Our reviews
315 fiction books we've reviewed, each with who it's for, who should skip it and every source we used.
315 reviews
Gerald Durrell
Best for: Readers who loved My Family and Other Animals and want to follow Gerald Durrell deeper into his naturalist obsessions, or anyone drawn to memoir that blends comic family chaos with serious wildlife observation and a vivid sense of 1930s Corfu.
Adam Silvera
Best for: Readers aged 14 and up who loved They Both Die at the End and want more of Silvera's emotionally precise, bittersweet YA fiction — particularly those drawn to queer romance, speculative world-building, and stories that wrestle with mortality and the urgency of living fully.
Terry Pratchett
Best for: Discworld fans ready to see Pratchett at a creative turning point — readers who want comic fantasy that earns genuine emotional weight alongside its satire, particularly those drawn to the Death sub-series or to stories that treat mortality and friendship as serious philosophical territory.
Robert H. Lustig
Best for: Readers who want to understand the structural and biological mechanisms driving the chronic disease epidemic — not just what to eat, but how the food environment was shaped, who benefits, and what the science shows beneath layers of industry-influenced messaging.
Michael Nehls
Best for: Readers who feel conventional psychiatric and pharmaceutical frameworks have failed them or their loved ones, and who are genuinely curious whether a trace nutritional deficiency — rather than a new drug — could be a missing piece in the modern mental health crisis.
Kristin Hannah
Best for: Readers drawn to emotionally immersive, women-centred WWII historical fiction who want a dual-narrative structure that honours both dramatic Resistance heroism and quieter domestic courage under occupation.
Karen M. McManus
Best for: YA mystery-thriller fans aged 14 and up who loved the social dynamics of Bayview High in One of Us Is Lying and want a propulsive new story set in the same world with a fresh central trio.
Freida McFadden
Best for: Readers who are already fans of Freida McFadden's high-velocity domestic thrillers — or anyone who wants a fast, dark, morally compromised page-turner built around betrayal, suspected poisoning, and a triple unreliable-narrator structure that keeps suspicion in constant rotation.
Richard Osman
Best for: Readers already invested in Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim who want to spend more time with an ensemble that balances deadpan comedy and quiet emotional depth around ageing, loss, and friendship.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Best for: Readers aged 12 and up who loved The Inheritance Games and want to dive straight back into Hawthorne Manor for more puzzle-driven intrigue, aspirational drama, and romance.
Terry Pratchett
Best for: Readers already invested in the Discworld City Watch sub-series — especially those who have finished Guards! Guards! — who want to see the Watch ensemble deepen with the introduction of Angua and the franchise's sharpest blend of police-procedural plotting and political satire.
Anita Brookner
Best for: Readers drawn to restrained, ironic British literary fiction — particularly those who prize sentence-level prose craft and character-driven interiority over plot momentum — and anyone looking for a natural entry point into Anita Brookner's body of work.
Min Jin Lee
Best for: Readers who love character-rich, multigenerational literary sagas — particularly those drawn to underrepresented histories — and who want a novel that uses one family's arc across seven decades to illuminate the largely unknown experience of Zainichi Koreans in Japan.
Elle Gray
Best for: Fans of character-driven FBI procedurals who want a fast-moving thriller anchored by a protagonist whose personal grief — a murdered family and a missing sister — is as compelling as the case itself.
Rick Riordan
Best for: Middle-grade readers aged nine and up — particularly those who have already enjoyed The Lightning Thief and want to follow Percy's continuing adventures through Greek mythology recast in contemporary America.
Holly Black
Best for: Older YA readers (15+) already invested in The Cruel Prince who want a densely plotted, politically sophisticated fantasy built around morally complex characters and an adversarial, high-tension central dynamic rather than a conventional romance.
Tahereh Mafi
Best for: Devoted Shatter Me series readers — particularly those who have followed Ella Sommers's psychological journey across all four prior books and are deeply invested in her relationship with Warner — who are ready for a revelatory, emotionally interior chapter of the saga.
Pip Williams
Best for: Readers drawn to character-driven historical fiction with an intellectual backbone — particularly those with an interest in language, literary history, the women's suffrage movement, or the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.
I. V. Marie
Best for: Fans of the Souls of Blackwood Academy series — particularly readers aged 14 and up who finished Immortal Consequences and are invested in the ensemble cast's romantic pairings, faction-based supernatural conflict, and the purgatorial Blackwood Academy setting.
Alan Hlad
Best for: Readers drawn to WWII historical fiction centred on female protagonists in espionage and resistance roles, especially those who want research-backed detail — particularly around the little-known National Pigeon Service — alongside a fast-moving spy narrative.
David Sussillo
David Sussillo's Emergence is a dual-threaded memoir tracing his path from a childhood in group homes with neglectful, drug-addicted parents to a career at the frontier of computational neuroscience and AI — weaving personal survival story with accessible explorations of how complex patterns arise from simple systems. This review is based on the book's content and published critical reception, not hands-on use.
D. Flower
Best for: Readers who thrive on wide-ranging, immersive adventure memoirs and want a single book that moves them from the Himalayas and East Africa to post-Katrina Louisiana, with cultural depth and emotional candour throughout.
Sally Hopgood
Best for: Caregivers, nursery educators, and gift-givers looking for a high-energy, rhyming read-aloud for preschoolers aged two to four who delight in animal characters, comic repetition, and participatory storytelling.
Matt Haig
How to Stop Time is a historical fantasy novel in which Tom Hazard — born in 1581 in France and cursed with a condition that makes him age at a glacial pace — navigates centuries of human history before returning to present-day London as a high school history teacher. Reception was split: starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly sit alongside mixed notices from The New York Times and other outlets, making this a novel that passionate Haig fans and readers of high-concept literary fantasy are most likely to embrace.
