Category: Book Review

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Pine by Francine Toon

Publisher: Black Swan Ireland
Publication Date: 01/10/2020
Length: 325 pages
Genre: Gothic | Horror | Thriller

CW: n/a

Blackwells.co.uk

Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she’s gone.

In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren’s mother a decade ago.

Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father’s turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.

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My Brother by Karin Smirnoff

Firstly, a huge thank you to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publication Date: 04/02/2021
Length: 320 pages
Genre: Translated Fiction | Contemporary Fiction | Family & Relationships

CW: Domestic violence, child abuse, sexual assault, animal abuse, suicide, incest.

Blackwells.co.uk

Jana is returning to see her twin brother Bror, still living in the small family farmhouse in the rural north of Sweden. It’s decrepit and crumbling, and Bror is determinedly drinking himself to an early grave. They’re both damaged by horrific childhood experiences, buried deep in the past, but Jana cannot keep running.

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Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

Firstly, huge thank you to Faber & Faber for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: 04/02/2021
Length: 336 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction | Historical Fiction

CW: Homophobia, racism, violence

Blackwells.co.uk

Lunchtime, a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in southeast London has a new delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages – after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. In it were five little children. Atomised.

Who were they? What future did they lose? Running another reel, another version of time, Perpetual Light is the rest of the twentieth century as the five children’s destinies were extended. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs, disasters; of second chances and redemption, all amidst the bustling, humming multitudes of London.

Five lives and stories told in beams of light, not ends.

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Of Magpies and Men by Ode Ray

Firstly, huge thank you to Ode Ray for sending me a copy of her novel in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: Self-Published
Publication Date: 02/02/2020
Length: 330 pages
Genre: Mystery | Thriller | Contemporary Fiction

CW: References to homophobia, domestic violence

Blackwells.co.uk

Can any good come of longings that a person can never satisfy? If so, good for whom?

Two corpses wash ashore in a picturesque Italian village, the violence that put them there is bound to a long-held secret and two strangers living worlds apart with seemingly nothing in common.

Benedict Grant a wealthy Londoner, leading a lonely life. Marie Boulanger a nurse and single mum, struggling to make ends meet in Marseille.

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Blog Tour – Crow Court by Andy Charman

Welcome to my stop on the Crow Court blog tour! Huge thanks to Random Things Tours for giving me the opportunity to take part in this! I was provided a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: Unbound
Publication Date: 21/01/2021
Length: 316 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction | Mystery

CW: sexual assault, child abuse, murder, suicide

Blackwells.co.uk

Spring, 1840. In the Dorset market town of Wimborne Minster, a young choirboy drowns himself. Soon after, the choirmaster—a belligerent man with a vicious reputation—is found murdered, in a discovery tainted as much by relief as it is by suspicion. The gaze of the magistrates falls on four local men, whose decisions will reverberate through the community for years to come.

So begins the chronicle of Crow Court, unravelling over fourteen delicately interwoven episodes, the town of Wimborne their backdrop: a young gentleman and his groom run off to join the army; a sleepwalking cordwainer wakes on his wife’s grave; desperate farmhands emigrate. We meet the composer with writer’s block; the smuggler; a troupe of actors down from London; and old Art Pugh, whose impoverished life has made him hard to amuse.

Meanwhile, justice waits…

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Blog Tour – The Invitation by Katie Webster

Welcome to my stop on the The Invitation blog tour! Huge thanks to Random Things Tours for giving me the opportunity to take part in this! I was provided a copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: The Conrad Press
Publication Date: 07/08/2020
Length: 198 pages
Genre: Fantasy | Middle Grade

CW: Domestic violence, child abuse

Blackwells.co.uk

On the island kingdom of Meta Emery, a young queen, Abigail, wakes in the middle of the night to a terrifying realisation; hostile wizards from the rival kingdom of Archmond have finally done what they’ve been threatening to do: bring a girl, Lucy, into this world to destroy the queen and all she has worked for. Hundreds of miles west, in Archmond itself, a great feast unfolds in the castle to celebrate Lucy’s arrival. Soleman, one of the wizards and a co-ruler of Archmond, has spread the news to his people that Lucy is the heroine an ancient prophecy predicted; he promises that the discord throughout their world will soon be over. But his fellow ruler Ronald remains dubious that this apparently meek and troubled girl could really overthrow Abigail, or whether she is ever likely to want to.

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