The third book (to date) in the Nicholas Shelby series, this is a sixteenth-century spy romp split between Marrakech and London. The settings are clearly and atmospherically created. There‘s plenty of murder, plague etc in the plot, but it seems strangely slow-moving – it really does take a long time to get going, and I‘m not sure that the wait‘s worth it. It just left me a bit cold.

This is simply wonderful book. Split into three sections, it tells the story of the day the atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima and intersperses this with updates in modern Japan. We watch the tragedy unfold from the perspective of a child, and find out what has happened to the main character Ichiro since. Has he been able to keep a promise he made?

This book perfectly evokes the final few years of island life on St Kilda, in the Outer Hebrides. It really captures the bleak and haunting beauty of this landscape and captures the disappearing way of life. Set from the 1920s to 1940s, it‘s the love story of local girl Chrissie and Cambridge undergraduate Fred; they fall in love but fate keeps intervening to keep them apart.

Twenty five years ago, Louisa won a scholarship to the elite Catholic Temple House boarding school, run by nuns. She and another student Victoria formed strong friendships with the bohemian art teacher Mr Lavelle. One day, though, Louisa and Mr Lavelle just vanished. What became of them? Fast forward to the present day, and a journalist is now investigating whether they ran off together, or whether tragedy struck.

The pitch-perfect prose brings Georgian London to vivid life, and strongly engages us with the central protagonist Bess Bright. She has had to give up her newborn baby Clara and the story follows her quest years later to find her daughter again. It makes lots of points about social divisions in the eighteenth (and twenty-first?) centuries and what it means to be a mother, all wrapped up in a page-turning narrative.

I have just had to conclude, though, that it really wasn‘t for me at all. It‘s a boy‘s own style story of spies and secret agents (rather than the literal battle fields) that follows a Cambridge professor as he accepts a top secret mission to rescue a parcel that might just bring peace. I was able to guess the ‘secret‘ pretty quickly. It just didn't grip me.

After her parents‘ deaths, Aderyn has become the Protector of Atratys. Since her mother‘s murder, though, Aderyn has lost her ability to transform into birds (in her instance a swan) putting her position and life at risk. The idea of nobles becoming birds is original and I really enjoyed watching Aderyn develop as a character over the course of the book as she gradually takes her place in order to save her country.

Despite their reputation as the ‘roaring twenties‘, they were actually incredibly tough times to live through: the book reminds us that so many people who had lost their loved ones and there were families living in desperate poverty. It is, then, thought-provoking and interesting.

Caroline Stark‘s idyllic life falls apart when she finds out that her husband Jason has been unfaithful to her. He disappears with the woman she suspects him of having an affair with and all their savings. In revenge, Caroline gets involved with bad boy Aidan – is one stalking the other, or is this a real relationship? And is everything what it seems?

This is simply a really charming book. We gradually piece together the life of Abigail over twenty years. She is a single parent and Happiness Café owner whose brother disappeared when he was fifteen and has never been found. Are there any clues in The Guidebook, a weird self-help book that has been mailed to Abigail over many years?

A really tense read with lots of family drama and some serial killer action for good measure! Four Bostonian women end up get involved with a dating app and we watch helplessly as the situation rapidly spirals out of control. Who will the next victim be?