I was bowled over by this book. There have been many great novels about the First World War, but this is head and shoulders above them all.
I loved the meticulous research and the superb characters that John Harris created. I really felt I was there with the Sheffield Pals Battalion as they faced the horrors of the Somme. It brought home what a debt I owe to those who perished in the First World War. My only regrets are that the book ended and that I didn’t read it years ago.
Stirringly told from the view of everyday soldiers, Covenant with Death is acclaimed as one of the greatest novels about war ever written. With a new foreword by Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
They joined for their country. They fought for each other.
When war breaks out in 1914, Mark Fenner and his Sheffield friends immediately flock to Kitchener's call. Amid waving flags and boozy celebration, the three men - Fen, his best friend Locky and self-assured Frank, rival for the woman Fen loves - enlist as volunteers to take on the Germans and win glory.
I loved this book when I first read it in my teens, and now I find it every bit as intriguing and engaging as I did then. I love the way in which John Wyndham draws me into the bizarre and dangerous world of the triffids.
I am there in the deserted London streets with Bill Masen, watching for marauding gangs and stray triffids. I find myself utterly caught by the tension of scene after scene. For me, it is still the very best of dystopian thrillers.
When Bill Masen wakes up in his hospital bed, he has reason to be grateful for the bandages that covered his eyes the night before. For he finds a population rendered blind and helpless by the spectacular meteor shower that filled the night sky, the evening before. But his relief is short-lived as he realises that a newly-blinded population is now at the mercy of the Triffids.
Once, the Triffids were farmed for their oil, their uncanny ability to move and their carnivorous habits well controlled by their human keepers. But now, with humans so vulnerable, they are a potent…
Although I have often been told I should read this book, I never read it until this year. I thought it was brilliant. I loved Jay Gatsby's complex character. His impossible love for Daisy is beautifully written, and I found it achingly painful.
I loved the exquisite prose and the multi-layered metaphors that Fitzgerald creates, not least the impossibility of the American dream and the invisible barriers of class and money. I am still there, lost in the pages of the novel, with Nick Carraway mourning the loss of Gatsby and puzzling over the phenomenon that he was.
As the summer unfolds, Nick is drawn into Gatsby's world of luxury cars, speedboats and extravagant parties. But the more he hears about Gatsby - even from what Gatsby himself tells him - the less he seems to believe. Did he really go to Oxford University? Was Gatsby a hero in the war? Did he once kill a man? Nick recalls how he comes to know Gatsby and how he also enters the world of his cousin Daisy and her wealthy husband Tom. Does their money make them any happier? Do the stories all connect? Shall we come to know…
Michael Turner is a senior banker with everything: a loving wife, money, and a family pedigree that stretches back to the English Civil War. The architect of an acclaimed deal to save the Scottish Imperial Bank, he is at the pinnacle of his personal and professional career.
It is a shock when Michael disappears. Files for one of his most important clients are missing, too. Alex Shepherd conducts the Bank’s investigation into the circumstances of his disappearance, following a dangerous and complex trail of money and dead bodies in a desperate attempt to find Michael.
