Enjoy Life

Book reviews

Looking for more? Here are some other reviews from books that were also published.  

In I Can Hear The Cuckoo (Gaia, £16.99), Kiran Sidhu writes movingly of how she came to terms with grief and learned to see life anew thanks to her move out of London and immersion in a small community in the Welsh Valleys, and, similarly bereaved, Hollie Starling explores the healing power of nature, ritual and folklore in The Bleeding Tree (Rider, £18.99)…

Martin Brunt looks back over his life as a crime reporter in No One Got Cracked Over The Head for No Reason (Biteback, £20), recalling the most shocking stories he has been involved in as well as reflecting on the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between press and police, and Writers and Their Teachers, edited by Dale Salwak (Bloomsbury, £20), celebrates how some of the leading writers of our time have been shaped by inspirational teachers. Contributors include Andrew Motion, Margaret Drabble and Paul Theroux…

Crossing The Park, by Peter Kenny Jones (Pitch Publishing, £18.99), profiles that rare breed of men who dared to play for both Merseyside rivals Everton and Liverpool, and Fear and Loathing at Goodison Park, by Louis Foster (Pitch Publishing, £16.99), reveals how, in the early 2000s, high hopes of an Everton revival under manager David Moyes ended up in bitterness and recrimination…

With the cricket season under way once more, an extraordinary summer of test cricket, including, naturally the ‘Bazball’ revolution, is examined in the latest edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack (Wisden, £57), along with the usual stats and analysis. Expertly edited by Lawrence Booth, it’s also available, in a shortened version, as an ebook priced at £17.99…

Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams reveals all about her traumatic childhood in the Deep South, the years of struggling for recognition and the stories behind some of her most enduring songs in Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You (Simon and Schuster, £20), and Same Old Girl (Fleet, £20), is the second memoir from influential music writer Sylvia Patterson, detailing her diagnosis with a life-threatening illness and the multiple challenges of the pandemic…

Former RAF pilot and Iraq captive John Nichol tells the story of the ejector seat in Eject! Eject! (Simon & Schuster, £20), farmer John Lewis-Stempel discovers the good life in La Vie: A Year in Rural France (Doubleday, £16.99), and in Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police (Bloomsbury Academic,  £24.79) Stejarel Olaru draws on secret police records and wiretap recordings to tell the dark story of the young Romanian gymnast who, as a child prodigy, charmed the world by winning gold at the 1976 Olympics before defecting to the West in mysterious circumstances 13 years later…

The Grove, by Ben Dark (Mitchell Beazley, £9.99), explores the hidden stories to be found in our front gardens, with each tree or flower having a tale to tell, and James Macdonald Lockhart writes about the songs of eight different birds, from habitats as far-ranging as lowland heath, forests and the coast, in Wild Air (William Collins, £18.99)…

Leaving a poor review for a gruesome horror novel has frightening consequences in Taylor Adams’ compelling The Last Word (Hodder, £20), a lottery winning couple’s dream move turns into a nightmare when one of them dies in mysterious circumstances, in Gilly Macmillan’s The Fall (Century, £16.99), and  Seahurst, by SA Harris (Salt, £10.99) is a creepy modern ghost story set on the Suffolk coast…

And The Orphanage Girls Come Home (Pan, £7.99) is the heart-breaking conclusion to Mary Wood’s Orphanage Girls saga, as Amy, separated from her friends, wonders if she will ever see them again.

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July 23 Hardback book reviews
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June DVDs
Hardback book reviews - June 2023
Simon Evans CD Reviews for June 2023
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May 2023 paperback book reviews
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May's DVD Selection
May's CD selection
Round up of April 2023's book reviews
April 2023 paperback reviews
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