Archive: Recommendations

White by Marie Darrieussecq

Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone reviews and recommends White by Marie Darrieussecq Edmeé and Pete have never met. They come from separate parts of the globe, but White follows their individual journeys to An…

Dominic Selwood’s Punctuation Without Tears: Punctuate Confidently – In Minutes

I’m not sure about all of you but I have a real phobia around punctuation. An old writing tutor once said to me that I just stand over text and sprinkle punctuation at random. So I was really pleased…

Review of Reconciliation by Guy Ware

Reconciliation, the second novel by Byte the Book member Guy Ware, is a page-turning quest to uncover the real story of the family spy; a story that rewrites both past and present. Reconciliation take…

Decision making lessons from Antarctic exploration. A book review of: When Your Life Depends On It by Brad Borkan & David Hirzel

Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone reviews When Your Life Depends On It co-written by Byte the Book member, Brad Borkan and David Hirzel. Antarctic exploration of the early 1900s, before radio communications an…

Review of A Secret Sisterhood Out June 1st

Byte the Book members, Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney have been interested in literary female friendship for some time. Not believing that the famous male literary friendships, like Coleridg…

Book Review of Owl Song at Dawn by Emma Claire Sweeney

Maeve runs Sea View Lodge in Morecambe. Nearly eighty years old, Maeve has lived there all her life. A guest house that once catered to civil servants in the war, builders afterwards and now specialis…

Love across a broken map. An expanded book review by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

I was lucky enough to be given Love across a broken map by Farhana Shaikh of Dahlia Publishing. Through Byte the Book and the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society, I’d been invited to the All P…

A Guide to Creativity by the Author of Eat Pray Love – Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Buy this book. Review by Tracey Sinclair. Do you want to pen a best seller? An award winning play? An Oscar nominated script? Then, suggests mega selling writer Elizabeth Gilbert, you might very well…

The Intimacy of Tragedies: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

Review by Jantien Abma Buy this book. This pocket-sized book comprises of two ‘slice of life’ stories, the titular Kitchen and forty-page Moonlight Shadow. Each brief yet peculiarly intimate story is…

An Engaging and Provocative Read – The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Buy this book here Review by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone. When I was studying my A Levels I had a friend from Southern Japan. I was with her the first time she saw England in the snow. It was a small cou…

An Unrushed Walk Through A Very Different Time – The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

You can buy this book here. Review by Jantien Abma The Rainbow follows the life of small farm-owner Tom Brangwen as he grapples with the frustrations of love, intellect and English tradition in the mi…

Penitent Perfection – The Apologist by Jay Rayner

Review by Justine Solomons Buy this book The Apologist is great. I’m a big fan of Jay Rayner’s writing. I tend to buy the paper at the weekend, skim the headlines and look at pictures, but Jay’s one o…

Satisfying Second Outing for Rowling’s New Sleuth – The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

Buy this book. Review by Tracey Sinclair. The first novel in the Cormoran Strike series was overshadowed by the media furore when ‘Robert Galbraith’ was unhappily outed as a pseudonym for none other t…

Superbly Creepy Debut – Home by Rebekah Lattin Rawstrone

Review by Tracey Sinclair. Buy this book here. A woman wakes up in hospital, not knowing where she is or how she got there. She is introduced to children she doesn’t remember, a family that isn’t hers…

Provocative Tale of a Modern Mother – Wounding by Heidi James

Review by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone Pre-order this book here. When I begin a novel, I anticipate a journey into new or differently interpreted experiences and I hope to be provoked into new or deeper a…

Chilling as an Arctic wind – Dark Matter: A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver

Buy Dark Matter. Review by Tracey Sinclair. If you like the ‘classic’ ghost stories of Susan Hill and her ilk, then you’ll love this tale of an Arctic adventure gone tragically wrong. Tense, atmospher…

Serial Killer Story with a Twist: The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Buy The Shining Girls. Review by Tracey Sinclair I’m not usually a fan of crime books where we spend too much time in the killer’s mind – too often it seems these chapters are there simply to show off…

Rebus and Fox reunited – Saints of the Shadow Bible (Rebus) by Ian Rankin

Buy this book Review by Tracey Sinclair Fans of Ian Rankin’s creation John Rebus were thrilled when the cantankerous old copper came out of retirement, and though his debut return Standing in Another…

A Tangle of Paranoia – The Darkening Hour by Penny Hancock

Review written by Richard Wood. You can buy this book here. Hancock paints a cloying backdrop of South London to frame a gripping and fraught examination of the power struggle between employer and emp…