Asking For It By Louise O'Neill: Book Review If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have said there were certain books that couldn't be published. And if they were, they certainly wouldn't be a smash hit. Asking For It by Louise O'Neill (the award-winning author of Only Ever Yours) is one such book. Mean girl Emma is queen bee in her small Irish town and ruthless about staying that way at any cost. Then she is gang-raped and dumped half-naked on her doorstep, the pictures are all over social

The Girl In The Tower By Katherine Arden: Book Review This is the time of year I'm looking for something seasonal, be it a chilly gothic mystery, a sprawling snowbound saga or an ethereal fairytale. Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy has snow by the shovelful. The Girl In The Tower is the second in the series, but functions equally well as a standalone. A captivating folktale-inspired adventure laden in mystery, magic and myth, it's the story of Vasya, one of the punchiest heroines I've

Only Ever Yours By Louise O'Neill: Book Review Imagine a world where you’re judged entirely on your appearance. A world where your peers give you marks out of 10, and where selfies are the currency. So far, so not that unfamiliar. But in the dystopian world of Only Ever Yours, girls are made, not born. They are punished, shamed and scolded for putting on weight. And they have only one purpose: to serve men – as companions, concubines or chastities. This YA smash hit was dubbed The Hand

The Expatriates By Janice Y. K. Lee: Book Review It’s seven years since Janice YK Lee’s, debut The Piano Teacher – a much-loved dual narrative tale of two parallel affairs in expat Hong Kong – topped bestseller lists globally. Her follow up, The Expatriates, takes us back to expat Hong Kong, where a terrible tragedy transforms the lives of three women; wives and mothers whose isolated existence throws into sharp relief the fragile position of women in a 21st century that could be mistaken for

In A Dark Dark Wood By Ruth Ware: Book Review Hen nights. Ugh. Hen weekends, even worse. Second only to the horror of the school reunion. If, like me, you'd rather pull out your nails with pliers than willingly attend either, then this tense debut from Ruth Ware will push all your buttons. Nora hasn't seen her old school friend, Clare, for ten years. So when she receives an email out of the blue inviting her to her hen weekend, logic would tell you she'd hit delete. Instead, against her

The Lake House By Kate Morton: Book Review Finding out Kate Morton's latest novel is a big old beef of a book is like having the new season of your favourite Netflix series drop: you want to devour it all in one go, but are simultaneously pleased you have hours' worth of enjoyment ahead of you. Morton writes with such page-turning ease, you can easily lose yourself in her world for days, and The Lake House is no exception. She returns to a tried-and-tested formula of idyllic English countrys

Trust By Mike Bullen: Book Review Think of those TV series you encounter once or twice in a decade and look back on with affection. Mouthpiece of a generation type comedies and dramas, like Sex And The City, for instance, or Thirtysomething. Dawson’s Creek or My So-Called Life. And this year’s contender, Catastrophe. If you’re me, Cold Feet, the late nineties comedy drama that so brilliantly nailed the ups and downs of so-called grown up relationships is right up there. Well, good news, b

Today Will Be Different By Maria Semple: Book Review “Today will be different. Today I will be present.... Today I'll play a board game with Timby. I'll initiate sex with Joe…" So starts my most-awaited book of the year. Maria Semple blasted her way into my consciousness four years ago with Where'd You Go, Bernadette, the wildly irreverent story of genius architect and menace to polite Seattle society Bernadette Fox. I've been waiting for Semple to put pen to paper again ever since and, fina

Imagine the Brontës had a descendant still living, and that descendant  - the very last of the Brontës - was rumoured to be in possession of a crucial, long-missing, part of the family's literary estate. She's not, of course. Samantha Whipple (a rather unBrontë-like name but with a very Brontë-like tongue) has never laid eyes on the inheritance she's meant to have been bequeathed by her father. But when she goes to study at Oxford, mysterious clues start appearing. Luckily, Samantha has

The buzz about Miss You is that it’s the new One Day or The Versions Of Us – both books I loved, and I whipped through Kate Eberlen’s novel with similar verve. But to label a cracking debut as “the new something” is to do it a disservice, because Miss You is as much a heart-rending portrayal of grief, and feeling alienated from your family, as it is a familiar tale of fate. The novel begins in 1997, with the separate stories of Tess and Gus, about to embark on university life. They both happ

A new novel from Marian Keyes is always an event, for Keyes has a bottle-it-and-you-need-never-work-again talent for making the serious seem feather-light. The Break is no exception. Seemingly the story of devoted couple Hugh and Amy, whose long relationship is the envy of their friends – until, out of the blue, Hugh announces he wants a marriage break and heads off, with barely suppressed excitement, on a “gap six months”. Whether or not their relationship can survive is the driving plot of

Louise O’Neill has always written complicated women – jealous and selfish and too much and too little – and in Almost Love, her first novel aimed squarely at adults, she gives us Sarah. Sarah is an artist who hasn’t quite been able to follow through on her promise and has become a teacher. The most important thing about Sarah – as she sees it – is that she is in love. And she uses that love (for Matthew, a largely unavailable man, 20 years or so older than she is) to fill the gaps in herself

If the hit Amazon series Transparent brought the issue of gender identity into general, telly-watching lexicon, then Laurie Frankel's heartfelt realisation of what it is like to raise a transgender child should, by rights, be the book everyone is talking about right now. It's warm and funny and engaging – and, most importantly, enlightening. Rosie and Penn Walsh-Adams have four boys already when their fifth, Claude, is born. By the time he starts preschool, Claude makes it clear that dressing

Two sentences in and I was sold. Gappah's compelling first novel is the story of Memory, a Zimbabwean woman convicted of the murder of her adoptive father. As part of her appeal, she is writing down what happened as she remembers it. Memory has had a life of two halves: an impoverished early childhood in a township, and then a convent-school and Cambridge education courtesy of her adoptive father. And now she faces another U turn: life in a maximum security prison. The novel weaves betwe

There’s something so seductive and satisfying about parallel-paths fiction (One Day and its ilk) I feel it could be a new genre in its own right. Helen Sedgwick’s debut novel takes a familiar premise – the stories of two lovers and how their paths come to meet – but weaves it with family back story against a magical backdrop of comets and their appearances throughout history. Astronomer Roisin and chef Francois meet working on a research base in Antarctica – she has been comet-watching since

In which we meet the Seville on Roxy. Not an address you'll be familiar with right now, but give it a month and it will be firmly in your literary address book. The Seville itself is not the subject of Fishbowl, but the once-ambitious, now-ramshackle, not-quite-a-tower block, has plenty of character in its own right. Nor, in fact, is Ian the Goldfish, or @goldfish_ian (yes, Ian has his own twitter account. What else?). Poor old Ian is simply the fish who sees all (and remembers nothing) as h