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Sounds exciting.

Sixty pages. I read it in an afternoon and thought about it for a week. This is what a novella should be — nothing wasted, nothing missing, every sentence carrying weight. The restraint of Keegan's prose is extraordinary: she never tells you what to feel, but by the end you feel everything.

I have thought carefully about whether to give this four or five stars and I am settling on four, for this reason: Yanagihara's accumulation of trauma crosses from harrowing into something closer to operatic, and there are passages in the second half where I felt manipulated rather than moved.

Four narratives, each one undermining and rewriting the last. Diaz is doing something technically ambitious here and the ambition is fully realised — which is not always the case. The way each successive section re-contextualises what came before rewards close reading and patience.

My reservations are about the prose, which tends toward the aphoristic in a way that I find reductive — complex emotional truths compressed into sentence-length insights that feel true only until you look at them closely.

I was resistant to this for longer than I should have been. Kingsolver earns every comparison she courts.

Flynn weaponises the unreliable narrator better than anyone writing today. The structure is the plot. First half you think you know what's happening. Second half you realise you knew nothing. Pacing is surgical. Read it on a flight. Stayed in my seat through landing. Five stars.

Reacher gets off a bus in a town he's never been to, for no particular reason, and is immediately arrested for murder. He didn't do it. What follows is forty-eight hours of controlled mayhem. Child writes action the way good code runs — no wasted steps, everything resolves.

Long, yes. But Hayes structures it like a software architecture — every thread resolves, nothing is wasted. A former intelligence operative, a Turkish murder, a bioterrorism plot. Read it.

Stroud writes like he's been awake for three days on bad coffee and loves every minute of it. A New York businessman, a career criminal, and a federal agent on the make — the plot mechanics are tight and the dialogue cuts. Pacing never lets up. Missed my stop. Nearly missed the next one too.

King in late career writing at something close to his best. Holly Gibney has been one of my favourite Stephen King characters since Mr Mercedes and this is her book in a way the earlier appearances were not. The antagonists are genuinely unsettling in a way that feels specifically contemporary.

This is extremely fun and does not pretend to be anything else. The premise (inheriting a supervillain's empire, complete with unionised dolphins and a volcano lair) is executed with complete commitment and the pacing is relentless in the best way. Read it in an evening.

I went in expecting comfort reading and got comfort reading plus a genuinely clever mystery. The plotting is tighter than it looks — Osman is doing something deceptively simple. The four main characters are distinct, funny, and surprisingly moving.

Missed my bus stop twice to work. Also arrived forty minutes late to dinner that same night and my friend had already ordered. Yellowface is the most compulsively readable book I have encountered since Gone Girl — not because it is comfortable but because it is not.

An interesting formal experiment and clearly the product of genuine research into Lincoln's grief and the historical period. My difficulty is that the polyphony of ghost voices requires a tolerance for formal difficulty that the emotional payoff does not always justify.

A novel that takes medieval scholarship seriously on its own terms — Eco does not condescend to the period or modernise it for accessibility. The detective structure is secondary to the intellectual substance, which will frustrate some readers and delight others. I am in the latter category.

My one historical reservation: the German perspective, while sympathetically rendered, occasionally softens the ideological commitment of its subjects in ways that feel slightly anachronistic. This is a minor criticism of what is otherwise a deeply researched and emotionally generous novel.

I have read a great deal of Tudor history both academic and popular and I can say without qualification that Mantel's reconstruction of Cromwell is the most convincing fictional rendering of that particular mind I have encountered.

Captivating story set in 1492 during the Spanish Inquisition. If you've read the first two books in this Torcal Trilogy, this books winds up the different plot threads in a way that makes you want more.