I fell in love with the cover and the title and the conceit that the book is built around but I half expected to be disappointed, so many books don’t live up to their covers and so many clever conceits turn into pedestrian prose, but instead, I was deeply impressed by ‘The Kitchens Of The Great […]
Two years ago, in March 2020, we had the first COVID Lockdown in England. Hundreds of people were dying each day. The NHS was overwhelmed. The death rate peaked on 8th April 2020 when 1,076 people died of COVID in a single day. There was no vaccine and no strategy beyond stay at home to […]
So that was 2020. The first year of lockdown. The final year of Trump. The year the UK tumbled off the Brexit cliff. The year we had 73.000 people die of COVID-19 in the UK. It was a year when I stopped wanting reading to be challenging and just wanted it to take me somewhere […]
With the present on hold and the future looking turbulent, I’ve reacted by spending much of the last three months escaping into books. It’s worked quite well for me, with more than half of the forty-one books being four or five star reads. I’ve picked out the ten that I think were the most absorbing […]
This Friday, I’m out to have fun and I have three very different books to help me do it.
”The Starr Sting Scale’ by C.Es. O’Cinneide (2020), kicks off a new hard-edged, witty crime series about Candace Starr, a former professional hitwoman, trying to retire and not quite getting there.
”Like A House On Fire’ by Caroline Hulse (2020) is an English comedy about a disastrous family anniversary party attended by a recently divorced couple who haven’t had the courage to tell the wife’s parents that they are divorced.
‘Dread Nation’ by Justina Ireland (2019) is a Young Adult alternative history, coming of age book, set in a timeline where the American Civil War was ended by a zombie uprising, tells the story of Jane McKeene who has just landed her first post protecting a wealthy white family after graduating from ‘Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls’.
Mike Finn's Fiction 