Book reviews, new books, publishing news, book giveaways, and author interviews

Review: Lifesaving for Beginners by Ciara Geraghty

Review: Lifesaving for Beginners by Ciara Geraghty

If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! My primary school was a tiny place, one so small that it had no play area to speak of. It did, however, look on to a vast park that wasand still isa favourite landing place for the citys hot air...

Review: Welcome to the Great Mysterious by Lorna Landvik

Review: Welcome to the Great Mysterious by Lorna Landvik

  Well, hello there, deja vu. It was only a few weeks ago that I was reviewing Louise Limericks'Lucindas Whirlwind, a novel about a career-minded aunt called in as a last-minute caretaker after her sister has jet-set off overseas, and here I am reviewing a book that covers some very similar ground. Mysterious how these things work,...

Baked beans, flashbacks and The Self-Preservation Society by Kate Harrison

Baked beans, flashbacks and The Self-Preservation Society by Kate Harrison

As we speak my mother-in-law is planning for the apocalypse. Or, at least, three days worth of the apocalypse, which she is expecting to coincide (perhaps fittingly enough) with her husbands sixtieth birthday. Her laundry is a-glug with bottled water, her pantry stocked with starches galore, and shes planning on hitting the supermarket the...

The purpose of chick-lit and Debby Holts Recipe for Scandal

The purpose of chick-lit and Debby Holt's Recipe for Scandal

Earlier this year I read Stephen Mays Life! Death! Prizes! (review) a title that refers to protagonist Billys nickname for those trashy magazines they stock by the counters of supermarkets and newsagents, the ones filled with stories about bizarre diseases, disturbingly weird relationships and twins separated at birth, and which are typically...

Evil in-laws, spineless husbands and Kirsty Crawfords The Secret Life of Husbands

Evil in-laws, spineless husbands and Kirsty Crawford's The Secret Life of Husbands

Goodness. And I thought I had some interesting in-laws to deal with, what with the whole being asked to sleep in cemeteries thing, helping to prepare for the end of the world, nodding along with Chinese karaoke, ignoring my father-in-laws penchant for getting around in a Ministry of Sound Jacket, and pretending that of course I love the taste of durian,...

Interview: There will always be stories about women finding their way in the world, says author Jane Heller

Interview: 'There will always be stories about women finding their way in the world,' says author Jane Heller

'When my first novel (Clean Sweep, formerly titled Cha Cha Cha) was published in 1994, the term chick lit hadnt even been invented,' says bestselling author Jane Heller. At the time she was told that she was writing 'contemporary women's fiction'. It was a categorisation she assumed was used strictly for booksellers so...