Book Reviews
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Book ReviewsThe Blackhouse
Detective Fin McLeod returns to his childhood home, the Isle of Lewis, for the first time in 17 years to investigate a brutal murder. Rediscovering the islan... Read more »| 25 Feb 2011 -
Book ReviewsThe Shard Box by Liz Niven
In a new collection of poems about her experiences in China, Liz Niven seems the perfect traveller. She’s adventurous in confronting the cultur... Read more »| 24 Feb 2011 -
Book ReviewsThe Celestial Cafe by Stuart Murdoch
The Celestial Café is the first book by Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch. Written in diary-form it gives the reader an insight into the min... Read more »| 23 Feb 2011 -
Book ReviewsJamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch
The whistle stop nature of this simple adventure story is a bit deceiving. Jaf's account of growing up in London, mid-nineteenth century, combines br... Read more »| 22 Feb 2011 -
Book Reviews
Twenty-One Locks
There are 21 locks in a canal running through a standard-issue north Lancashire town, the nondescript anonymity of the village perfectly befitting Je... Read more »| 22 Feb 2011 -
Book ReviewsProust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer’s exploration into that old Science vs. Art debate throws up some refreshing and thought-provoking messages. Lehrer takes his mode... Read more »| 28 Jan 2011
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Book Reviews
The Liberation of Celia Kahn by J. David Simons
Set against the background of rent strikes, anti-war sentiment and a revolution brewing in Russia, a young Jewish woman from the Gorbals gains her first tast... Read more »| 27 Jan 2011 -
Book Reviews
The Kellys of Kelvingrove by Margaret Thomson Davis
The past, they say, is another country – even a past as relatively close to us as 40 years ago – when a decaying Glasgow, still raw after the Ibr... Read more »| 26 Jan 2011 -
Book Reviews
Wartime Notebooks by Marguerite Duras
The posthumous publication of a writer’s early notebooks and drafts can often feel like a cynical opportunity, or a desk-clearing exercise of little in... Read more »| 26 Jan 2011 -
Book Reviews
Treblinka by Chil Rajchman
Chil Rajchman’s memoir of mass extermination in the Nazi death camp of Treblinka is unhysterical in tone, but harrowing in effect. Its spare, unsensati... Read more »| 25 Jan 2011 -
Book Reviews
The Breakers by Claudie Gallay
Villages at the end of the earth share a degree of uniformity in that through their inhospitable settings and eccentric communities, they have an ability to ... Read more »| 25 Jan 2011 -
Book Reviews
The Legacy by Kirsten Tranter
A literary novel that borrows elements from Portrait of a Lady and The Big Sleep sounds a bit too literary and not very novel. But The Legacy isn&rs... Read more »| 05 Jan 2011 -
Book Reviews
The Passages of Herman Melville by Jay Parini
Jay Parini's last novel was The Last Station, about the final days of Tolstoy. How to follow up a novel about the writer of War and Peace? With a novel about... Read more »| 05 Jan 2011 -
Book Reviews
The One O'Clock Gun
The One O'Clock Gun, which regularly startles unwary tourists and is an instinctive time-check for the locals, is a well-established institution at t... Read more »| 21 Dec 2010 -
Book Reviews
Stramash by Daniel Gray
Somewhat unusually, Daniel Gray has followed up Homage To Caledonia, his book about the Scots who fought in the Spanish Civil War, with a book about lower di... Read more »| 14 Dec 2010