Tag: Reviews

My Week in Books – 1st February 2026

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On the blog last week

Monday – I published my review of Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson.

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was New Authors I Discovered in 2025.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading.

Saturday – I took part in the Six on Saturday meme, sharing six things from my garden this week. I also published my review of Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet.

New on my shelves

The Cut Line by Carolina Pihelgas, trans. by Darcy Hurford (World Editions via NetGalley)

In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship. She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. Physical labor and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish.

Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. All around Liine, nature is facing acute drought and heat. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence.

Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine—always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing—undergoes profound transformations, too. 

The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving way to hope and healing, joy and lightness.

The Perfect Circle by Claudia Petrucci, trans. by Anne Milano Appel (World Editions via NetGalley)

Two women far apart in time, a mysterious unsellable mansion in Milan that connects two lives that start to overlap as impossible parallels are revealed in this story of passion, betrayal, and selfish desire.

In the round house on Via Saterna, its Palladian square exterior nothing but a trompe-l’oeil, the sun pierces through the central skylight. Its rays pass three floors unobstructed, before reaching the circle below at the heart of the four fingers of water filling a little silver basin.  It is here that young Lidia dies, setting an end to her clandestine love affair with the ambitious architect. It is this house that real-estate agent Irene is asked to sell, decades later, as the climate catastrophe escalates, cloaking the divided city in a permanent orange haze.

Returning to her native Milan for the sale, Irene feels the brunt of her father’s judgement. He is a proud Italian and prouder architect—how could his own daughter make a living selling cultural patrimony to the highest foreign bidder? As she faces this new Milan and the old family tensions she had avoided while living in Rome, Irene throws herself into the impossible sale, getting to know Via Saterna intimately—this space that is as unsettling as it is hostile, with the slowly emerging traces of Lidia’s interrupted life. In every room of the house, the burden of a mysterious, unresolved past can be felt, remnants of a selfish and manipulative love.  

Goodbye Chinatown by Kit Fan (World Editions via NetGalley)

As her native Hong Kong seethes, torn between two world powers, Amber Fan tries to build a career as a chef in London’s Chinatown.

Amber Fan, a young Oxford-educated chef, opens the first Chinese fusion joint in London’s Chinatown following the failure of her father’s traditional restaurant. When her parents decide to return to Hong Kong, taking with them their young son Bobby as well as the haunting secret surrounding his birth, Amber is left alone in London.

That is, until a woman called Celeste hires out the restaurant, coughing up three grand for a dinner for one. Who is this extravagant stranger, and how did she get so wealthy?

Invitation from a Dictator by Rory Clements (Viking via NetGalley)

On the eve of war, a royal guest is lured into Hitler’s deadly web . . .

Munich, 1937. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor have arrived in Germany, due at Hitler’s mountain retreat at any moment. But that night, a string of attacks devastate the city, soon claimed by the rising Communist group, Red Freedom. Brutal and bloody in their methods, there’s no doubt that Edward, Wallis and their host at the Berghof are their next target.

They are put in the urgent care of Detective Sebastian Wolff, but the choice between protecting the prince and fighting for his own politics becomes all the more complicated when Wolff realises who is behind Red Freedom: Ulrike, his first love and the mother of his son.

Words for Patty Jo by Jill Arlene Culiner (eARC, Wild Rose Press)

A passion for books creates a lasting bond between teenage Patty Jo and David, but small-town prejudice and social differences doom their romance. After a summer of reading and falling in love, David heads for university, foreign adventure, and a dazzling career; Patty Jo marries slick, over-confident Don Ried.

Yet plans can go horribly wrong. The victim of her violent husband, Patty Jo abandons her home and children to live on the streets of Toronto. David, a high-ranking executive in Paris, is dismayed by the superficiality of corporate success.

Forty years later, Patty Jo and David meet again. Both have defied society; both have fulfilled their dreams. And what if first love was the right one after all, and destiny has the last word?

What I’m currently reading

I’m reading Trial by Terror from my Classics Club list, The Shock of the Light from my NetGalley shelf and listening to the audiobook of Room 706.

Look out for…

  • Book Review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
  • Book Review: Julia Sleeps by Zoe Caryl

Book Review – Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet

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About the Book

On 9 July 1857, Angus MacPhee, a labourer from Liniclate on the island of Benbecula, murdered his father, mother and aunt. At trial in Inverness he was found to be criminally insane and confined in the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison.

Some years later, Angus’s older brother Malcolm recounts the events leading up to the murders while trying to keep a grip on his own sanity. Malcolm is living in isolation, ostracised by the community and haunted by this gruesome episode in his past.

Format: Hardcover (170 pages) Publisher: Polygon
Publication date: 2nd October 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime

Find Benbecula on Goodreads

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My Review

Benbecula, part of the Darkland Tales series, is based on the true story of a gruesome triple murder carried out in July 1857 on a small island in the Outer Hebrides. The author fills in the gaps in the available documentary evidence about the case to explore the events leading up to the murder.

Our narrator is Malcom MacPhee, the elder brother of Angus, the man responsible for the murder who was committed to the Criminal Lunatic Department of Perth Prison following his trial. It’s many years after the murder and Malcolm is living alone in the family home. He lives in a state of squalor, rarely bathing or venturing outside. His days are spent reflecting on his role in past events, especially the increasingly erratic behaviour of Angus, and pondering on his own mental state. Perhaps it’s true, he thinks, his family is ‘a poisoned lineage’.

Shunned by most of the villagers, Malcom’s only visitors are the local priest and a Mrs MacLeod who, seemingly of her own volition, turns up periodically to clean the house, force him to bathe and cut his hair; the latter he finds strangely erotic.

As he looks back on the past, Malcolm paints a picture of a very strange family who scrape a meagre living from tending a small strip of land (a ‘rig’) and collecting kelp from the shoreline. The most, possibly only, sensible person in the household in his sister Marion but the island has nothing to offer her except years more of the same backbreaking mundane tasks. Malcolm’s father is mostly inebriated and his mother spends her days obsessively tending the fire, sitting in front of it with her legs splayed.

Uncontrollable sexual urges and a capacity for violence lurk just under the surface. In the case of Angus these emerge from time to time in manic episodes. Angus’s violent outbursts and strange behaviour are an increasing burden on the family. They cannot afford to have him confined to an institution so they must be constantly vigilant. In practice this task falls to Malcom and Marion.

But how much can we trust Malcolm’s account of events? After all, we learn Malcolm shares some of the same violent and sexual impulses as Angus. For example, he interprets a cat tormenting a half-dead mouse as an entertainment put on for his benefit. And although he manages to control – just – most of his impulses, instead acting them out in his imagination, there is one very chilling act he carries out in reality. Through these and Malcom’s own insights into his unstable mind, the author provides just enough ambiguity to leave us wondering if there’s more to events than meets the eye.

This is not a book in which the crime itself dominates. In fact, the description of the murders doesn’t come until late in the book. Instead it’s much more an exploration of notions of hereditary insanity and attitudes towards mental illness prevalent at the time. The afterword provides details of source documents but also of the cruelty endured by Angus during his long incarceration. If this all sounds pretty depressing, rest assured there are moments of absurdity and dark humour.

In three words: Unsettling, sinister, atmospheric
Try something similar: A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

About the Author

Graeme Macrae Burnet is the author of five novels: the Booker-shortlisted His Bloody Project, which has been published in over twenty languages; the Booker-longlisted Case Study (named as one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2022); and the Georges Gorski trilogy, comprising The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, The Accident on the A35 and A Case of Matricide. Graeme was born in Kilmarnock and now lives in Glasgow.

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