Cabbie Monaco

Before picking up The Hare With Amber Eyes , I was under the impression it was fiction. My heart sank on discovering it's a family mem...

Claire Douglas isn't writing books for people like me, but nevertheless I do have some positive things to say about The Couple at No. 9...

In the early 1970s Mum's American pen friend and family paid us a visit on their way home from Iran; the husband was something in US di...

Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe is one of those books where it pays to read something about it before you start. It's the sort of...

Some of the books I read for Book Club are really not my sort of thing . I like to think I read them with good grace, and I really do try t...

It's not often I read a book that starts at the end, tells the story, and then ends at the beginning, but this is exactly what VS Naipa...

I didn't have high expectations for Sarah Haywood's The Cactus . Goodreads places it in the Chick Lit category, and it's been ...

Who would want to be a teenager again? Not me. Nor, I imagine, the fictional narrator of Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults . T...

Damon Galgut won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise , but at book club we decided first to read his 2003 shortlisted The Good Doctor . ...

Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and praised as an excellent example of historical fiction that e...

Beautiful Antonio ticked a lot of my boxes. It's set between WW1 and WW2, with themes including fascism, hypocrisy, and gender inequa...

In simple terms, Autumn is about the relationship that develops between a 9-year-old girl called Elisabeth, and her elderly next door nei...

Convenience Store Woman is about Miss Furukura. " Everyone thought I was a rather strange child ", she says, and it was only wh...

I'd come across Bernardine Evaristo's 2001 book, The Emperor's Babe , in a search for fiction based in Roman times. It had won...

Is the The Swans of Fifth Avenue a fairytale? In the Preface Melanie Benjamin describes the eponymous swans as if they really are talking...

Hamnet is the name of Shakespeare's son who died aged 11, but the book is not really about him, it's about his mother Anne, or Ag...

Sometimes you'll be watching a movie or TV series that portrays the ideal family, one where problems are discussed and resolved, where...

These days it's impossible to read a book without the gloomy cloud of Covid looming above me. Unfortunately Caroline Blackwood's G...

Maria Dahvana Headley's The Mere Wife opens with a female soldier, Dana Mills, "facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dea...

" Her name was Leila. Tequila Leila, as she was known to her friends and her clients. " Elif Shafak's 10 Minutes 38 Seconds ...