Glorious colours riotously abound in Monique Roffey's first novel: 'deep purples, maroons, reds and oranges'. It is set in a delicatessen cum cafe in Shepherd's Bush, London where large, ungainly August Chalmin presides over culinary riches.
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The Cookbook Collector is one of those instantly engaging books that makes you want to tell all your friends that they must read it even when you are only half way through the novel yourself. Author Allegra Goodman did herself a disservice when she described her new novel as "Sense and Sensibility for the digital age", particularly given the number of outraged responses that subsequently appeared on Jane Austen fan pages. Goodman deals with much bigger issues than Jane Austen ever aspired to write about in her novels, however exquisite those classics might be.
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This Will Go Down On Your Permanent Record defies categorisation; it is not merely a coming of age story, but neither is it a sugary high school drama nor a moralistic critique of the potential pitfalls of teenage life. This debut novel focuses on the importance of friendship and the lessons learned as you grow up—sometimes surprising lessons—about what real friendship means.
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A runaway bestseller when it was published in Sweden in 1910, and now a classic, Elin Wagner's Penwoman was "the book of the Swedish women's suffrage movement" according to translator Sarah Death. Now 100 years old, Penwoman remains a captivating story that convincingly transports the reader back to the beginning of the twentieth century, but also reaches ahead to the twenty-first and speaks to the gender inequality that still exists.
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Oswald Rufeisen might be called a saint; he lived a simple, selfless life, full of kindness and sacrifice. Truth is often greater than fiction, yet Ludmila Ulitskaya succeeds in fictionalising the life of Oswald Rufeisen as 'Daniel Stein' or Brother Daniel. She weaves a fascinating web of activity around Brother Daniel's life from his early life in Poland; through the years of the Second World War when he works for the Gestapo as an interpreter, yet saves many people from the Nazi death camps; to his years as a Jewish Catholic priest in Israel.
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