Category: Bookends

  • January 2026

    The Poisoned King – Katherine Rundell I have read the first of this series of books: Impossible Creatures, and have written about it on my blog: beyondtheairingcupboard.co.uk, and having read that, I was eager for the sequel. The narrative, the plot, the characterisation are all brilliant but there is so much more. The author is […]

  • December 2025

    Ysenda is an interesting person. Her articles often appear in a variety of publications, including The Spectator, The Church Times and various newspapers. She has written nine books, all non-fiction until this offering, the most famous being ‘Terms and Conditions.’ This is about life in girls’ boarding schools 1939-1979 and it sold well. I went […]

  • November 2025

    This immediately appears to be an oxymoron. How can crime be cosy? A contradiction in terms surely but actually this has long been a recognised moniker in the publishing world. As so often happens it is fairly easy to identify but rather tricky to actually explain. Sometimes this is written with a z as Cozy […]

  • October 2025

    I wonder how many of you reading this remember devouring Labyrinth in 2005? For most people this was our introduction to Kate Mosse and for me it was one of the only books where I reached the end and immediately turned back to the beginning and read it again. In time this was followed by […]

  • September 2025

    On a Saturday morning there is a decision to be made. There will be an email from Daunts Bookshop wanting to share with me their five book choices for the week. Will I open the email or just leave it? If I open it then the chances are I will buy one of those books. […]

  • August 2025

    Joanne Harris is an interesting writer. She is half French, lives near Barnsley in Yorkshire, has played in a rock band for decades and was a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. She is the chair of the SOA, the Society of Authors, and has had many quite public, strong disagreements with JK Rowling, mainly […]

  • July 2025

    The advert on the wall of Marylebone tube station was indeed large and it pleased me immensely. It was advertising Tracy Chevalier’s latest novel ‘The Glassmaker’ and I understood it immediately. I knew the book had come out last year but now they were telling me it was available in paperback. I had been restrained, […]

  • June 2025

    I can’t imagine there are many people reading this who aren’t familiar with the name Alexander McCall Smith. The jovial, super brainy professor of medical ethics at Edinburgh University who gave up the day job to become a full-time writer in the late 1990s. The confidence to take this very large step came from the […]

  • April 2025

    I have recently been down a long and convoluted Virginia Woolf shaped rabbit hole and what a fascinating journey it has been. It began with ‘The Memory Library’ by Kate Storey, (visit: beyondtheairing cupboard.co.uk to read my thoughts on that book and a musing about ‘Mrs Dalloway,’) and led me to have another go at […]

  • May 2025

    When I set up my blog about books and reading a couple of years ago, I did of course need a name for it. Over a cup of coffee I played about with some rather obvious titles: cover to cover, turning the page etc etc. They had of course all been taken by existing blogs […]