2013Review/Preview2014  Looking back, I've had a pretty good hit rate with 2013's books, even if I didn't manage to read...

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear McBride [The Vapour Trails Book of the Year 2013 ] " I know. The thing wrong. It's a....

Day of the Ram - William Campbell Gault They say that you should never judge a book by its cover but this one jumped off the shelf. Th...

The Reivers - William Faulkner ".. Fortune is a fickle jade, who never withholds but gives, either good or bad: more of the forme...

Brother of Sleep - Robert Schneider (Translated by  Shaun Whiteside) " Come, O death, O come, sleep's brother, Lead me where...

Vertigo - W.G.Sebald " Yes, said Lukas, there was something strange about remembering. When he lay on the sofa and thought back, i...

Solace - Belinda McKeown Solace is a beautifully crafted book, reminiscent in its way of the work of John McGahern. Character and pl...

Embers - Sándor Márai (Translated by Carol Brown Janeway) " A lamb was brought, a white lamb, and our host took his knife and kil...

City of Bohane - Kevin Barry " This is the Bohane river we're talking about. A backwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off t...

Tinkers - Paul Harding " George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died ." Thus begins Tinkers , a...

Dear Mr Capote - Gordon Lish " Of course I contradict myself. I am large ." You need to take a deep breath after reading th...

Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner " tonight I can sit here with the tape recorder whirring no more noisily than electrified time,...

A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan I lost this book mid-stream and so there was a large gap between starting and finishing it...

Seeking Mr Hare - Maurice Leitch This is the third Leitch novel that I've reviewed on this blog and I aim to make it through his l...

Young Adolf - Beryl Bainbridge " Never in all my life, thought Adolf, under torture or interrogation, will I mention that I have b...

Loitering With Intent - Muriel Spark Like champagne bubbles being burst with a scalpel, Spark's novels are outrageous fun with a b...

Detective Story - Imre Kertész This was my first brush with the Nobel Prize winning Hungarian author Imre Kertész and it won't be ...

Troubles - J.G. Farrell ( Winner of the "Lost Booker' awarded in 2010 to novels from 1970 that had been denied a shot at the a...

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie I've been finding it difficult to gather the time and attention to read for the past...

Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov Well, Nabokov has thrown this whole blog enterprise into question. All I am, apparently, is increasing ...