Reviews

Stella Tillyard is an English author and historian whose books include a number about the royal family – George IV: King in Waiting; A Royal Affair: George III and his Troublesome Siblings; and Aristocrats. The Great Level is set after the Civil War and about a quite different subject that must have had momentous impact on the inhabitants of the Fens. Click on the title to read our review.

This review is of a French novel that has unanimous praise on review sites. Our reviewer's commentary reminded me of The President’s Hat which I loved and indeed that is also by Antoine Laurain. So, if you need to be cheered up then this is the one for you. Read it while drinking some good French wine and you won’t need to take that plane to Paris!

This review is about the history of witches in Scotland and how widespread and sometimes influential in the course of history they were. Lily Seafield has published a number of successful books about ghosts and the supernatural in Scotland.

This is a monumental novel following the story of a family rising from their beginnings in abject poverty in rural Afghanistan to affluence in California while never forgetting their connections to their home and family in war-torn Afghanistan. It chronicles aching life events such as the selling of a daughter, not more than a toddler, to a wealthy childless couple in Kabul. Increasing prosperity follows to a life in the USA, not neglecting corruption, cruelty and moral breakdown along the way, through to a circular return to their roots. Click on the title to read more....

This is not a novel for the faint hearted, but I feel enriched having read it and have a much greater sense of Italian aristocratic life during the Renaissance in terms of its splendour and opulence as well as its corruption, brutality and power. As in Hamnet when Maggie O’Farrell enabled us to experience Elizabethan Stratford and London in Shakespeare’s time, offering us an extraordinary insight into his family’s situation, she now takes the real life figure of Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara, and his treatment of his 15-year-old bride, the subject of the marriage portrait, who met an untimely death. Click on title to read more......

An intriguing book set in Edinburgh, is the first novel by Mary Paulson-Ellis who lives in Edinburgh. A previous novel, The Other Mrs Walker, was a Times best seller and Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year. She writes across the boundaries of crime, historical and literary fiction, often in dual timelines.

The Way of all Flesh is the debut novel in a series by a couple of authors – one a successful writer and the other a medical professional. It was inspired by research for a Masters degree in the History of Medicine. This book was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year.

Abyss tells the story of the most perilous event in recent World History from the viewpoints of national leaders, Russian officers, Cuban peasants, American pilots and British disarmers. Sir Max Hastings is a journalist who accompanied the British Task Force to the Falklands War. He was editor of the Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard and has published a number of books about the history of war.

The subject of this review tells of relatively recent events that still have great significance to this day. Undoubtedly the story of Colditz has been written about before. However, this account provides new insights. Ben Macintyre is a master storyteller of real-life espionage who has had success with a number of books such as Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat.

The recently published Bho Bheul an Eòin/ From the Bird’s Mouth by Ruairidh MacDhonnchaidh / Derek Robertson is also is the subject of the last library talk in our Autumn Series. You may know Derek Robertson from his exhibitions of paintings of birds and animals over the years in the Pittenweem Arts Festival. Derek is one of Scotland’s foremost wildlife artists as well as being a television presenter and author.