HIghgate – Oxford Street – Wimbledon and more…..For London the worst has happened. There have been riots, huge uncontrolled fires, outbreaks of savage looting, artillery battles, mass flights. The great city lies three parts deserted, open to marauding gangs...

A long way from Verona this certainly is!! No mention of Verona, the book is set in North Yorkshire – quite possibly Redcar – and is narrated through the eyes of Jessica Vye, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a local...

Don’t be deceived by the title of this collection of stories. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala – the only writer to have won both the Booker and two Oscars – is a post-Raj realist, not a romantic. Not for the first...

Former dancer and party loyalist Wen Liping vanishes in rural China just before she was to leave the country. Her husband, a key witness against a smuggling ring suspected of importing aliens to the US, refuses to testify until...

Madras in the 1920s. The British are slowly losing the grip on the subcontinent. The end of the colonial enterprise is in sight and the city on India’s east coast is teeming with intrigue. A grisly murder takes place...

Set in the Southeast Asian tropics of Sri Lanka, the story centers on an extended family trying to marry off a reluctant male relative. Berty Rajakaruna, a Jane Austenian-type of bachelor, is trying to figure out whether marriage is...

At first sight, Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots – neighbours who can’t reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of...

It is winter, 1943. Bernie Gunther has left the Criminal Police and is working for the German War Crimes Bureau based in Berlin. Reports have been circulating of a mass grave hidden in a wood near Smolensk. The grave’s...

Set in the in the atmospheric and squalid streets of Paris, Maigret sets out to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death for a brutal murder. In another one of Maigret’s unconventional and audacious plans, he arranges...

A grizzly and cold November morning. Detective Sergeant Kate Linton is called on Glastonbury Tor where a young woman has been strangled. Twelve holes are found at the scene, surrounded by wax, evidence of garden flares – the only...