Milkman by Anna Burns
In late 1970s Northern Ireland, our narrator walks with her nose buried in a book. She does this a lot; she prefers the 19th century to distract herself from the issues that guide her life. One day, the milkman shows up. He knows a lot about her; what she knows about him is that he is an influential paramilitary, and it would not be wise to anger him. He makes it clear that bad things will befall her boyfriend if she continues to see him. […]
The Terror by Dan Simmons
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Life has an odd way of making things come together sometimes. Either that, or I simply wasn’t paying attention when I ended up accidentally reading two books about the lost Franklin expedition at the same time. Both books are fiction, which means that they take their own liberties with the truth; after all, not much is known about the exact fate of the men aboard the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus. What we do know is this: explorer Sir John Franklin, experienced but not […]
The Chalk Man by CJ Tudor
Eddie is a young boy in 1986 and he does what other 1980s teenagers did: hang around with his friends during a long, hot summer. They devise a plan to send each other secret messages using stick figures that they draw in chalk. Then, a terrible accident happens and not soon after, a body is found in the forest. If books and TV shows are anything to go by, it’s amazing that anyone managed to escape the eighties unscathed. Then again, the point of the […]
1989 (Allie Burns #2) by Val McDermid
The year is 1989, and journalist Allie Burns isn’t enjoying life. She’s moved from Scotland to Manchester with her girlfriend and fellow journalist Rona. The newspaper she works for has been bought by a media magnate named Ace Lockhart (named in the novel as Rupert Murdoch’s main competitor but for all intents and purposes, he is Rupert Murdoch), which means than rather than write the well-researched think pieces Allie used to do, she is now chasing juicy athlete divorce stories and covering disasters like the […]
Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood
Elsie is a theoretical physicist, stuck in a dead-end job she hates – teaching ungrateful students who keep emailing her day and night with excuses as to why they can’t meet their deadlines – while barely making ends meet. To get by, she works as a fake girlfriend for a company called Faux: men who are tired of their family members asking them when they’re going to find a girl, or men who need a plus-one for a corporate dinner, hire Elsie for the night. […]
How the Dead Speak (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan #11) by Val McDermid
An old convent is bought by a property development company. Soon, work begins on the grounds, but it’s not long before the skeletal remains of forty young women are discovered. The bones are old – years, sometimes decades – but it begs the question: what, exactly, happened at the convent, where girls with nowhere to go were taken in? Why were the secretly buried, and why did their families receive no word of their passing? The ReMIT team, specialising in serious crime, investigates, though why […]
