The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (2023)
11th September 2026 This is a fictionalised account of some of the episodes in the life of GW (Georg Wilhelm) Pabst, a successful film director in Weimar Germany, his Pandora’s Box (1929) acclaimed as a classic of the silent cinema. In the early 1930s, many of his compatriots in the industry flee the antisemitism of…
NW by Zadie Smith (2012)
9th August 2026 This novel is firmly set in Willesden and its environs – inner north-west London – where the author was born in 1975. From its opening pages, we are brought straight into the heart of the locale: its houses, streets, shops and ethnic complexity, its uneasy (and imbalanced) combination of aspiration and desperation…
The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1915)
15th July 2026 The Valley of Fear was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fourth and final “long” Sherlock Holmes novel, appearing roughly two-thirds of the way through the canon of 56 short stories that ran from A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891 to The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place in 1927. The book is in two…
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford (1986)
31st March 2026 In Richard Ford’s novel, Frank Bascombe is a sportswriter approaching his 39th birthday and living in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey. Having had an amicable divorce from his wife – whom we only ever know as “X” – he is attempting to establish a relationship with a nurse, Vicki Arcenault,…
Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd (2024)
10th February 2026 In August 1960, Gabriel Dax – an ambitious 30-year old travel writer – is in Léopoldville in the newly independent republic of the Congo. Through a friend from university who is now a Minister in the government, he secures an interview with the charismatic Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Gabriel learns that Lumumba…
A Scrooge Mystery by Andreina Cordani (2025)
18th January 2026 It is a few days before Christmas in 1844, nearly a full year on from the events of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The enlightened Ebenezer Scrooge – now a reformed character and an enthusiastic supporter of the festival – is paying one of his occasional visits to the local graveyard for…
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)
24th December 2025 It is a day in January 1951. The prisoner (or zek) is awakened by the five o’clock reveille sounded – by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail hanging up near the staff quarters – for those in his freezing barrack hut. “The clanging ceased, but everything outside still…
The Sorrow of Belgium (Het Verdriet van België) by Hugo Claus (1983)
21st October 2025 The Sorrow of Belgium is generally recognised to be one of the most significant 20th Century novels written in Dutch. It is a long read – just over 600 pages – of which the first 40 per cent or so set the scene in 1939 with the remainder then taking the narrative…
Jaws by Peter Benchley (1974)
28th August 2025 It is now 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws took the cinematic world by storm, its combination of narrative conflicts, breath-taking shocks and special effects – aided by John Williams’s dramatically sinister score – relating how Amity Island in New England was being terrorised by a man-eating Great White shark. (Not…
The Reader (Der Vorleser) by Bernhard Schlink (1995)
1st July 2025 When the 15 year-old Michael Berg is taken ill in the street, he is comforted by Hanna Schmitz, a neighbour in her mid-30s. She cleans him up and then accompanies him back to the home that he shares with his parents and three siblings in the suburbs of Heidelberg in the German…
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JR Alexander 