Karou lives a double life. On the one hand she is a seventeen year old art student in Prague, only concerned about fending off her ex-boyfriend. On the other, she runs errands for Brimstone, a decidedly non-human being who raised her. Then one day, she meets an angel…

This is the premise of Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone. It does get a lot more complex than that, but this is an adequate summary for the purpose of this review.

Laini Taylor

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Back in 2004, I saw some adverts on TV for a new show called Long Way Round, featuring Ewan McGregor and his best friend Charley Boorman travelling around the world on motorcycles. I decided to give it a go – after all, I’ve been a fan of Ewan’s for year. Within minutes I was hooked, on the adventure, the fun and the camaraderie between the pair. Since then the intrepid duo have travelled through Africa in Long Way Down, and Charley has branched into solo projects, with Race to Dakar, By Any Means and Right to the Edge (By Any Means 2). Now he’s back with a new adventure, Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada.

In November this year I was lucky enough to see Charley’s live show, in which he talks in detail about the trips he has undertaken.

Charley Boorman

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It was just another day on the 7.44 from Brighton to London, when suddenly a man is taken ill and dies. One Moment, One Morning by Sarah Rayner is a novel about how one moment is all it takes to change lives.

Karen loses her husband, Simon. Anna, her best friend, loses a valued friend and must support Karen. Lou was sitting near Simon and meets Anna when they share a taxi from the train, before Anna knows who has passed away. All three women’s lives are changed by this tragedy.

Sarah Rayner

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Hatred, Ridicule & Contempt is the first novel by David Cooper. As a solicitor, it is perhaps unsurprising that he has written a novel about the law, sticking to what he knows.

Hatred, Ridicule & Contempt follows Alex Harris, a solicitor who at the start of the novel is made a partner at his firm. Having been passed over the previous year, Harris is pleased to finally have his hard work recognized, yet as the novel goes on he learns more and more of the firm’s dark secrets and management style. The main story centres around Harris’s case defending a newspaper against libel accusations, which soon turns out to be connected to a much bigger picture.

David Cooper

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As you can guess from the title of Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos, in the latest addition to the wonderful world of Simon’s Cat, a kitten has joined the household. Kittens are wonderful things, so playful and inquisitive, and always hilarious with their antics. But of course Simon’s Cat is not too impressed with this cute new housemate – the kitten grabs Simon’s attention easily, and refuses to learn to behave as a dignified cat should.

Simon Tofield

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Some time ago I read and reviewed Tim Butcher’s Blood River, about his journey along the Congo River, and I’m afraid to say I wasn’t terribly complementary about it. I didn’t like his style or attitude, and thought I would rather find other books on Africa. Yet when I learnt about his recent book, Chasing The Devil: The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit, I found myself keen to give it a go. Perhaps it was the African journey again which drew me in, but I have to admit there was also a hope that I might enjoy Butcher’s writing more second time round.

Chasing The Devil is Butcher’s account of a journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia. Like Blood River, he is again recreating an earlier journey, this time the trip made by author Graham Greene and his cousin Barbara in 1935.

Tim Butcher

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The Penal Colony by Richard Herley has recently been available as a free download on Kindle, and from the synopsis given it sounded like it would be a reasonable read for a freebie. Although published in the late 1980s, I hadn’t heard of it before, and I assumed it was written more recently.

The Penal Colony is about a man named Tony Routledge who is convicted of a crime he did not commit. Set in the late 1990s, so the near future for reads in 1897, prisons are now on islands offshore, where convicts are left to fend for themselves with weekly helicopter drops of supplies. Routledge is sent to Sert, where an organised and civilised community exists in the Village, but the island is also populated with groups of Outsiders, who want access to the supply drops controlled by the Village.

Richard Herley

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Destined is the ninth novel in the popular House of night series by P.C. and Kristen Cast. Set in the present day with vampyres as part of the normal fabric of society, the series follows Zoey Redbird from the day she is Marked to be become a vampyre through the discovery she is to be an important part of the fight against evil, and of course all the events which follow.

In book number eight, Awakened, Zoey recovered from her journey to the Otherworld and yet another innocent character died. Awakened was followed by Dragon’s Oath, a novella, telling the backstory of a House of Night professor, which turns out to be relevant to Destined.

P.C. and Kristin Cast

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What do you know about Mary Boleyn, sister of the better-known Anne? The chances are that whatever you think you know is incorrect or unsubstantiated. Recent fiction such as Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, along with various historical studies, have convinced us that it is certain that Mary gave birth to two children by Henry VIII, and that she was promiscuous and branded a whore – but these “facts” are far from proven.

Alison Weir’s latest work Mary Boleyn: ‘A Great and Infamous Whore’ is the first full length biography of the lesser known Boleyn sister. With little historical evidence to go on, Mary has been misunderstood and misrepresented for centuries, and Weir aims to attempt to set the record straight.

Alison Weir

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The Blackhouse is a novel by Peter May, set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, the first in a series (trilogy according to Amazon) featuring Detective Fin Macleod. Having escaped Lewis at the age of eighteen, Fin is packed off to the island from Edinburgh when a murder is committed in a similar manner to one he has been investigating in Edinburgh.

The story alternates between the present and flashbacks to Fin’s childhood and adolescence, with the present being in third person and the past in first person. Although packaged as a crime novel or thriller, the whodunnit isn’t really the focus of the novel. Fin never wanted to return to Lewis, and is frequently confronted by bad memories.

Peter May

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“Get your kicks on Route 66” goes the song. As someone who grew up on rock and roll and dreamt of the wide spaces of America from Glasgow, Billy Connolly has always had a fascination with the iconic Route 66. In Billy Connolly’s Route 66, he travels the famous Mother Road, and invites us all along for the ride.

Stretching from Chicago to Los Angeles, Route 66 travels through many famous places, and is an integral part of the California dream – travelled by millions in search of a better life on the West Coast, particularly by the “Okies” escaping the dust bowl of Oklahoma during the great depression. Now however, with much of the small towns which relied on passing trade bypassed by the Interstate highway, the road is dying. Some towns and businesses are enterprising and manage to continue to attract visitors, but there are many more abandoned houses and premises.

Billy Connolly

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