Doting wife, devoted husband, cherished child. Merry, Sam and Conor are the perfect family in the perfect place. Merry adores baking, gardening, and caring for her infant son, while Sam pursues a new career in film. In their idyllic house in the Swedish woods, they can hardly believe how lucky they are. What perfect new lives they've built for themselves, away from New...

There's no real way around saying this. The Pisces is about a passionate and erotic love affair with a mer-man. Hats off to the cover designer who really nailed the brief. As a floundering PhD student, Lucy is despondent, unfulfilled and recently heartbroken after her long term relationship ends with a doughnut fueled breakdown. She spends the summer house-sitting for her sister and the...

"In the arid summer heat, four children – Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom – find themselves abruptly orphaned. All the routines of childhood are cast aside as the children adapt to a now parentless world. Alone in the house together, the children’s lives twist into something unrecognisable as the outside begins to bear down on them." I'm going to start by saying I...

"This is a story of something like survival..." Sal planned it for almost a year before they ran. She nicked an Ordnance Survey map from the school library. She bought a compass, a Bear Grylls knife, waterproofs and a first aid kit from Amazon using stolen credit cards. She read the SAS Survival Handbook and watched loads of YouTube videos. And now Sal knows...

gloaming ˈɡləʊmɪŋ' noun literary twilight; dusk. "hundreds of lights are already shimmering in the gloaming" To say I read The Gloaming would be something of an understatement. This is one of those rare books that has such a hypnotic influence on you that instead of actively reading it, it kind of happens to you. Set on a remote Scottish island cloaked in folktales of...

"It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes." Spell-binding and acutely observed, The Immortalists spans over a hundred years of American...

How do you rescue someone who has already been found? Imagine if Labyrinth's Sarah Williams had a Mum who completely freaked out when she went off on an adventure with Jareth. That's the best way I can describe Whistle in the Dark. Emma Healey presents a British suburban family drama with undercurrents of bizarre surrealism. Main character Jen is at a loss when her teenage daughter Lana...

I had another reading drought at the beginning of March which saw me starting numerous books only to abandon them or get distracted by a zillion other things. Luckily a train ride home from my parents' house at the start of the week meant that I had very little phone signal and my Kindle was fully charged and loaded with NetGalley goodies. I...

The Customs House by Andrew Motion has been on my TBR pile for the past few months. I keep being drawn back to this collection of poetry, written partly inspired by soldiers' experiences from 1914, his father's own experiences of D-Day and then much later on, inspired by marriage. Andrew depicts landscapes and topographies which are wrapped up in the intimate memories of marriages....

Set in the hot summer of 1986, with powerful waves, open skies and bold cliffs, I was going to be biased from the first page. It's set in Cornwall, my favourite place!  Located on the dramatic coastline of Cape Cornwall, The Cliff House offers an escape from isolation and loneliness for sixteen year old Tamsyn. Spending her summer holidays obsessively spying on the...

The Cactus fits perfectly in the nook carved out by Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Warm, uplifting, funny and bittersweet, Sarah Haywood's book will make you cringe, laugh and get stingy eyes.  Susan Green is a forty-five year old independent woman who owns her own flat, has a full-time job, a long term, convenient lover,...

'I can feel it swimming through my veins like glitter ... it's liquid gold.' Lexi Volkov is a socialite hotel heiress who finds herself admitted to the Clarity Centre, a rehabilitation unit for the under twenty-threes. In denial of her drug problem she lashes out and initially resists the help of the doctors and staff.  As the days in isolation pass and Lexi's body goes through...

A thrilling YA thriller that leaps from suburban England to the favelas of Rio.  The Truth & Lies of Ella Black has all the necessary ingredients to fly you through the pages and keep you wanting more.  Ella Black is an ordinary school girl living in Kent with her two best friends. She's quiet and nice and often over looked when the popular girls are around. ...

I adored We Were Liars (heartbreaking, I literally read it in one sitting and cried at the end). I had high hopes for Genuine Fraud and I wasn't disappointed.  This is a psychological thriller with a pathological liar at its heart.  Jule is the protagonist (or antagonist if you want to be fancy) and she has the ruthless survival skills of a trained assassin....