of the family. Here is a little story with a wintry theme featuring our favourite eco-lovers-not-fighers in picture book format.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408834243</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Holly Black
|title=Red Glove (Curse Workers 2)
|rating=4.5
|genre=Teens
|summary=Cassel lives in a world where magic is frowned upon. Practice is banned and everyone wears gloves to prevent being worked. Cassel himself is a transformation worker - the rarest type. And he is the most powerful transformation worker in living memory. This makes him extremely valuable to the crime families who use curses to support and maintain their empires. It also makes him extremely dangerous as far as the authorities are concerned. And that's why Cassel tries to keep his status to himself, since he discovered it in the [[The White Cat (Curse Workers, Book 1) by Holly Black|first book]] in this ''Curse Workers'' sequence.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0575096764</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Ilsa Bick
|title=Ashes
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Beware: it's impossible to review ''Shadows'' without giving spoilers for [[Ashes by Ilsa Bick|Ashes]], the first book in this dystopian trilogy, which ended on a huge cliffhanger.
The world has been devastated by a catastrophic electromagnetic pulse. Many of the young have become ''Changed'' - cannabilistic monsters with a penchant for violence. Alex was hiking in the wilderness when it all happened and although she isn't Changed, her senses have heightened and it seems the progression of her terminal brain tumour may have halted.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857382640</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Neal Shusterman
|title=Unwholly
|rating=5
|genre=Teens
|summary=
At last! It's been five years since ''Unwind'', Neal Shusterman's first book set in a dystopian future where teenage children are ''unwound'' - retroactively aborted to provide organs and limbs for transplant surgery. If you're an adult reader, the world of ''Unwind'' is very much like ''Never Let Me Go'' by Kazuo Ishiguro. ''Unwind'' had a profound effect on me - as the best books for children do - it was exciting, touching, shocking and, above all, fearless. But there were flashes of humour that made it all bearable.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857078623</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Drummond Moir (compiler)
|title=Just My Typo: From 'sinning with the choir' to 'the large hardon collider'
|rating=4
|genre=Humour
|summary=Warning: this book can seriously damage your reputation. Laughing in pubic will be the least of your worries. You will reach the stage where teas run down your face and you snort in politically incorrect fashion at the disfigured man who has always had a car on his face, or the one who could not find the cash to buy a house and had to burrow. You'll snigger at the charmless who become harmless but it will be up to you as to whether or not you agree that love is just a passing fanny. Personally I felt very sorry for the man who studied and became an unclear physicist.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444759973</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Victoria Glendinning
|title=Raffles And the Golden Opportunity
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Although Raffles has gone down in history as the founder of Singapore his roots were far from grand. He had no advantages apart from his own drive and determination and his professional life began with a lowly clerkship with the East india Company, then as large and ungainly as many a government. When he went abroad on behalf of the Company he quickly learned the merits of doing something and asking permission afterwards, not least because of the time taken to contact London and then receive a reply. Even if all went well this could take the best part of a year - by which time the original question could well be academic.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846686032</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Scarlett Thomas
|title=Monkeys with Typewriters: How to Write Fiction and Unlock the Secret Power of Stories
|rating=4
|genre=Reference
|summary=I really wasn't expecting a book about how to write fiction to change my TV viewing habits. Alter my reading? Possibly. Improve my writing? Hopefully. But watching Grand Designs in a completely different light?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0857863789</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Libba Bray
|title=The Diviners
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=1920's New York City. Jazz and gin mix with murder and mystery. For Evie O'Neill - fresh in from Ohio to the city of her dreams after her demonstration of a strange power caused a scandal in society - this is what she's always dreamed of. But dreams can become nightmares, and when Evie, her uncle Will and their friends find themselves trying to stop a serial killer, she'll have to use all of her wits, as well as her power, to stay alive.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1907410392</amazonuk>
}}
