Book reviews

Snap Belinda Bauer

The title may be succinct, but the story itself is anything but. Belinda Bauer weaves a compelling and highly intricate novel that begins with two separate threads: the heartbreaking story of 14-year-old Jack Bright, who is doing his best to look after his two younger sisters as a career burglar following the murder of his mother, and grouchy DCI Marvel who’s been relegated from London to the West Country. Snap follows the humanimpact of murder with knife-sharp balance between harrowing and humorous. As you get to know each character, they become real – there’s Smooth Louis Bridge who runs small-town crime, the insufferable DC Reynolds, and 5-year-old Merry, Jack’s vampire-loving youngest sister. When Jack meets Marvel, the plot blossoms with their search for the truth.

9/10 The Water Cure

Sophie Mackintosh The Water Cure is the hotly-anticipated debut novel from London-based writer Sophie Mackintosh, winner of Stylist magazine’s 2016 Short Story Competition. It tells the tale of three sisters trapped in a hauntingly dystopian existence by their controlling parents, in a story reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. They haven’t been allowed to mix with the opposite sex, but then three men wash up on the beach of their strange world – bringing with them exciting discoveries. It makes for an uncomfortable yet compulsive read; I found myself captivated. It is a relatively short book which will have you gripped until the very end. Mackintosh’s eerily gorgeous prose dances around the details, refusing to spoon-feed you.

8/10 A Shout In The Ruins

Kevin Powers Former soldier Kevin Powers, the awardwinning author of Yellow Birds, swaps the battlefields of Iraq for those of the American Civil War and its aftermath in A Shout In The Ruins. An evocative, sometimes beautifully written story, it follows the fortunes of Emily Reid, her father Bob and their neighbour, amoral plantation owner Antony Levallois, and the struggle for survival for slaves Nurse and Rawls in pre and post-Civil War Virginia. Powers’ vision of casual cruelty and the making, breaking and taking of lives, ground into the dust by mendacity, greed and ruthlessness, puts a fresh stamp on a familiar theme. This is a novel many readers will take to their heart but for some, there will be too many bumps in the road that spoil the journey.

7/10