Lonesome Reader

I spent an entire weekend completely engrossed in this book! It's the kind of novel I kept returning to in every spare moment and staying up late until I'd finished it. At its centre is a genuinely gripping mystery: the body of a teenage girl is found not only dead but dismembered and severely burned. But what makes the novel so compelling is...

I was so delighted to see Anne Carson named this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I watched the announcement live, cheekily typing "JCO for the win" into the comments as always. But Carson had been one of my top

I was away in Italy when the 2026 Booker shortlist was revealed last week but I did my own little reveal video beside the Mediterranean and I'm absolutely thrilled with the six the judges have chosen. Having read the whole longlist and made both a

Gwendoline Riley is a well-regarded author who's received considerable award attention over the years, and plenty of readers and critics genuinely love her fiction. I am not one of them. I'd previously read her earlier novel

I always find it fascinating when a book creates such a wide divide between professional critics being largely positive and everyday readers who tend to be far more judgemental, and that's exactly the case with "The Shadow of the Object". Most readers I've come across seem either mixed on it or genuinely baffled, generally agreeing that the f...