Painfully realistic portrayal of an over-achieving Jewish family. Great fun at times, also incredibly painful.

A richly wrought bibliomemoir that you will unreservedly love, if you ever loved George Elliot, books and stick-beaming into the life of a writer. This book is tastier than steaming hot soup on a blizzard-struck day and warmer than a hand-knitted alpaca-wool scarf. This book will travel loyally by your side and rescue you from your day's quest, plunging you purposefully into Rebecca Mead's bookish epic to Middlemarch and back again.

A modernist gothic tale which serves as a profound metaphor for repression and female subjugation. Despite the seriousness of these themes, the prose is strong and clear and all characters evocatively drawn. It is a perfect read - no words are wasted, and the import of each scene is keenly felt. This is one of those sure things that has somehow slipped from being known as a classic. It is a peculiar tale, but a thoroughly deserving one. Read it.

I am a devotee of Toltz's 'A fraction of the whole', but this book had one too many deceased infants in it - trigger warning for new mothers. Quicksand is brilliant and its prose is merciless - but I could not spend one more moment with Aldo, a character who caused me endless stress. Please try to read it, and I may return to it in a few years.

Surely the best book about gardening you'll have ever read. The author's garden at times lends metaphoric gravitas, but mostly it is just a garden, and a great little garden at that. Urban, wild, fertile and populous, you can almost pick the greedy fat slugs off the page and run your hand over the frothy tendrils of new parsley shoots. Simons' stunning garden book is a memoir grafted onto creative nonfic. I'll mint a new genre for her - leaflit.

A book devoted to the beetroot - how could you not yourself rooted to the page at every turn? A sweet addition to the kooky corpus.

"Dreams are a poor man's guardian', and his destruction. They take us by the hand, walk us through a thousand promises, then leave us whenever they want." p64