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The Shogun's Queen

The Shogun's Queen

The Shogun's Queen by Lesley Downer (Bantam Press, £16.99) Imagine a country isolated from the rest of the world, threatened by invasion and ruled by an emperor so secret his name cannot even be spoken but whose decisions are all that stand between peace and war. Imagine then that this reclusive emperor has the fragile unfocussed mind of a sickly child, that the true power lies with his powerful manipulative mother and that you, a seventeen year old country girl, are the one

The Naked Muse

The Naked Muse

The Naked Muse by Kelley Swain (Valley Press, £8.99) In all the years, I've been life drawing, I'm ashamed to say I have never made friends with the model. We've chatted of course, when they've come round in the breaks to see what I've done, but I've never stopped to consider what they think about when they are sitting on a piece of old curtain staring out at a room full of artists staring back at them to seek out every line, every perfection or imperfection and turn it into

Present perfect

Present perfect

Ten War Poems, selected and introduced by Andrew Motion (Candlestick Press, £4.95) I love this idea, in fact long before this little collection landed on my desk, I'd already brought the London poetry pamphlet for my mother as a birthday card and the cats one for a friend. I live in hope that'll I get the bicycle one, but not yet - I need to hint harder. It's just so cleverly simple, instead of a card you get a book of 10-12 poems all on one topic and for around the same pric

Fire and Fountains

Fire and Fountains

A Death At Fountains Abbey by Antonia Hodgson (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99) After escaping the confines of the Marshalsea prison, and cheating the gallows at Tyburn, Thomas ‘Half-Hanged’ Hawkins has left London, in the spring of 1718, for the open moors of Yorkshire. He’s been sent by the queen to recover a book of accounts the contents of which, if revealed, would be extremely embarrassing for an establishment caught up in the South Sea Bubble – the greatest swindle of the ag

A Country Road, A Tree

A Country Road, A Tree

A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker (Doubleday, £11.99) Perhaps the strangest thing about this whole mesmerising story is that it's true. If you thought literary writers spent their lives propelled as if on casters from bed to desk to library and back again, never risking more than a trip to the bar, here's something to make you think again. Samuel Beckett's whole being was about writing, when the book opens he's in pre-war Paris hanging out with friends including James Joyce

Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award

Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award

Photograph © Francesco Guidicini Kindness is dead. She was knifed, no axed, no shot by her boyfriend, a lover, a man in a red car that was not a silver Pajero and the five ladies who were her colleagues in the hair saloon (sic) where she was the best (and cheapest) braid plaiter in Harare can’t get enough of her death. They weave it in and out of their day, around their customers, a blind beggar and his seeing-eye boy – both barefoot, the tennis-playing lady they reckon is no

One with You

One with You

One With You by Sylvia Day (Penguin, £7.99) Hankies, check. Glass of wine, check. Comfy sofa, check. Copy of One With You? Sorted. I’m settling down for the blockbuster finale of Sylvia Day’s Crossfire series, a bit late to the party I admit, this is my first Crossfire novel, but here I go. Suffice to say that in the beginning was Sylvia Day, the author of a chart-topping series of novels teeming with all the breathless romance and eroticism you’d need to set Mr Mills’ and Mr

L'amour fou

L'amour fou

We'll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington, (Pan Macmillan, £12.99) Never trust a book by its cover. After reading the line on the front of Emma Beddington's memoir, I thought it was about trying and failing to become French - frothy, witty, insightful, I thought, just what I need as a break from my day job writing about a 700-year-old prison. And it is all those things - the sections where teenage Emma is kicking against her childhood in nice middle-class Yorkshire rang very

Tattoo you

Tattoo you

An Unreliable History of Tattoos By Paul Thomas (Nobrow Press, £14.99) Now spring is coming, warm sun and longer days coax many things into the open: the blossom will bloom on the bough, the baby birds will take their first flights, and men and women across the country will shed their winter plumage and reveal the summer colours inked permanently into their skin. Once upon a time tattoos were the preserve of sailors – you weren’t in the gang if you didn’t have an anchor tatto

Take a butcher's

Take a butcher's

The Butcher’s Hook by Janet Ellis (Two Roads, £14.99) What a gloriously odd little book this is. Inside its beautiful cover lurks a tale that will confound all your expectations of historical literary heroines, though its darkly intense characters are caricatures in the best tradition of eighteenth-century literature. Janet Ellis, television presenter and mother of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, graduated from the Curtis Brown Creative School in 2014 and is one of the first to be publi

Getting It Write

Getting It Write

I almost didn’t do this course, which would have been a shame as I’ve learned so much. Back in October I had the first draft of a novel I knew wasn’t working, but didn’t know how to fix. I was starting to avoid it when a Curtis Brown newsletter pinged in advertising a three-month course tutored by Erin Kelly (below), a writer of psychological thrillers with tightly-controlled, slowly unfurling plots. Perfect timing, then. I applied, thinking I’d worry about the cost if I got

For The Most Beautiful

For The Most Beautiful

For The Most Beautiful by Emily Hauser (Doubleday, £12.99) The only prize I ever won in school was for speaking Greek verse. We, half a dozen state school girls from Hertfordshire, took on the might of the top (male) public schools and won. It was girl power at its finest. So armed with that victory and the subsequent O-level, here is my review of this lovely book by proper classicist Emily Hauser, a retelling of the Trojan Wars where the women also come out on top. The story

The triumph of Hope

The triumph of Hope

The Ballroom by Anna Hope (Doubleday, £12.99) For all it's set in an asylum, this novel is less about insanity per se than about 'normality', the 'madness' that lurks within and the truth that, ultimately, all most of us need to heal is love. Its quiet brilliance lies in the subtlety with which author Anna Hope introduces her characters and ideas and then plays with the reader's perceptions as it goes along. The year is 1911, a fertile time for theories on the treatment of t

Wickham Hall

Wickham Hall

Wickham Hall by Cathy Bramley (Corgi, £6.99) MLXLS I love a happy ending, don't you? A follow-your-dreams kind of romance where nothing too terrible happens but true love follows its path and happiness reigns. It's a skill to pull off a novel like that without populating it with stereotyped characters and a cliché-ed plot, but Cathy Bramley has the knack and she's funny too: sometimes gentle, sometimes wry but always warm and witty. Holly Swift is a neat freak, she can't fun

Santa Baby

Santa Baby

Dear Santa If you are struggling for last minute presents, here are five (in no particular order) novels from the last year that anyone would love to find in their stockings. Disclaimer by Renée Knight (Black Swan, £7.99) If you loved Gone Girl, and I did, this is perfect. Cor, I thought when I read the blurb. Imagine you are reading a book and it turns out to be all about you. And not just about you, but about your greatest secret. Something not even your husband and son kno

Paws for thought at Christmas

Paws for thought at Christmas

A Gift From Bob by James Bowen (Hodder, £7.99) I defy anyone to read this heart-warming tale without shedding a tear. From the minute you open the cover, you'll feel a pricking behind the eyes that won't leave you until the very last page. Without wishing to sound cynical, the story of streetcat Bob is the Christmas gift that keeps on giving: this is the seventh book in the series and a film is in the pipeline. When James, a recovering heroin addict and former street sleeper,

In the beginning was the word...

In the beginning was the word...

Wordplay by Gyles Brandreth (Coronet, £14.99) At Christmas, book elves' shelves groan with new titles from cookery to biography and beyond, but the one kind of book that finds its niche at this time of year might loosely be termed stocking filler, as it seems to defy all other categorisation. In this section, you'll find quiz books, joke books, books of interesting, quirky facts, records and events. You will also find word books, which to my mind, are the most fun. And if you

Melting your heart

Melting your heart

A Snow Garden by Rachel Joyce, (Transworld, £9.99) Rachel Joyce's writing sneaks up on you. Just when you think you're reading a nice little story about a father spending Christmas week with his sons, or Magda and Johanna welcoming their new baby, or a popstar son ditching life on the road for the comforts of his parents' yuletide home, you suddenly finding yourself reaching for the Kleenex. Joyce's writing is exquisite. Robust and unsentimental, real and magical. Her charact

Cookbook of the month

Cookbook of the month

Nopi by Yotam Ottolenghi and Ramael Scully (Ebury Press, £28) So, I've got all Yotam Ottolenghi's books, I've eaten in his Ottolenghi restaurants and seen the TV series. You could say I'm a fan. It's the flavour combinations. I know, I know, you hear a lot about these, but Mr Ottolenghi has a way with flavours that it is, it is no exaggeration to say, mind-blowing. He doesn't improve on existing ideas, he goes out and creates his own and, thanks to his, exquisite palette, the

Dribbling a bibful

Dribbling a bibful

The Road To Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson (Transworld, £20) Cycling home the other day I whizzed past a small tatty tree with little bits of laminated paper tied to its branches. I stopped and went back to investigate because that’s the kind of thing Bill Bryson would have done. This tree, I was informed, had been dedicated by the Living Poetry Society, to the memory of Robin Williams and those affected by suicide. Its a random tree in south London between a burger bar and

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Present perfect

Present perfect

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