News & Reviews

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates   Words, books, writing, storytelling — the power to haunt, to change the world. With the force of a prosecutor and the lyricism of a poet, Coates takes us with

You can support our bookshop and promote your business to our community by advertising with us. Our reading guides are more than a catalogue for Christmas shoppers. Our next edition features cover art by

    THE MIGHTY RED by Louise Erdrich   One of those books you can’t wait to get home to. Funny and tragic in equal measure, The Mighty Red is a quixotic look at how

There is much doubt cast on Rooney’s talent as a writer, particularly following the wild success of Normal People. She is habitually positioned in a binary: a once-in-a-generation genius or over-rated, her prose hollow

  In minute-by-minute, fast-paced, riveting detail, Ben Macintyre,  tells the story of the seizure of the Iranian embassy in London in April 1980, a crisis largely over shadowed by the Americans being held hostage

A riveting family memoir. The author’s father was a soldier in Mao’s army in the 1950s.   His loyalty turned to disenchantment and escape to America.   Wong was New York Times bureau chief

Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart — Again, by Robert Kagan.   The next time someone asks me to ‘explain America’ — how can Trump be so popular; why is the country so politically

Two Irish football superstars find themselves in court facing sexual assault charges. Robbie is cocky, entitled, privileged; Evan, reserved, self-made, escaping a poor and difficult upbringing. All evidence points to their guilt. As the

A perfectly immersive novel for devouring in a day. The Heart in Winter is a classic Western, a tale of two love bitten vagabonds on the run with destruction and revenge  at their heel. I’m

Set in 17th Century UK and The Netherlands, Lauren Chater’s historical fiction novel “The Beauties” follows the lives of three individuals existing in close connection to the Royal Family. Emilia Lennox, a young married

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson   So much of what we know about China today comes from people who no longer live there.   “Sparks” is brilliant

“James” by Percival Everett It has been a long time since a book grabbed me in the opening pages and kept me reading unable to put it down. James is the runaway slave on

Acerbic. Iconoclastic. Sui generis.  All fit Kara Swisher, who has chronicled the rise of digital, the reading news not on paper but on mobile phones; of Netflix and streaming services disrupting Hollywood. In sketches

The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt We overprotect children in the real world and underprotect them online. It’s like sending them to Mars, with no protections. Play-based childhood has been replaced by phone-based childhood. The

How To Win An Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, Peter Pomersantsev If you thought disinformation was a phenomenon of social media, you will be transfixed by how Hitler used ‘propaganda’ (‘disinformation, by