Books

Mhairi McFarlane’s 2020 novel If I Never Met You has been on my ‘to be read‘ list for a while – and I am so happy that I finally got around to it. The story revolves around thirty-six-year-old Laurie. She’s a lawyer, one of the best at her firm. Her partner, Dan, dumps her after […]

Such A Fun Age is Kiley Reid’s debut novel and she comes out swinging with this fantastic piece of writing. The story focuses on Emira, a nanny for a wealthy family. She’s a young black woman whose life is turned upside down when she is accosted by a security guard in a grocery shop, assuming […]

Country idol Dolly Parton has announced that she is writing her first novel. Parton will team up with novelist James Patterson, for her debut named Run, Rose, Run. There will also be a 12-track album based on the characters and plots in the book with lyrics even featuring in Run, Rose, Run. At the centre […]

The reputation of Where the Crawdads Sing is gigantic. 72-year-old zoologist Delia Owens’ debut novel has garnered the best reviews from critics around the world, and sat on The New York Times Best Fiction Sellers list for 124 weeks. Is this novel – the one about an abandoned young child who learns to survive all alone in […]

The Bridgerton hype is going nowhere fast. That is almost one hundred percent guaranteed – and the books are no different. After living above a rock, I have obviously seen Netflix’s adaptation of Bridgerton more times than I care to recall. However, as we all know, I am an avid reader and so, naturally, have […]

5/5 If you’ve ever read a book review by yours truly before, you’ll know it’s rare I award five stars. They are reserved for special works of art – and Sally Rooney’s Normal People is exactly that. In fact, Normal People is a masterpiece. I first heard of the book when it was broadcast as […]

4.5/5 About five years ago in my youth youth, I put a film called Atonement on one Sunday afternoon. From the beginning, I was hooked. I then found out it was a book. Five years later, one pandemic-stricken summer, I bought the book and kept it next to my bed until I was free to […]

4.5/5 Kindness. Wisdom. Courage. Those are the three things that L. Frank Baum’s most famous children’s book, The Wizard of Oz, is about. Those three things and, of course, the ever-important lesson that home really is where the heart is. At the ripe age of 20, I eventually dug into Baum’s children’s classic, 120 years […]

4/5 Books written today are usually lacklustre and fail to hit the mark. But Tom Bradby’s (yes – that’s Tom Bradby from ITV News at Ten) latest novel, Double Agent, is far from lacklustre and absolutely hits the mark. Double Agent picks up where its sister novel Secret Service left off: MI6 agent Kate Henderson […]

Do you enjoy being entertained? Do you like funny jokes? Do you like learning top secret pranks? Well if you do, then The Beano comic is for you. In my opinion, The Beano is Britain’s best comic and is home to comic legends the Bash Street Kids. They have super skills…and maximum chaos! Bu please, […]

4.5/5 Published in 2010, Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero is a great young adult book. Best for those over the age of 13, it is part of a pentalogy of fantasy novels written by Riordan. At the beginning of The Lost Hero, Jason doesn’t remember anything before waking up on a school […]

World Book Day is always one of the best days in the calendar for children in particular. It’s a day that celebrates literature and creativity, encouraging children to embrace their own creative abilities and to really think hard about books and stories and characters. So, of course, we thought we’d share our top five literary […]

At some point, we’ve all wished we had magical powers. Well, the following individuals on this list were granted that dream and, as far as we’re concerned, squandered it. Consider the following magicians, wizards or sorcerers who majorly wasted their abilities. Gandalf (Lord of the Rings) The Fellowship of the Ring’s resident wizard, Gandalf is, […]

As September marks the birth month of one of children’s literature’s most influential authors, thousands of parents and their sons and daughters will be celebrating Roald Dahl Day. Each year, Dahl’s birthday is celebrated with a ‘wonderful array of events’ according to the official website, including a party at the Roald Dahl Museum in Great […]

There are some truly reprehensible villains out there. In both fiction and reality. Sometimes though, the bloke posited as our ultimate bad guy isn’t half as bad as the slimeball in the background. Here are our picks for the characters who, honestly, were worse than the official antagonist. Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter) If you’ve ever […]

Weird, I’ve never reviewed a comic before. Let’s give a shot, starting with the latest from Marvel Comics, Venomverse. As we already know, when it comes to comic books, there are thousands of alternate universes. From Spider-Man being Gwen Stacey in one, to Spider-man (and everyone else) being zombies. It’s a way to form countless […]

Harry Potter has brought joy to millions of people around the world. Now it’s doing it again, but for some weird reasons. Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash is a new story created by a predictive keyboard. The story is ridiculous and hilarious. It was created by […]

One of the most read books in the world has been made into a comic-book format, visualising what the young girl must have gone through all those years ago. The diary, which Anne Frank nicknamed Kitty, has been given a splash of colour by the creators of Oscar-nominated animation Waltz with Bashir, with an animated […]

You know, the thought of books being banned due to their content, for the creative vision of an author to be banned in certain countries, must be a hard pill to swallow. If you’re in school you may have seen displays showing the books that certain people may not want you reading. But these aren’t […]

Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened, detailing the events that led to her loss in the 2016 presidential election, has sold 300,000 copies according to the publisher Simon & Schuster. The sales included 167,000 hardback copies as well as e and audio books. This makes for the biggest opening week of a non-fiction hardcover in five years. […]

Whether you’re writing an academic essay, doing research for an article or just trying to better your understanding of a subject, you will at some point in your life have to read a ‘boring book’. If your subject area is science, politics, or just anything that is detailed and complicated, it is near impossible to […]

At the Star Wars Celebration last week, it was revealed that a new book, called Inferno Squad, will reveal and set up the characters and plot for Battlefront II. The book itself will take place after Rogue One, after the Rebels successfully humiliated the Empire by stealing the Death Star plans. The publisher’s description read: […]

Marvel’s vice president of sales has comment on the declining sales of comic books, blaming the studio’s efforts at diversifying their character roster. In recent years Marvel has expanded its wealth of diverse characters. They made Iceman gay, Thor is now a woman, and they made the new Spider-Man mixed race. But maybe that’s the […]

Any woman who wants to educate herself on the suffragette movement should read this book. Any woman who wants to pay some sort of homage to those who fought for her vote in this country should read this book. Any person – irrespective of gender – who wants to learn about a part of British […]

“Libraries symbolise a commitment to learning, community and equality that can no longer be taken for granted.” That is a quote from comedian and actor David Mitchell, which I recently came across while reading an article he wrote for The Guardian on the new London Garden Bridge. It got me thinking about how much time […]

Barter Books in Alnwick became an international book shop sensation when it discovered the infamous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ propaganda poster from WWII. It is one of the largest second-hand book shops in Britain, home to 350,000 books and located in a derelict railway station. The interior of the shop is beautiful – a […]

Like most young people who read The Great Gatsby, I did so rather reluctantly ahead of starting the novel in English Literature this week. However, what I can tell you is that I turned every page after the first with an intrigue and love uncommon for a sixth form student buried under four essays and revision. […]

If you’re struggling with writer’s block or just want to do something creative but can’t get started, a great way to spark your imagination is to make use of what we call “writing prompts”. A writing prompt can be a sentence or even a word that begins a story. Here are twenty prompts to help […]

100 years have passed since the children’s writer Roald Dahl was born, and with classics like The Twits, James and the Giant Peach and Charlie in the Chocolate Factory still fresh in the minds of many readers, we thought we’d list some of his best works: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: having been made into two […]

Everyday Sexism was the debut novel of Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and journalist. Described as the ‘more politicised sister’ of Caitlin Moran’s notorious How To Be A Woman, it is one of the most successful pieces of feminist literature since the turn of the century. The project that was also the […]

If you’re going away on holiday this summer, chances are that you’re going to be spending a lot of your time sunbathing by the beach and trying to get a tan. While it’s going to be extremely relaxing, and probably just what you need, it’s likely that you might get a little bit bored of […]

In December 1847, under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, Wuthering Heights was published and a gift of literature was given to the world. Emily Brontë’s wild Gothic novel about a ferocious love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw has stood the test of time and is still widely read today. After being adopted by Cathy’s father at a young […]

With more than sixty years between being written and being published in English, Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin certainly has a story to it. This novel, set in Berlin towards the end of the Nazi era, follows the family, friends and acquaintances of a working-class couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, whose son is killed fighting […]

Few books have managed to combine humour and real-life scandal like the first of Imogen Edwards-Jones’s bestseller Babylon novels does. The book follows the twenty-four-hour exploits of a receptionist at a five-star London hotel on a double shift, from early morning to early morning. Hour by hour, the plot takes in death, drugs and drinking, […]

There is no doubt that Iain Banks’s ‘The Wasp Factory’ is one of the most controversial novels of our time, following the unconventional life of Frank, an isolated 16-year old who appears to be suffering from some form of psychological disorder. On simply reading the blurb, it becomes clear from the offset that the themes […]

Regarded as one of literature’s best novels, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre still lives up to its reputation today. The story begins with Jane as a young child in Gateshead living with her evil Aunt Reed. A book is thrown at her by Jack Reed and so young Miss Eyre fights fire with fire and is punished by being locked in the […]

One of my favourite books of all time is Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The book follows Christopher Boone, a fifteen year old boy with the psychological disorder Asperger’s Syndrome, as he tries to work out who killed Wellington, his next door neighbour’s dog. However, as Chris starts […]

Sven Hassel, who died aged 95 in 2012, was one of Britain’s biggest-selling war authors, penning fourteen novels which sold over 53 million copies worldwide, 15 million of which were in the UK alone. Hassel’s novels tell a story of a number of soldiers (the author, who served as a Danish auxiliary in the Wehrmacht, being […]

The Gothic genre has become immensely popular during the 21st century, so much so that it is now a module for many A Level and University courses in English Literature. Classic texts, such as ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Macbeth’, are widely studied. However, more radical, risqué texts have also come out of the woodwork. In particular, […]

2,100 miles of strenuous hiking through the American wilderness, in the company of the sort of man who “might have friends named Julio and Mr Big”. Sound like fun? In this strange-enough-to-be-fiction account, Bryson shares the details of his abortive attempt to trek the Appalachian Trail with his old high-school friend Stephen Katz. Battling the […]