I really didn’t need an extra book to add to the leaning tower of Pisa next to my bed…but when in the library the other day with Little I, I couldn’t resist picking up Sweeth Tooth, the new novel by Ian McEwan that was on display. Dangerously I read the inside front cover, and the [...]

I read a lot of Stephen King as a teenager, but it’s been a good 15 years since I picked up anything by him. Yet something about 11.22.63 really intrigued me. Maybe it was the sheer weight of it – 740 pages no less! But I think it was the premise: if you had the [...]

Today is World Book Day, and I know many children have gone into school dressed as their favourite book character. Speaking personally, I have always loved a strong, unconventional heroine…and last night I finished reading ‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett, which just happens to contain one of the most loveable, inspirational female characters that I [...]

I love a good whodunit. In my child-free years I used to devour a crime novel in one sitting, but regrettably those reading days are over. Nevertheless, I love it when I come across a writer who keeps you guessing until almost the last page. Towards the end of last year I did a wee [...]

You will have been hard pressed not to have noticed the buzz surrounding Christos Tsiolkas’ novel The Slap throughout the second half of 2011. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, as well as being made into a TV drama that was recently aired on BBC4. Set in [...]

As a child I loved scratch ‘n sniff things. They were usually pleasant girly fragrances such as strawberry shortcake, roses, freshly baked bread, etc. I’m not sure if smells such as a stinky pond, smelly old shoes, garlic and farts would have appealed quite so much…and so the conservative me wonders if The Smelly Book [...]

Finding a book that’s of as much relevance to a parent as to a child is a rare and special find. Authors who can write successfully for such a vast age range are few and far between. The Man Who Planted Trees (or L’homme qui plantait des arbres’) by French author Jean Giono is a [...]

Last night I spent a couple of hours engrossed in the newly launched book ‘Jack Draws Anything’, kindly offered to me by Hodder Children’s Books for review. I couldn’t put it down until it was finished. I can truly say that the heart-warming account of six year-old Jack Henderson and his astonishing fundraising efforts for [...]

‘The hand that first held mine’ is Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel. It follows the lives of two women who are separated by 50 years. Lexie Sinclair, who has run away from her rural life in Devon to the bohemian milieu of 1950s Soho where her life becomes entwined with the eccentric but dashing magazine editor [...]

The word ‘haunting’ is overused within book reviews, but in the case of Every Last One by Anna Quindlen, I really can’t think of a more apt word to describe the book. But as a mother, it’s the sort of ‘haunting’ that stays with you and gets under your skin – you don’t want to [...]