Guest Book Review: Alison Jean Lester - Lillian on Life

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

Lillian, a single, well-travelled woman of a certain age, wakes up next to her married lover and looks back at her life. It's not at all the life she expected.

Walking the unpaved road between traditional and modern options for women, Lillian has grappled with parental disappointment, society's expectations and the vagaries of love and sex. As a narrator she's bold and witty, and her reflections - from 'On Getting to Sex' to 'On the Importance of Big Pockets' or 'On Leaving in Order to Stay' - reverberate originally and unpredictably.

Amazon links: Kindle or Paperback

Guest Book Review: Joanna Barnard - Precocious

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

There are some lessons you shouldn't learn in school...Fiona Palmer is (un)happily married when a chance meeting with her former teacher plunges her headlong into an affair. Intercut with the realities of their adult relationship, Fiona remembers first meeting the enigmatic Henry Morgan as a precocious and lonely fourteen-year-old. Her schoolgirl crush developed into an intense relationship, but it was always one which she controlled.  Or did she? 

Amazon links: Kindle or Hardcover

Guest Book Review: Sahar Delijani - Children of the Jacaranda Tree

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

Tehran, 1983. A city paralysed by fear, its people silenced. And the beating heart of the regime is Evin prison. Yet even within its walls three women dare to dream of a life beyond tyranny. 

Azar gives birth to her daughter in captivity. One day the guards simply take her child from her. Parisayearns for her tiny son, growing up a few miles away but completely out of reach. And Firoozeh, broken by cruelty, has turned her back on everything she was fighting for. 

But even in the most desolate places hope can take root . . .

Amazon links: Kindle or Paperback

Guest Book Review: Sara Novic - Girl at War

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

Growing up in Zagreb in the summer of 1991, 10-year-old Ana Juric is a carefree tomboy; she runs the streets with her best friend, Luka, helps take care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her father. But when civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, football games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills.

The brutal ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosnians tragically changes Ana's life, and she is lost to a world of genocide and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for survival. Ten years later she returns to Croatia, a young woman struggling to belong to either country, forced to confront the trauma of her past and rediscover the place that was once her home.

Girl At War is a haunting, compelling debut from a brilliant young writer, rooted in historical fact and personal experience. Sara has lived in the States and Croatia, and her novel bears witness to the haunting stories of her family and friends who lived through the height of the conflict, and reflects her own attempts to come to terms with her relationship to Croatia and its history. It is an extraordinary achievement for a novelist of any age, let alone age 26. 

Amazon links: Kindle or Hardcover

Guest Book Review: Patrick Gale - A Place Called Winter

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

To find yourself, sometimes you must lose everything. 

A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence - until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything. 

Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies. Remote and unforgiving, his allotted homestead in a place called Winter is a world away from the golden suburbs of turn-of-the-century Edwardian England. And yet it is here, isolated in a seemingly harsh landscape, under the threat of war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before. 

In this exquisite journey of self-discovery, loosely based on a real life family mystery, Patrick Gale has created an epic, intimate human drama, both brutal and breathtaking. It is a novel of secrets, sexuality and, ultimately, of great love.

Amazon links: Kindle or Hardcover

Guest Book Review: Karen Perry - The Boy That Never Was

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

You were loved and lost - then you came back . . .

Five years ago, three-year-old Dillon disappeared. For his father Harry - who left him alone for ten crucial minutes - it was an unforgivable lapse. Yet Dillon's mother Robyn has never blamed her husband: her own secret guilt is burden enough.

Now they're trying to move on, returning home to Dublin to make a fresh start.

But their lives are turned upside down the day Harry sees an eight-year-old boy in the crowd. A boy Harry is convinced is Dillon. But the boy vanishes before he can do anything about it.

What Harry thought he saw quickly plunges their marriage into a spiral of crazed obsession and broken trust, uncovering deceits and shameful secrets. Everything Robyn and Harry ever believed in one another is cast into doubt.

And at the centre of it all is the boy that never was...

Amazon links: Kindle or Hardcover 

Guest Book Review: Anna Hope - Wake

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

Five Days in November, 1920: 

As the body of the Unknown Soldier makes its way home from the fields of Northern France, three women are dealing with loss in their own way: Hettie, who dances for sixpence a waltz at the Hammersmith Palais; Evelyn, who toils at a job in the pensions office, and Ada, a housewife who is beset by visions of her dead son. One day a young man comes to her door. He carries with him a wartime mystery that will bind these women together and will both mend and tear their hearts. 

A portrait of three intertwining lives caught at the faultline between empire and modernity, Wake captures the beginnings of a new era, and the day the mood of the nation changed for ever.

 Amazon links: Kindle or Hardcover 

Guest Book Review: Louise Walters - Mrs Sinclair's Suitcase

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

Forgive me, Dorothea, for I cannot forgive you. What you do, to this child, to this child's mother, it is wrong...

Roberta likes to collect the letters and postcards she finds in second-hand books. When her father gives her some of her grandmother's belongings, she finds a baffling letter from the grandfather she never knew - dated after he supposedly died in the war.

Dorothy is unhappily married to Albert, who is away at war. When an aeroplane crashes in the field behind her house she meets Squadron Leader Jan Pietrykowski, and as their bond deepens she dares to hope she might find happiness. But fate has other plans for them both, and soon she is hiding a secret so momentous that its shockwaves will touch her granddaughter many years later...

Amazon links: Kindle or Hardcover

Guest Book Review: Renita D'Silva - The Forgotten Daughter

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

‘You were adopted’. 

Three simple words, in a letter accompanying her parents' will, tear Nisha’s carefully ordered world apart. Raised in England, by her caring but emotionally reserved parents, Nisha has never been one to take risks. 

Now, with the scrawled address of an Indian convent begins a search for the mother and family she never knew and the awakening of childhood memories long forgotten. 

The secrets, culture and people that Nisha discover will change her life forever. And, as her eyes are opened to a side of herself she didn’t know existed, Nisha realizes that she must also seek answers to the hardest question of all – why? 

Amazon links: Kindle

Guest Book Review: Adele Parks - Spare Brides

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

New Year's Eve, 1920. The Great War is over and it's a new decade of glamorous promise. But a generation of men and women who survived the extreme trauma and tragedy will never be the same. 

With countless men lost, it seems that only wealth and beauty will secure a husband from the few who returned, but lonely Beatrice has neither attribute. Ava has both, although she sees marriage as a restrictive cage after the freedom war allowed. Sarah paid the war's ultimate price: her husband's life. Lydia should be grateful that her own husband's desk job kept him safe, but she sees only his cowardice. 

A chance encounter for one of these women with a striking yet haunted officer changes everything. In a world altered beyond recognition, where not all scars are visible, this damaged and beautiful group must grasp any happiness they can find - whatever the cost.

Amazon links: Kindle, Hardback or Trade Paperback

Guest Book Review: Anton Disclafani - The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

My parents sent me away because I wanted too much, wanted badly. And all that want was a dangerous thing...

High in the Blue Ridge Mountains, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is a refuge of privilege in a land devastated by the Depression.

Thea Atwell's arrival late in the summer season causes a ripple of intrigue and speculation. But even the most scandalous rumour cannot come close to the truth that destroyed her family, and brought her here.

Fearless and unbroken, Thea soon finds that there is no banishment from secrets and temptations. Poised on the brink of adulthood, the events of that year will change the girls of Yonahlossee in ways they will never forget.

Amazon links: Kindle or Paperback

Countdown to Christmas Day 14: Festive Fun Q&A with Danielle

The latest participant in my Countdown to Christmas features is guest reviewer Danielle with a festive fun Q&A.

What’s your earliest or favourite Christmas memory?
Christmas was always massive in our family when I was growing up. We had a routine of always going to Newcastle to see a moving display in Fenwick’s (a local department store) window. The theme changed every year and it was a highlight of the year. It is still an event to this day.

What are you looking forward to most this Christmas?
Doing lots of festive things with my little boy. He’s four and at a lovely age to enjoy the magic!

Do you have any family traditions that you always follow? 
Apart from Fenwick’s window, we always go to Beamish Museum to visit Santa Claus. Beamish is a living museum set in the early twentieth century and they do Christmas so well. We also choose a new special bauble for the tree each year. Before the little one came along, we always attended Durham Cathedral on Christmas Eve, so atmospheric and haunting.

Guest Book Review: Sinead Moriarty - This Child of Mine

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

Sophie is a happy 18-year-old living in London with Anna, her Irish mother. Anna has devoted her life to Sophie. It may be just the two of them but Anna has more than enough love to give. Sophie has everything she could ever need. 

Laura is a not-so-happy artist. She too has a daughter, Mandy. But Laura is haunted by the loss of her first child, Jody. Happy-go-lucky as she is, Mandy lives in Jody's shadow and wonders why her mother can never let go. 

Both mothers carry secrets and cannot forget the day their paths crossed. But a chance discovery is about to bring everything into the open and mothers and daughters, love and lies, past and future, will spectacularly collide.

Amazon links: Kindle or Paperback

Guest Book Review: Matthew Quick - Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

How would you spend your birthday if you knew it would be your last? 

Eighteen-year-old Leonard Peacock knows exactly what he'll do. He'll say goodbye.

Not to his mum - who he calls Linda because it annoys her - who's moved out and left him to fend for himself. Nor to his former best friend, whose torments have driven him to consider committing the unthinkable. But to his four friends: a Humphrey-Bogart-obsessed neighbour, a teenage violin virtuoso, a pastor's daughter and a teacher.

Most of the time, Leonard believes he's weird and sad but these friends have made him think that maybe he's not. He wants to thank them, and say goodbye. 

Amazon links: Kindle or Hardback  

Guest Book Review: Alison McQueen - Under the Jewelled Sky

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

London 1957. In a bid to erase her past, Sophie Schofield accepts a wedding proposal from ambitious British diplomat, Lucien Grainger. When he is posted to New Delhi, into the glittering circle of ex-pat society, old wounds begin to break open as Sophie is confronted with the memory of her first, forbidden love and its devastating consequences. This is not the India she fell in love with ten years before in a maharaja's palace, the India that ripped out her heart as Partition tore the country in two.

And so begins the unravelling of an ill-fated marriage, setting in motion a devastating chain of events that will bring her face to face with a past she tried so desperately to forget, and a future she must fight for. This is a tender story of love, loss of innocence, and the aftermath of a terrible decision no one knew how to avoid.

Amazon links: Paperback or Kindle

Guest Book Review: Lisa Jewell - The House We Grew Up In

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

All four children have an idyllic childhood: a picture-book cottage in a country village, a warm, cosy kitchen filled with love and laughter, sun-drenched afternoons in a rambling garden.

But one Easter weekend a tragedy strikes the Bird family that is so devastating that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear them apart.

The years pass and the children become adults and begin to develop their own quite separate lives. Soon it's almost as though they've never been a family at all.

Almost. But not quite.

Because something has happened that will call them home, back to the house they grew up in - and to what really happened that Easter weekend all those years ago.

Amazon links: Kindle or Paperback

Guest Book Review: Henriette Gyland - The Elephant Girl

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

Peek-a-boo I see you ...

When five-year-old Helen Stephens witnesses her mother's murder, her whole world comes crumbling down. Rejected by her extended family, Helen is handed over to child services and learns to trust no-one but herself. Twenty years later, her mother's killer is let out of jail, and Helen swears vengeance.

Jason Moody runs a halfway house, desperate to distance himself from his father's gangster dealings. But when Helen shows up on his doorstep, he decides to dig into her past, and risks upsetting some very dangerous people.

As Helen begins to question what really happened to her mother, Jason is determined to protect her. But Helen is getting too close to someone who'll stop at nothing to keep the truth hidden ...

Guest Book Review: Lisa Jewell - Before I Met You

 Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

London, 1920. Arlette works in Liberty by day, and by night is caughty up in a glamorous whirl of parties, clubs, cocktails and jazz. But when tragedy strikes she flees the city, never to return.

Over half a century later, in the grungy mid-'90s, her granddaughter Betty arrives in London.

She can't wait to begin her new life. But before she can do so, she must find the mysterious woman named in her grandmother's will.

What she doesn't know is that her search will uncover the heartbreaking secret that changed her grandmother's life, and might also change hers for ever...

Crime Fiction Week Guest Review: Stephen Booth - Already Dead

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

A summer of endless rain in the Peak District leaves the officers of Derbyshire's CID with a problem. They have discovered a man's body lying in shallow water, but torrential rain has swollen the rivers and flooded the roads, making travel difficult and forensic examination impossible. 

And that's not all. The absence of DS Ben Cooper, on extended leave after an arson attack, has left a serious gap. DS Diane Fry is a reluctant temporary replacement, but now their makeshift team is about to be tested to the limit. The fatal events of one damp August night are likely to remain shrouded in mystery if they can't track down a car glimpsed only as a dark outline in the rain by a passer-by.

As the rain turns into a deluge, loyalties among the officers will be put under intolerable strain as they try to solve their toughest case yet. And that's before it emerges that Ben Cooper is not at home, but has vanished into thin air...

Crime Fiction Week Guest Review: Kate Rhodes - A Killing of Angels

Reviewed by Danielle Pullen

The first death looked like a suicide. But someone had tucked a picture of an angel and a handful of white feathers into the banker's pocket - before pushing him in front of a Tube. A killer is stalking the Square Mile, an avenging angel intent on punishment. But why these victims? What were their sins?

Psychologist Alice Quentin swore she'd never get involved with police work again. Her duty is to the living, not the dead. But she owes detective Don Burns a favour, and when he comes begging for help, how can she refuse? 

In order to find the murderer, Alice and Don must dig deep into the toxic heart of the City. A place where money means more than life, and no one can be counted innocent.