'''Read [[Features|new features]].'''
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{{newreview
|author=Susan Maushart
|title=The Winter of Our Disconnect: How One Family Pulled the Plug and Lived to Tell/text/Tweet the Tale
|rating=4
|genre=Home and Family
|summary=Back in early 2009 Susan Maushart - a single mother of three teenagers - came to the conclusion that the family plugged into their workstations, TVs, DVD players, iPods and gaming consoles at the expense of normal relationships, or what we’ll come to call Real Life. She included herself in this - her relationship with her iPhone was about the strongest she had outside of her children - and she decided that something drastic had to be done. So began the winter of our disconnect - six months without screens of any description, mobile phones or listening devices in the home. You think that’s not enough of a shock to the system? Nor did Susan - she started off with two weeks without any power in the home.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668465X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kenneth D Alford and Theodore P Savas
These are three unlikely friends. Alex doesn't really want to do his A levels. He'd rather join his father in estate management. But his father feels he needs to connect with the world more, especially since his mother died, and so Alex goes along with his wishes with as glad a heart as he can manage. Max doesn't have much choice either. Expelled from his posh private school and a severe disappointment to his military family, Hammerton is his last chance to salvage some chance of a future. Levi provides the link between these two wildly different boys. He's an easygoing, happy-go-lucky lad whose dreams are much more about being a lover than a fighter.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1407129902</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Malouf
|title=The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
|rating=4
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=There's something quite uplifting about the physical brevity of David Malouf's 'The Happy Life' which is subtitled 'The Search for Contentment in the Modern World'. It suggests that it is easy to find, when of course, the whole point of the book is that despite, or perhaps because of, scientific and technological advances that have taken away many of the causes of true unhappiness in the world, it remains elusive for most. Who can say that they are truly happy? The book runs to less than 100 pages if you take out the Notes section, and the typeface is large. It is, by any reckoning a slim offering.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0701187115</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matthew Hollis
|title=Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Most historians tend to refer to Edwardian England as the thirteen-year interlude between the Victorian era and the shots at Sarajevo which precipitated the First World War, an era of relative stability. However, there had been ominous rumblings from the new order of things during the two years or so prior to June 1914, particularly from a new spirit among the younger literary generation. The old Victorian writers, notably the uniquely terrible Poet Laureate Alfred Austin (doubtless a very good man, but an almost comically inept writer of verse) were dismissed as irredeemably old hat by the likes of Rupert Brooke and W.H. Davies. For a short time London was the poetry capital of the world, and the book opens with the opening in January 1913 of Harold Monro’s poetry bookshop in Bloomsbury, which rapidly became a magnet for the self-proclaimed Georgian poets and readers.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0571245986</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Frank Cottrell Boyce
|title=The Unforgotten Coat
|rating=4.5
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=Julie lives in Bootle and is in her last year of primary school. She's like every little girl, hoping to be invited to her friends' houses for tea and just beginning to think about boys. She's never thought much about the world outside Bootle but the arrival of Chingis and his younger brother Nergui is about to change all that. The two boys are nomads from Mongolia and they arrive at school on a hot summer's day, wearing traditional Mongolian furry coats and hats. Taking a shine to Julie, Chingis appoints her his Good Guide to the UK. And in return he tells her stories of horsemen and eagles and shows her Polaroid photos of a land far away.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1406333859</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Julia Blackburn
|title=Thin Paths: Journeys in and Around an Italian Mountain Village
|rating=4
|genre=Biography
|summary=Julia Blackburn had known Herman for many years, but they had drifted apart. She put the postcard which she received from him in an album: it mentioned a cottage he had discovered in Liguria and which he was renovating. Some time later there was another postcard and an invitation to visit. Over time the cottage would become her home and Herman her husband. 'Thin Paths' is the stories of the people who inhabit this harsh, wild landscape and of the way in which the landscape has formed the people. The thin paths join the people and the places together in a way of life which is rare.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224090682</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Carrie Jones and Steven E Wedel
|title=After Obsession
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Aimee Avery isn't a normal teenage girl. She has supernatural abilities – Aimee is a healer. But something evil is calling to her to the River, like her mother who drowned in the River. Aimee's mum had supernatural abilities too, and was branded insane by those around her. But was she? Or is there something really out there killing people in the river? Was Aimee's mum's suicide a suicide at all?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408818272</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Burnside
|title=A Summer of Drowning
|rating=3.5
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=''A Summer of Drowning'' is a book in which for much of the time not a lot happens - but always spookily. Set on the Norwegian island of Kvaløya in the Arctic Circle, the story is narrated by Liv who is now 28 but who recalls events of a summer when she was 18. Liv resides with her artist mother in, if not isolation, then certainly seclusion. The book makes much of the midsummer madness that 24 hour daylight induces and in that respect it is wholly successful. It aims for a dream-like and timeless quality which it largely achieves.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>022406178X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jean Marsh
|title=The House of Eliott
|rating=4.5
|genre=Women's Fiction
|summary=When Evangeline and Beatrice's father dies, the two sisters discover that he has left them with very little money and without any qualifications with which to support themselves. They struggle to find suitable employment before accidentally discovering their talents as seamstresses and fashion designers. The book follows their journey of independence after their father's death, and the new relationships they begin to build without him dominating their lives.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>144720008X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Damian McNicholl
|title=Twisted Agendas
|rating=3
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=Writing about Ireland and the Irish, especially the dimension of the Troubles and the IRA, from a third hand American perspective is a recipe for cliché and stereotype. Balancing and interweaving the story of American journalist Piper with that of Irishman Danny's search for independence in London does enable McNicholl in some part to achieve a wry and knowing stance, making us hope for a clever twist away from the predictably which always seems so close.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1908248025</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Kristina Stephenson
|title=Sir Charlie Stinky Socks and the Tale of the Terrible Secret
|rating=4
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=The brave and bold Sir Charlie Stinky Socks and his companions - who are, as I am sure you already know by now, his good grey mare and his pet cat, Envelope - are led to a castle that teeters on top of a hill from which strange cries are heard. Sir Charlie knows that even though he is a bit scared, he must be brave and put right the terrible thing that has happened in the tall, tall tower (with the pointy roof). And so our hero's tale begins…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1405253975</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Denise Kiernan
|title=Signing Their Rights Away
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=
Many Americans believe that the Declaration of Independence is the cornerstone of the American democracy, the fountain-head of the American Way of Life and the American Dream. The 4th of July is the national holiday and often thought to be the single most important date in American history.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>159474520X</amazonuk>
}}
