To be clear, this is not a book about Martians, or even girls. The central character is a woman in her late thirties, Jean Beckett, a writer who lives in today’s London. She is writing…Read more…

I love time travel stories.  And I love history.  This book had a lot of promise.  The main character, Max (who’s female), is witty and loveable.  The book is full of action.  There are lots…Read more…

This is one of those books that I started to read, put aside, and then picked up much later and decided to give it a second chance. And it’s a good thing that I did….Read more…

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the murder of the Russian imperial family by the Bolsheviks. Among those killed were not only the hated Tsar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra, but also their…Read more…

It’s not a total mystery why I rate Mark Billingham as the best crime writer in Britain today. He’s created a wonderful lead character, Tom Thorne, with a great supporting cast who you…Read more…

No, not that candidate.  In spite of making every effort to keep up with today’s headlines (references to the Russian seizure of Crimea, North Korea’s nuclear programme and so on), author…Read more…

No, not that candidate.  In spite of making every effort to keep up with today’s headlines (references to the Russian seizure of Crimea, North Korea’s nuclear programme and so on), author…Read more…

This, the second of the Red Sparrow books, continues where the previous one left off, and offers more of the same. It’s written by a former CIA officer, so much of it has the ring…Read more…

Jason Matthews writes with such authority about the CIA that I kept thinking as I read this book — he’s either got a great imagination, or he was a player. It turns out to be…Read more…

This is normally the kind of book I love. A gritty, serial-killer crime novel set in today’s London. Having read a very favourable review, I thought I’d give it a chance. I have to say…Read more…

This books tells the tragic story of a group of young Georgian men (and one woman) who chose to hijack a Soviet airliner in November 1983 in an attempt to escape to the West. As…Read more…

Ian Kershaw’s book aims to answer just one question: why did the Germans continue to fight even after the second world war was clearly lost? He reviews a number of explanations given, ranging…Read more…

In this 290 page book, Donald Trump does not make an appearance until page 210. This is not what you’d have expected, given the media focus on the sacked FBI director’s account of his…Read more…

I first learned about this book because of the fact that in the BBC television series based on it, the creators decided to use the Georgian alphabet for one of the two cities — because…Read more…

To be honest, I bought this book in a small, independent bookshop in San Francisco, where I spotted it while browsing a few days earlier, and not on Amazon. I read it as a paperback,…Read more…

Rob Eagar’s book is actually a very good introduction to the subject of book marketing for authors. Though lacking in specifics on some things (like how to get speaking gigs), his emphasis is…Read more…