I’d heard so many great things about this book. Quite simply, it is fantastic. The very many awards and shortlists support that feeling and include (but not limited to): Waterstones Debut Prize 2024, Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2024, Authors Club prize for debut fiction, shortlisted in the Nero awards for debut fiction, shortlisted for the […]
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Published this year (2025), Broken Biscuits and Other Male Failures is Farrer’s second book after the award winning Cold Fish Soup. Broken Biscuits is a series of essays (but this reads excitingly like short stories) based around his life with the subject being musing on his failures to meet the assumed cultural ideals of manliness.
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Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones was first published in 2006 and is a fictional tale based on the 1980s Bougainville Island civil war. It follows the life of Matilda, a teenage girl living with her mother, and her journey through life, in tension and under threat, with heroism and betrayal, love and loyalty all woven
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For our first Books and Brews review it is local favourite, House of Books & Friends. If you’re in the centre of Manchester we’d highly recommend a quick parallel side-step from the pains of Market Street to the safe haven that is the House of Books & Friends. Established at the end of 2022
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A Winter Book is a collection of short stories from the creator of the Moomins, Tove Jansson. I’d started this book when it was much colder, truly Winter. But having finished it on a March Sunday, Spring is on its way; the sky is clear and the sounds of grass cutting seem to form a
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Black butterflies is a truly gripping turmoiled tale of hope, love and heart-wrenching grief. Based in 1992, the book is set during the first year Sarajevo (a city in then Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina) was under siege and closed off from the world. The story is told through Zora, a landscape artist and university
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The Boy from the Sea is a debut of sorts from Carr. This is his first outing in adult fiction, having already published across non-fiction (The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border (Faber)) and children’s (The Badness of Ballydog, Lost Dogs, Deep Deep Down (Simon & Schuster)). We find ourselves in Killybegs, County
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