About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Joanna Biggs
Positive The Guardian (UK) [An] unusual blend of memoir, criticism and literary biography ... Biggs seems to take a more jaded view of marriage, hardly crediting that any woman might survive it with her independence and spirit intact ... Biggs has chosen women who put their own lives into their writing – as has she.
Marion Turner
Positive The Guardian (UK) ... this book is an intriguing combination of the fantastically bawdy and the deadly serious. It contains all the academic throat-clearing you might expect from a dissertation... and all the forensic research, too ... Turner is clearly a Wife of Bath megafan... and readers are assumed to have a thorough knowledge of the original text.
Adam Rutherford
Positive The Guardian (UK) A short book about a big subject ... It takes patience to trace the complicated web linking these ideas, and Rutherford does so with much-needed nuance and an absence of alarmism ... It’s frustrating that he tiptoes around some of the more difficult questions ... Control is persuasive, sensible and ultimately reassuring, but it is not complacent ... This book is a shot worth having.
Ashley Ward
Rave The Guardian (UK) Vampire bats \'have each other’s backs\', according to one of the extraordinary stories in this fascinating book ... Ward...draws very few explicit connections between animal behaviour and our own, and is cautious about ascribing emotions or motivations to the creatures he studies—even in tear-jerking anecdotes about how elephants and wolves appear to mourn. But it’s hard not to take from some of his stories the idea that humans could learn a lot from social animals ... Ward describes this book as his attempt \'to distil the wonder that I still feel in the company of animals\', and it certainly does that ... Some thought-provoking chapters about baboons, bonobos and chimpanzees show how humans could learn from our closest relatives, too.
Roddy Doyle
Positive The Guardian (UK) ... what feels most familiar is the sense of absence that fills every story, of voices and bodies and people who are missed ... Doyle shows us men who are tired, or hurt, or baffled by the way things have turned out, walking around strange towns looking for things they are never going to find or making up tall tales so they don’t have to face the truth. And Covid doesn’t help ... There are laughs as well, of course, many of them prompted by a sort of gravedigger’s humour ... There are happy endings, too ... Generally, these are rooted in moments of connection, in finding new ways to talk to each other, after everything that has happened. There is dialogue, after all. Even in a pandemic.
Suzanne O'Sullivan
Positive The Guardian (UK) In this illuminating and often challenging book, [O\'Sullivan] travels the world, bringing her expertise and curiosity to some astonishing cases of MPIs ... Throughout her travels, O’Sullivan acts with humility about the limits of western medicine ... By making social problems visible on the body, O’Sullivan believes, these conditions allow voiceless people to tell their stories and to make themselves heard. Perhaps this eloquent and convincing book will be the start of making people in authority listen, make change and help.
Rachel Joyce
Rave The Guardian (UK) ... an excellent premise, and one that pans out almost as heartwarmingly as you’d expect, but with some powerful, moving and sometimes violent surprises en route ... While the journey of self-discovery may be predictable, Miss Benson’s Beetle is a joy of a novel, with real insight into the lives of women, the value of friendship and the lasting effects of war.
Tracy Chevalier
Positive The Guardian (UK) Chevalier excels at writing about the ordinary human characters who find themselves accidentally at the centre of history ... There are times when the stiff fabric of Chevalier’s research shows through the delicate stitches of plot and character, but she creates a convincing picture of the period. Most impressive are the portraits of individual women like Violet’s mother, made bitter and furious by grief, who either pursue their freedom in small acts of disobedience, or quietly stitch their loss into comfort and beauty for generations to come, leaving no mark or memorial other than a neat set of initials sewn into a cushion.
Gina Rippon
Positive The Guardian There is actually very little discussion of the effect of all this on men and boys, which is a shame ... one of those books that should be essential reading before anyone is allowed to be a teacher, or buy a child a present, or comment on anything on Twitter, ever again … but my fear is that Rippon is preaching to the choir. That said, all systemising brains out there owe it to themselves to read this calm and logical collection of evidence and science, and all empathisers will understand its importance.
Laura Barnett
Positive The Guardian The novel is muddled in places, with a few too many characters and the odd bit of stilted dialogue. But it has a wisdom and a harmony that are satisfying, as Cass considers all the years that had, with such incomprehensible swiftness, rolled by and disappeared\'. Who knows where the time goes? People who listen to the words will find one intriguing answer in Greatest Hits.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Rave The Guardian Fleishman Is in Trouble is a remarkable work of ventriloquism ... Fleishman Is in Trouble is so much smarter than a Great American Novel wannabe written by another clever man ... Brodesser-Akner shows great skill as Libby the narrator takes on Toby’s perspective to pass judgment on the women in his life ... What Brodesser-Akner has achieved here, by Trojan-horsing herself into Toby’s point of view, is to quietly reveal the souls of the women in the story. But more than that, to show that all stories—about marriage, love, loss, hope and disappointment—really are universal ... This is an honest, powerful, human story with no apologies. And it will do the \'American Novel\' a power of good.
Lewis Dartnell
Positive The Guardian Dartnell is an eloquent, conversational guide to these daunting aeons of time. He writes of land masses swelling and bursting \'like a huge zit\', and global warming \'triggered by a great methane flatulence of the oceans\'... He adds, in one of many maddeningly intriguing, throwaway footnotes, that humanmade global warming might prevent the next ice age, which sounds perversely hopeful, in a way. I’d like to read a whole book by Dartnell on that subject. All in good time …
Shirley Barrett
Rave The Guardian There’s no two ways about it, this is a baffling book. Part thriller, sometimes veering wildly towards fantasy, with a heavy dash of romcom and a sardonic kind of farce, it defies convention ... I was hooked from the opening pages ... While the beginning of the novel is a shockingly funny and satisfying story of one woman’s illness, the latter part is confusing and very odd. Perhaps that is Barrett’s point—that life is ridiculous and uncategorisable and doesn’t wrap up with any neat answers. Is Eleanor possessed, or mad, or the only sane person in town? Is her lover a killer? Is there really a disembodied hand scuttling around seeking its revenge? After reading this book, you’ll be none the wiser, but read it you should; it’s laugh-out-loud horrible and perfectly nuts—you’ll never find anything like it again.
Hannah Fry
Rave The Guardian Are you a concerned citizen of the modern world? Do you ever worry that algorithms are stealing your data? Do you secretly have little idea what algorithms and data actually are? Then Hello World is for you ... This book illustrates why good science writers are essential. \'We have a tendency to overtrust anything we don’t understand,\' Fry says. And if we don’t understand it, those difficult questions will be answered by those who do – pharmaceutical companies, malign governments and the like. It’s time to pull back the curtain on the algorithms that shape our lives. Because, as Fry says, \'the future doesn’t just happen. We create it.\'
Yrsa Daley-Ward
Mixed The Guardian There may be truth in this memoir, but not in the traditional sense. But then, her writing is anything but traditional ... The Daley-Ward in the book reinvents herself several times; her story involves drugs, depression, sex work and modelling. She has devised a form that combines first and third person, poetry and prose, upside-down printing, and wincingly honest streams-of-consciousness about sexuality and physicality that sometimes make for difficult reading ... Some readers will be put off by the start-stop nature of this extraordinary narrative. Others will be thrilled by its honesty.
AJ Pearce
Rave The Guardian A jolly romp through London in the blitz sounds like an unlikely idea for a novel, but Dear Mrs Bird is full of poignant moments that cut through the froth of its narrator’s voice ... And though at times the book seems like an Evelyn Waugh pastiche crossed with a Radio 4 comedy drama, complete with hilarious misunderstandings and some dodgy dialogue, Emmy is truly charming. When her upper lip finally wobbles, the reader’s will, too ... along the way she shows some grown-up insights as well as true grit ... In the end, the novel’s spirit is madly winning.
Carl Zimmer
Positive The Guardian \"[The Book\'s] Mini-biographies paint powerful pictures ... She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is packed full of learning, and years of work. Some of the science around genetic diseases is a little hard to follow, and readers may find the story of Zimmer’s own genome to be too much like navel gazing... But the book offers clear insights into a fast-moving area, and asks big questions.\
Melissa Dahl
Rave The Guardian \"This lively study explains how embracing embarrassing conversations or exposing situations can improve your life ... She offers several convincing examples ... Dahl is exceptionally good at describing emotions and the visceral physical sensations that often accompany them, and on the whole her personal anecdotes and her more scientific investigations are pertinent and penetrating. Cringeworthy offers several sensible pointers for readers, perhaps on trains, who would like to overcome awkwardness. But the most passionate advice is to be \'grateful for this odd little emotion and the power it has to connect us … There will always be awkwardness, and the only way to keep it from isolating us is if we start cringing together.\'\
Jami Attenberg
Rave The Guardian The literature of sex and the single woman has been in the doldrums since Carrie got married and Bridget had her baby, so three cheers for this warts-and-all portrait of a woman trying to find her place in the world and in her own nuclear family now she is all grown up ... This is a novel about how to step up when your smug married friend suddenly gets divorced, or when your annoying mum really needs you; about 'being there' for people when you don’t even know where 'there' is. It has hope, in spades.
Carolyn Parkhurst
Rave The Guardian If this novel is part Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and part We Need to Talk About Kevin, it also contains shades of Lord of the Flies. For this, young Iris is the perfect narrator. She is stroppily resentful of the attention Tilly receives, but fiercely protective of her big sister ... This is a fascinating novel, at once challenging and compassionate, thrilling and thoughtful. It asks tough questions about what happens to people who don’t fit predetermined patterns, and what it means to be normal.