Category: Uncategorized

Casual get together, as ever to review this month’s book: slight difference this month is that the author, Chris Power, will be joining us!  With reviews ranging from ‘a daring debut short story collection‘ and ‘more than the sum of its parts – not a clutch of episodes, but a single, unified, many-sided work, best read…

“I-i-i-i-i-i-it’s Chri-i-i-i-i-istmas!” or so yelped Noddy Holder. As such, it’s time for our annual Secret Santa. Pick a book off your shelf that you’ve love, love, LOVED and write a little note to explain why, but don’t sign off: it needs to be a surprise. Wrap it up in the cheapest wrapping paper you can find…

“Ingenious narration and a sinister air distinguish Ottessa Moshfegh’s brilliant novel Eileen” To close 2017, we’ll have a Christmas book with a difference. No chintzy Dickens, no poetic Thomas childhood recollection. Nope, we’ll be knocked flat by a narrative left turn of gut-curdling horror; what’s not to love and feel all festive about. Goodreads page

Very pleased to welcome, a neuroscientist and psychiatry lecturer at the Centre for Medical Education at Cardiff University and the author of the Guardian’s most-read science blog, Brain Flapping. He lives in Cardiff. We’ll be reviewing his book The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head is Really Up To

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic – but it owes its plot, characters and conclusion to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1920s novel We. Orwell even reviewed We, three years before publishing Nineteen Eighty-Four to universal acclaim. Goodreads page

Bapsi Sidhwa tells of a time and place of civil unrest, of wrecked friendships and betrayals of trust, of the sullen moods and sudden violence of sectarianism, of a moral wilderness redeemed only by the courageous good sense and pragmatic decency of a few individuals. The description might seem to fit any number of turbulent…

The precocious Tempest performed this long form poem on prime time, Saturday  night TV. We urge you to read the piece yourself and then see her perform it. We’ve not done poetry for some time, so we hope you’ll all embrace this! Goodreads page

From one sentence to one player. Science-fiction writer John Scalzi has aptly referred to “Ready Player One” as a “nerdgasm.” There can be no better one-word description of this ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture. Goodreads page

“An extraordinary hymn to small-town Ireland. One family man’s Day of the Dead in County Mayo after the boom and bust… This is a book about Mayo, Ireland, Europe, the world, the solar system, the universe.” Goodreads page

The great surprise on this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist. Published by tiny Scottish imprint Saraband, the novel initially attracted little attention and no mainstream reviews. It reads “as if Umberto Eco has been resurrected in the 19th-century Scottish Highlands.” Brilliantly unputdownable, it should have won the Man Booker. Which is probably why it didn’t.…