Our Recommendations

Here we recommend books we are reading or have read, or which our customers recommend to us.

Rebecca Abrams, Touching Distance, paperback at £7.99.  This was recommended to me by my brother Matt Ridley.  His fellow guest on A GOOD READ on Radio 4 earlier this year was Rebecca Abrams so he read her book.   Based on a true story, it is a scientific drama, a medical mystery, a moving love story and a stunning historical novel set in Aberdeen in 1790.  Progress and knowledge clash with superstition and fear.  Unputdownable.  (MJ: 10th March 2011).

Lionel Shriver, So Much For All That, paperback at £7.99.  Anyone who heard Lionel Shriver will have wanted to read her latest novel, wry, funny and readable about death and dying.  We had early copies of the paperback for the Literary Festival but these all sold out.  More copies will be coming in shortly, so we can put you on the waiting list for copies or you can buy the hardback with the cover which Lionel likes better.

I am just finishing an excellent thriller set in the Arctic winter, White Heat by S. J. McGrath, featuring the Inuit bear hunter Edie.  Readers who savour Donna Leon's Italian policeman's meals may not enjoy Inuit delicacies: raw guillemot eggs, slices of frozen seal and fermented walrus gut.  But read it for the claustrophobia of the small community scratching a living in the vast tundra.

John is really enjoying The Marrowbone Marble Company by Glenn Taylor: special price of £11.99 for the hardback (£3.00 off the published price).  Taylor's previous novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, is now out in paperback at £7.99.

Coming up in a month or so is a gripping new psychological thriller, Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson.  You won't be able or want to go to sleep until you have finished it.  See the promotional video on youtube.

I think I am going to read Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese next, highly recommended by Hilary Graham.