If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, its never good news, begins Stormbreaker, the first in Anthony Horowitzs bestselling Alex Rider series. I would definitely concur. The...

Back when I was in uni I had a bit of an affair with the short fiction of Jeffrey Ford. Though not the most elegant writer out there, his work is famously strange, wide-reaching and wide-ranging. Of his long-form work Id only read bizarre and eerie'The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, which I remember quite enjoying, particularly as I read it around the same...

  Well, hello there, deja vu. It was only a few weeks ago that I was reviewing Louise Limericks'Lucindas Whirlwind, a novel about a career-minded aunt called in as a last-minute caretaker after her sister has jet-set off overseas, and here I am reviewing a book that covers some very similar ground. Mysterious how these things work,...

Ah, here I am once again feeling a touch embittered about the fact that Ive been misled entirely by a books cover. I know, I know, dont judge a book and all that, but honestly, if we werent supposed to do so, then we wouldnt have covers, would we? Ive had'Lucindas Whirlwind'sitting in my to-read pile for a...

Im always surprised to read that readers find it easier to get into the head of a first person narrator. For me, theres something about an essentially nameless character that is immensely disorienting and distancing. Second person is even worse, bringing with it the weird double-think that it does, and unnamed thirds are a lesson in nominative...

I have to say that on the whole I dont associate hospitals with romance, perhaps because generally the time Ive spent in hospitals has been visiting the ill, the infirm and the gratuitously sillythe last largely being that subset of the world that is my husbands family, a group who manage to get themselves into all sorts of bizarre...