Book Reviews

  • Hunger Games comeback – is this the Dystopian Renaissance?

    By Regina Lopez Puerta When I opened my phone yesterday, I felt I was transported all the way back to 2013. Suddenly, I was back in my childhood bedroom, a mockingjay pin on my jacket, Katniss posters all over my wall, scrolling through billions of fan theories about this fascinating world; and it was all triggered by an important piece of news. The new Hunger Games film has released its teaser trailer and poster. Based on the prequel set 64 years before the original novels, A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows the story of a young Coriolanus Snow before he […]

  • Anna reviews This Family by Kate Sawyer

        This Family by Kate Sawyer It’s a new beginning. She should be happy. And she is. She is. But where there are beginnings, there are always endings too.’ I enjoyed Kate Sawyer’s first novel The Stranding, a powerful reimagining of the end of the world but I loved her most recent novel, This Family. Here she kicks back and settles into what she’s really good at – the nitty gritty of family life. We love our families but we often despair of them too, and it’s this nexus of joy and pain that Sawyer explores with warmth and humour, […]

  • Daisy Jones & The Six: It Could’ve Been Great

      For a book whose central conflict lies around being good vs being great, that emphasises the need to make history with one’s art,  the new series falls short of that. Don’t get me wrong, the screen adaptation is perfectly good, and that is exactly why it fails. Because it could’ve been great.  I did not want to write a “the book is better than the movie” review, because I really hoped the adaptation would ace it, but unfortunately it did not.  Taylor Jenkins Reid has become a powerhouse when it comes to writing books that appeal to the new generation […]

  • When authors recommend other authors

    Blog note:  Author Kate Worsley has kindly provided Red Lion Books with a list of books that inspired her latest novel ‘Foxash‘, from ‘Fenwomen‘, a feminist Akenfield, to ‘Love on the Dole”s 1930s Salford.  Foxash is published on 27th April and will be launched in Manningtree that evening. Book here     FOXASH Kate’s recommended reading list Adrian Bell’s Corduroy 1930 trilogy (Faber and Faber, 2011): the arch example of urban middle-class longing for the countryside: a full-throated threnody for vanishing rural ways. (blog note: this title is no longer available but we suggest Men & The Fields as an alternative) […]

  • Francis Spufford and his Light Perpetual

    Daytime book club is back and we were thrilled to have Francis Spufford as our guest, discussing Light Perpetual. Book club member, Paul Burns, shares his thoughts. We were gathered in the bar area of the Three Wise Monkeys, looking at each other and chatting and wondering what he’d look like! And then there he was, at the door, Francis Spufford himself, author of Golden Hill and, more recently, Light Perpetual, the novel he had come to talk about, to us, eager Red Lion Book Club readers! We bundled down narrow stairs in to what was billed as the Gin Cellar, thick pillars, dimly-lit […]

  • What brings you here?

    Is it Lemn Sissay saying ‘Hourglass will stay with me for a long time?’ Did he tempt you? Or perhaps it’s Hollie McNish? ‘A book for anyone who ever has been or ever will be heartbroken. So that’s everyone‘. Maybe it is Max Porter saying, ‘This book glows in the heart of the reader‘. Or is it the book cover? Do you judge a book by its gold foiled lettering? Perhaps you find a slim, hardback novel both achievable and appealing? Hourglass ticks visual boxes with aesthetic repetition of the letters h, o, u, r, g, l, a, s, s  forming an […]

  • Say it with books

    There’s something rather lovely leaving the shop when it’s still light. I’ll probably say the same thing when it starts to get dark, come November, when there’s the first signs of the orange street-light glow. But for now, Spring is on its way and love is very much in the air. There’s always a lot of love when it comes to working in a bookshop. You can see people punch drunk with pleasure, ambling among the shelves, wistfully looking at covers and spines promising them escapist trips to somewhere that isn’t here. Except here is where they want to be. That’s what they […]

  • A Terrible Kindness

    FACT: Warm, generous, wise authors can take you to terrible places; talented authors ensure you return home.   A TERRIBLE KINDNESS proves it. Pre-publication, our wonderful Indie Alliance rep, Rosy, brought a proof copy to Red Lion Books saying, “This. You need to read this and you need to take my word for it because I don’t want the subject matter to put you off”.  When the subject is the 1966 Aberfan landslide you react.  You either walk away or you trust in the power of words.  The right words, written by the right author,  can guide you through unimaginable situations in […]

  • The Insatiable Queen B

    Red Lion Books met Daisy Buchanan at the EA Festival last year https://www.eafestival.com/ and instantly hit it off – finding a mutual love of bookshops, Margate and Jilly Cooper. Let me clarify, this wasn’t F.Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy incarnate.  No, this was the very much alive Daisy: award winning writer, columnist, broadcaster, and author of non-fiction How To Be A Grown Up and The Sisterhood and more recently Insatiable and Careering. Alive and a lot of fun so we were thrilled when she agreed to have an event with us. The strap line for this event was ‘You will know if this […]

  • Nicholas Jubber returns to Red Lion Books

    Never underestimate the gratitude that an author has for their readership (and the booksellers) who champion their work. On a cold January evening, Nicholas (Nick) Jubber travelled all the way from Dorset to speak with Red Lion Books – here in Essex – about his new book; THE FAIRY TELLERS (Published 20th January, Hachette).   He politely requested a cup of tea before settling into our ‘Author’s Chair’ where he entranced us with the stories behind the stories. Who wrote the fairy tales that have been told and retold for centuries? In this far-ranging quest, award-winning author Nick has unearthed the lives […]