Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Exhalation is a collection of science fiction short stories by Ted Chiang looking at what it really means to be human. One story considers our memory and how it could be enhanced to the extreme. Another looks at how non-human characters could be brought closer to the real world. One of the stories concerns time...

The Confession by Jessie Burton

The Confession follows the story of Elise, Constance, and Rosie over more than 30 years and two generations. They are three very different women with a strong connection between them. Set in the 1980’s Elise and Constance meet for the first time and start to build an unbreakable bond. Thirty years later and we are...

The Muse by Jessie Burton

It's 1967 and Odelle is offered a job as a typist in a London art gallery. A budding writer from Trinidad, she doesn't realise how much life will change for her whilst working for Marjorie Quick. In 1936 Olive is living with her art dealer father, and her mother in Spain. Isaac and Teresa arrive...

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

It's 1686 when Nella arrives in Amsterdam to move into her new husbands home. She is greeted by her husbands sister and the maids , but no husband (Johannes). It doesn't seem a great start to married life. He soon returns to their home but is often distant and too busy working to speak to...

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

A post-apocalyptic novel that could easily be made into a film. Station Eleven tells the story of a number of characters from before, during and after an outbreak of the Georgian Flu. You are thrown straight into the story just hours before the flu epidemic begins. Of all of them there at the bar that...

Harvest by Jim Crace

Jim Crace has won the James Tait Black Prize for fiction given by Edinburgh University. I read this back in March. Here's what I thought about it: I loved the way I could really get into the setting of the book. The writing gave me a vivid picture of the fields, trees, and main house...