Tales of Pirates and Blue Water (1922) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Book Review by George S: This 1922 volume contains stories written by Doyle over a long period, and the most striking are the four about the evil pirate Sharkey, set mostly in the Caribbean during the early eighteenth century. In the course of them, Doyle presents a potted history of the Caribbean. He depicts it … Continue reading →

We Are Not Alone (1937) by James Hilton

Book review by George S: James Hilton wrote this novel after he had moved to Hollywood, and it reads rather like a movie treatment. We begin with opening shots of a cosy English cathedral town. A house is being demolished to make room for a department store, and people are reminiscing nostalgically: ‘That was where … Continue reading →

Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Book review by Sue R: Sylvia Townsend Warner was a poet, short story writer, novelist and musicologist. She wrote non- fiction works including a biography of T.H. White, and a translation of Proust. She and her partner Valentine Ackland, a poet, were both active in the Communist Party; they worked for Red Cross during the … Continue reading →

The Middle of the Road (1922) by Philip Gibbs

Book Review by George S: Philip Gibbs was a so-so novelist, but a very good reporter. The saving grace of this 1922 novel is that in the second half, the reporter becomes dominant. The novel is very much designed to explore the political issues of the day. Gibbs has been called a ‘newspaper novelist’, and … Continue reading →

The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948) by Dennis Wheatley

Book review by George S: The premise of this story is a gripping one: During the Second World War, Toby Jugg, a fighter-pilot, crashes and is paralysed from the waist down. He is being looked after in a country house in Wales, under the care of Helmut, a teacher from his old school. The book … Continue reading →

The Black Baroness (1940) by Dennis Wheatley

Book Review by Jane V: Bond meets Biggles – way out of my comfort zone. But what interested me most about this story is the speed with which reporting on contemporary events, as they happened, was written up and published in no more than three and a half months. Wheatley must have written fast (376 … Continue reading →

Steel Saraband (1938) by Roger Dataller

Book Review by Sylvia D: Roger Dataller was the pen name for Arthur Eaglestone who was born in Rotherham in 1888 and started working in a steel mill at the age of thirteen. He then worked for a number of years as a miner and in 1925 published “From a Pitman’s Notebook” This won him … Continue reading →

Children of the Dead End (1914) by Patrick MacGill

Book review by George S: The book’s subtitle is ‘The Autobiography of an Irish Navvy’ and its hero, Dermot Flynn, has many experiences in common with Patrick MacGill’s own life. The early chapters describe his upbringing in rural poverty in Donegal. In Glenmornan, money is scarce: ‘In my own house we had flesh meat to … Continue reading →

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) by Alan Sillitoe

Book review by Alice C: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was: ‘That rarest of all finds: a genuine, no-punches-pulled unromanticised working-class novel which makes Room at the Top look like a vicar’s tea party’, according to a review in the Daily Telegraph. Born in a council house in Nottingham in 1928, his father illiterate and … Continue reading →

Beginning with a Bash (1935) by Alice Tilton

Review by Kathryn Rangeley: Like another member of the group, I chose to find a book by a woman in the hope that I might get the ‘hard-boiled’, tough aspect of the story without too much gratuitous violence and misogyny’. I found what I hoped would be exactly the right novel at the Pier Bookshop … Continue reading →