Kwok, Jean (2019) Searching for Sylvie Lee. Morrow. Golden girl Sylvie, flies to the Netherlands to visit her dying Grandmother, and then goes missing. Her distraught younger sister Amy sets off in search of her sister, retracing her movements and revealing long-hidden family secrets. At the heart of the mystery is Sylvie's upbringing, raised until… Continue reading December Picks
Tag: New Books
November Picks
Dukess, Karen (2019) The Last Book Party. H. Holt. A coming-of-age tale of Eve, a young woman with floundering literary ambitions, struggling to find her voice. During a Cape Cod summer Eve jumps at the chance to work as an assistant for famed New Yorker writer Henry Grey, only to discover that the literary world she… Continue reading November Picks
September – October Picks
Walker, Martin (2019) The Body in the Castle Well. Quercus. Bruno, my favourite policeman, in his 12th outing, again takes on a murder mystery in the Périgord (Dordogne). Claudia, an American art student, who has been studying the archives of an elderly art historian and war hero, is found dead at the bottom of a… Continue reading September – October Picks
August Picks
Walker, Wendy (2019) The Night Before. St Martin's Press. Rosie has spent most of her life worrying about her younger sister Laura. Laura is emotionally fragile, her life haunted by tragedy, but with an abiding desire for love and happiness. Rosie's peaceful family life is turned upside down when broken-hearted Laura returns to live with her.… Continue reading August Picks
July Picks
McLean, Felicity (2019) The Van Apfel Girls are Gone. Fourth Estate. The Van Apfel sisters, Hannah, Cordelia and Ruth, disappeared into the surrounding bushland during the school's Showstopper concert. Tikka was eleven in that summer of 1992 and now she has returned home to make sense of what happened to her friends. Does what she… Continue reading July Picks
June Picks
Sky, Emma (2019) In a Time of Monsters: Travels Through a Middle East in Revolt. Atlantic Books. After serving time in Iraq as a political advisor Emma Sky found no homecoming in the UK and soon returns to the Middle East. In her travels (2011-2016) she bears witness to the Arab Spring, and to the failures… Continue reading June Picks
April Picks
Swanson, Peter (2019) Before She Knew Him. W. Morrow. Hen and Lloyd are newly settled in the suburbs of Boston. When their next door neighbours, Mira and Matthew, invite them to dinner Hen spies a disturbingly familiar object in Matthew's office. It looks like something connected to an unresolved killing. The more Hen observes Matthew… Continue reading April Picks
February Picks
Plomin, Robert (2018) Blue print: How DNA makes us who we are. Allen Lane. All aspects of our personality are profoundly shaped by our inherited DNA. Plomin launches a rethink from a psychological perspective on who we are, arguing from the stance that nurture, whether at home, school or in our broader environment, is not… Continue reading February Picks
January Picks
Norton, Graham (2018) A Keeper. Hodder & Stoughton. Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother Patricia's death to sell her childhood home. While searching through her mother's belongings she finds some letters than send her off to solve the 40 year mystery of her paternity, leading to a little stone house in the shadows of… Continue reading January Picks
7:30 Bookclub 