CARO JOWETT

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...

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, e...

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 10-1...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 a...

 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 were...

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...