My top book choices of 2025 reflect my constant focus on story. I seek titles that stir my imagination or teach me something new. Although my go-to can often be soft crime I am forever on the lookout for challenging non-fiction. Women heroes, characters and writers always feature highly in my picks - maybe it's… Continue reading Best Picks 2025
Category: Best new reads
November Picks
Cleeves, Ann (2025) The Killing Stones. Macmillan. Shetland's Detective Jimmy Perez returns, now posted to Orkney with his life partner and boss Willow. When Jimmy's best friend Archie is killed by a blow to the head with a Neolithic stone this investigation becomes personal. As he and Willow scan the archipelago for clues two other… Continue reading November Picks
October Picks
Ware, Ruth (2025) The Woman in Suite 11. Gallery/Scout Press. This is a book where it would have been advantageous to have read its prequel The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016), now a Netflix movie, as many of the Cabin 10 characters crop up. Lo Blacklock, 10 years on, is invited to the opening of… Continue reading October Picks
August – September Picks
Hochschild, Arlie Russell (2024) Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right. The New Press. In an attempt to understand the Democrat-Republican divide, and how cultural identity influences politics, sociologist and emeritus professor Hochschild has followed on from her acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016),… Continue reading August – September Picks
July Picks
Harvey, Samantha (2023) Orbital. Grove Press. This 2024 Booker Prize winner is a slim, no plot work of fiction. It describes the experience of six astronauts in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) over sixteen orbits in one 24-hour period. There is little dialogue or interaction between the crew rather the focus is on… Continue reading July Picks
June Picks
Richell, Hannah (2025) One Dark Night. Simon & Schuster. In Thorncombe there is a haunted wood that lures people to their deaths. When a teenage schoolgirl from Folly View College is found dead the morning after Halloween, her body carefully arranged at the bottom of an old gothic folly, the community fears 'Sally in the… Continue reading June Picks
May Picks
Hall, Clare Leslie (2025) Broken Country. J.Murray. Gabriel was Beth's first love. She was seventeen when she met him but when he left it was Frank she married. Frank with whom she built a home and had a son. When Gabriel returns Beth's life is already in turmoil. Is this their second chance? Although recognising… Continue reading May Picks
April Picks
Purnell, Sonia (2024) Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. Viking. Pamela Churchill Harriman was an unsung power player of the twentieth-century; a strategic weapon and legend, cultural icon, hostess and a maligned courtesan who operated at the centre of politics across two continents. Purnell has sympathetically researched the life of Pamela… Continue reading April Picks
March Picks
Cher (2024) Cher: The Memoir, Part One. HarperCollins. After seven decades Cher's story is too big for one volume. In Part One we are taken from her mother Georgia's dark and unstable childhood, to Cher's less than normal upbringing - miserable hardship, multiple 'fathers', mother's constant search for fame, and always moving moving, until at… Continue reading March Picks
February Picks
Kim, Juhea (2024) City of Night Birds. HarperCollins. World-famous prima ballerina Natalia Leonova, after a two-year hiatus that saw her lost in pills and alcohol, is in crisis. Her life and career has unravelled. When she is given the opportunity to rehabilitate herself by dancing her signature role of Giselle, with the Mariinsky Ballet in… Continue reading February Picks
7:30 Bookclub 