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

I met our delightful authoress Eva Rice through a mutual friend and the first thing she said to me was, "This might sound weird but I feel I know you and we really should be best friends." I immediately said, "Yes, that does sound weird but that's why I now concur that we should indeed be best friends." For it's exactly the kind of thing I could equally splurge and would have said to her if I had read this book before meeting her. Because, like Eva, this book is very funny, feminine, cleve

It's easy to dismiss YA (young adult) fiction as exactly that - fiction for not-yet-adults that is therefore not worthy of consideration by Old Adults. But you'd be wrong. Look at the books and authors who are shaking things up: addressing themes as serious as any seen in ManBooker shortlisted novels. Patrick Ness, Sarah Crossnan, E Lockhart, RJ Palacio, Non Pratt, Louise O'Neill - whose Asking For It was one of the toughest books I read last year.  And yet, ostensibly also Not For Adults. YA

If you’re a sucker for a bit of nostalgic period drama, you’re going to love Mrs Bird – it’s Call The Midwife for the Second World War. Emmy is an aspiring journalist, sharing a London flat with her best friend, Bunty, and lands herself a job not – as she hoped – as a war correspondent, but assisting on the agony-aunt pages of a women’s magazine. The “editress” (that alone speaks volumes), Mrs Bird, won’t hear of letters with even marginally personal content being answered (her list of “topi

You could be forgiven for not having heard of the Murphys, but chances are you know them. Sara Wiborg and her husband Gerald Murphy were the real-life inspiration behind Dick and Nicole Diver in F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night. Their relationship is the force of nature that drives Liza Klaussmann's second novel, Villa America. Like Klaussman's debut, the evocative Tigers In Red Weather, Villa America (named for the Murphys home on the French Riviera) drips atmosphere, ennui and he

I only recently heard of people taping over the camera on a laptop to prevent hackers spying. Imagine if it was the computer itself privy to your every move. No, really. Fortunately, the computer in Happiness For Humans, an AI called Aiden, has good intentions: finding love for Jen, the journalist being paid to “humanise” him through one-to-one conversation. But Aiden isn’t the only AI out there – and what happens when one with a nastier streak “escapes” on to the internet and starts wreakin