books

The past is funny place. For some of us, it’s good. For some of us, it’s bad. For some, it sits in the middle, simply bordering on whether it needs to be spoken about or not. For Florence Claybourne, the past is an almighty landscape of…

I really tried to avoid the never ending stream of tweets on my timeline obsessing about Conversations With Friends.  I already fell victim to the online chatter about the profundity of Anna Burns’ 2018 Man Booker Prize winning novel,…

It has been just under ten years since American author, Suzanne Collins, finished her world-renowned book series: The Hunger Games. Now, she is back for more and teases fans with this poster, revealed this week by Scholastic Book Clubs.…

There is a small, vocal, and very protective fandom in the literary world who were both wary and excited when they found out that Donna Tartt's third novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch, was being made into a film. The…

On Monday, we fans of the A Game of Thrones book series were treated to a rarity: George R. R. Martin wrote a blog post (http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2019/05/20/an-ending/) on the final, upcoming books, whilst waving goodbye to the…

 Jacob Fleming is a student at Swansea University currently studying a module in the Dylan Thomas prize, making him one of the first students in the UK to study a module based solely on a literary prize. Here in the first of two…

Belated happy new year to you all! I hope you've got plenty of books ready to read in 2019 - I know I have. And I hope that at least some of these books are being read for pleasure - because mine are not. When I opted to do English…

I’ve always been an optimist. Glass half full? Absolutely. Do your best and that’s all that matters? Of course. There’s a bunch of books currently on the market that promote this sort of thing, from well-being and mindfulness to the…

Just before Christmas in 2015, a shocking attack took place in a suburban street somewhere in Glasgow. The journalist Russell Findlay was attacked by a hitman posing as a Royal Mail delivery man. The hitman, William 'Basil' Burns threw acid…

Juno Dawson is a Young Adult author, who, in 2014, was awarded the title ‘Queen of Teen’ - an award given to writers of teen fiction. This is due to the success of her books, many of which feature LGBT+ characters. Juno Dawson is a…

Title: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Author: Laurence Sterne What Do I Think Of It?: What do you get when you cross Jonathan Swift with Daniel Defoe and throw in a splash of Carrollesque surrealism? You get …

BBC 4 Presenter Jenni Murray, who has run Women’s Hour since the late 1980s, has recently channelled her feminist persona within a new literary medium, A History of Britain in 21 Women. Thomas Carlyle once claimed “the history of the…

Down and Out in Paris and London is more than just a novel. It’s an analysis of poverty so profound and real that the reader is made to feel dirty, cold, and rejected by the ruthless society of the 1930s. It’s also terribly relevant in a…

The winner of this year’s Nobel Literature Prize is the Japanese-born British author, Kazuo Ishiguro. Already a highly acclaimed author, Ishiguro was described by the Swedish Body as an author "who, in novels of great emotional force, has…