Black light, the other name for ultraviolet light, a searing ray that reveals things hidden to the naked eye with occasionally harsh effects because no one can stand u/v rays for too long. Rimi B Chatterjee’s new book takes this characteristic as its premise.

The novel opens quickly enough in the everyday world of Satya, a reporter who’s given up his beat for the staid world of the teletext and the edit desk. His calm is shattered when a call from home tells him that his aunt Medhasri has fallen off her balcony – the implication is suicide but no one wants to utter that word since the repercussions would be scandalous where a traditional Bengali family is concerned.

Rimi B. Chatterjee

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I have read a couple of other novels by Lisa Jewell which I very much enjoyed but none have come near the absolute pleasure I have recently derived from reading One Hit Wonder which I think is a wonderful novel! Before I started reading it I did wonder whether it would live up to the praise heaped on it on the back cover – ‘will keep you up all night in a sweaty addicted reading frenzy (The Times) and ‘stands out from the mass of chick-lit like a poppy in a cornfield’ (Nova) – but having read it I have decided that it is certainly worthy of this praise and more!

Lisa Jewell

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Marian Keyes’ latest book, The Brightest Star in the Sky, is set in and around a multi-occupancy residential building, 66 Star Street, which as you’d expect is in Dublin. It follows the lives, loves, triumphs and disappointments of the residents, a mismatched bunch that I found hard to imagine sharing a roof. On the ground floor we find Maeve and Matt the young married couple who seem to be rather more clingy than might be expected and are harbouring a horrible secret that explains their rapidly revealed reliance on anti-depressants. Heading to the upper floors we meet Jemima, the elderly protestant who lives with her dog and is temporarily putting up her pretty-boy catholic foster-son Fionn whilst he makes a gardening programme for a television channel. Jemima is a part time telephone psychic, a complete fraud of course, but one with a good heart.

Marian Keyes

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The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is one of these books, a “modern classic” if you will, which everyone seemed to have read and raved about…except me. I finally caught up and read it recently; having noted a reference to it in a non-fiction book, I was keen to read a novel set in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The novel tells the story of the Price family; father Nathan, an American preacher, takes his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959 on a mission to spread Christianity. The Poisonwood Bible is the story of what happens in the village of Kilanga, and the aftermath over the next three decades.

Barbara Kingsolver, Congo

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I had never read any books by Janet Evanovich and so I didn’t really know what to expect when I picked up ‘To the Nines’ to read. Nor had I realised that this book is just one of a whole host featuring the central character, Stephanie Plum. This did not matter in the least though, as To the Nines really works as a standalone story and I was not aware of any references to events in previous novels, although they were probably inadvertently there.

Janet Evanovich

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Seymour is the least popular kid at Glendale school, a Manhattan fee-paying school that’s “small and getting smaller every year”. It’s a shame he’s not doing better because his parents can’t really afford the fees to send him there and he suspects they might have worked out that their investment in his education doesn’t look like paying off. Of the 41 children in his year at his Manhattan school, he ranks himself as the 41st in terms of popularity but on the whole he’s pretty cool about that. Yes, he wishes he had a bit more status and particularly wishes that Jessica, the ‘hot’ girl with the breasts who borrows his pencils during detention, would notice him but he’s pretty resigned to being the butt of class jokes and getting called names by Lance, the top dog in the school’s basketball team. When a 42nd pupil joins the school everything is set to change for Seymour. The ‘new boy’ is like nobody he’s ever met before. Elliot Allagash is wealthy beyond the imagination of most of us mere mortals and Elliot has his eye on Seymour.

Simon Rich

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As a huge fan of Kate Mosse’s previous novels, Labyrinth and Sepulchre, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on The Winter Ghosts. I met her in 2008, and she said she was working on the follow up to Labyrinth and Sepulchre, to feature the recurring character Audric Baillard. I assumed The Winter Ghosts was this follow up.

The Winter Ghosts takes place mainly in 1928, although the story is being told in 1933. A young Englishman, Freddie Watson, who lost his brother in the Great War, is travelling through the south of France, in the Corbieres/Languedoc region. He has a car accident, and seeks refuge in the village of Nulle, where he hears an extraordinary story, and meets the mysterious Fabrissa.

Kate Mosse

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Single in the City is Michele Gorman’s first novel and it really is a good one! From the moment I picked it up, I did not want to put it down and just wanted to read more about the exploits of Hannah Cumming, the twenty six year old American heroine in the story.

At the start, Hannah is newly arrived in London having decided to leave her less than glamorous life in Connecticut behind and to start out afresh. She is searching for a dream job, dream friends and most of all a dream man. Unfortunately none of these come that easily and Hannah discovers that she does not like being alone in the big city especially with the somewhat surprising language and cultural differences that she starts to experience.

London, Michele Gorman

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Not long after a German student is found brutally murdered in Reykjavik’s university, a suspect is arrested. Soon afterwards, lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir receives a phone call from Matthew Reich, a German acting on behalf of the dead student’s family; they don’t believe that the drug dealer charged with Harald’s murder is the killer and they’d like Thora, who has been recommended to them because she studied in Germany, to help with a private investigation into Harald’s death. It soon becomes apparent that Harald led a less than conventional lifestyle; his post mortem reveals that he underwent several dramatic procedures to change his appearance, and the valuable pieces of art on the walls of his flat point to a morbid fascination with a thoroughly unpleasant subject.

Scandinavian crime fiction, Yrsa Sigurdardottir

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Northern Lights is the first novel in the His Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman. First published in 1995, it was several years later that I became aware of it, perhaps when the series became popular. I borrowed Northern Lights from my parents about a year ago, but I’m ashamed to say I’ve only just got round to reading it, and then with the motivation of it being set for my reading group.

Northern Lights is about Lyra, a twelve year old girl who suddenly finds herself at the centre of world events.

Philip Pullman

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‘What was Lost’ by Catherine O’Flynn is an interesting but unusual novel. It was the sort of book that was very easy to read but I couldn’t work out exactly where it was going and how all the different pieces fitted together until the very end. At that point I realised that I had enjoyed it very much and felt that it had been an immensely satisfying and moving book.

‘What was Lost’ could be described as a twenty-first century mystery, set in a large and somewhat impersonal shopping centre where a small girl went missing twenty years before.

Catherine O’Flynn

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