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  If you are still wondering which book to take on holiday with you this year, then just go and buy this one and you can thank me later.  It is smart and funny and all those things you would want a book to be if you were going to write one.  If you loved Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, then you are going to love this too (and if you never got around to reading that, then add it to your holiday reading list right now). There is a paragraph about the author at the front of this book, and the last line tells us that:  'She is a professor of creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.',  and when I saw that I was all set to find a style of writing that was grammatically correct but a little short on readability.  Wrong.  If Alison Espach was teaching a writing course anywhere near me, I'd want to be first in the queue to listen to what she has to say.  There is not one thing I want to find fault with in this novel. The protagonist i...

This past weekend the weather has been blisteringly hot and the only thing to do was spend most of the day reading in the shade, and this was the perfect book for the occasion. It's an unashamedly girlie book, set in Ireland, with plenty of colourful characters to add a layer of fun.  I haven't read anything by Marian Keyes before, but the woman is obviously a machine as this book was over five hundred pages long, and she has quite an extensive back catalogue that I suspect are much the same size. It's a love story around the 'will she, won't she' theme, as Anna spends a large chunk of her life alternately falling in love with Joey or hating the very ground he walks on.  Fate brings them together at intervals, and in between their meetings they both have other serious relationships that change everything about their lives, and for these two at least, the path of true love is never straight. I liked the fact that we meet Anna in her late forties, just as she ente...

This is good, very good, but you are going to have to be prepared to give it your full attention if you are going to stand a chance of keeping up with all the names.  I could easily see this becoming a box set on Netflix as there are sufficient twists and turns it would keep you hanging on for the next episode. Susan Lewis has created a very realistic account of a terrible crime where no-one has ever been bought to justice.  Three women were murdered, and a child of one of the victims disappeared on the same day, but the trail of enquiries quickly went cold and the investigation was shut down. The chief suspect was the husband of one of the women, as he didn't have a convincing alibi for where he was on the day, but with no hard evidence to link him to the murders, he had to be released from custody.  Sixteen years later, the team behind a crime investigation podcast called Hindsight pick up the case and quickly find that there is a lot more to investigate than just the m...