Cracking opening scene!

Old spies reunite

Jansson brilliantly captures the voice of a child

A journalist in Nazi Berlin

A classic man versus nature thriller with detailed marine vocabulary

The ultimate constitutional

What fresh hell is this? Life in a secondhand bookshop.

A writer learns Italian

An emotional reckoning on the Birmingham waterways

A secondhand bookseller suffers the slings and arrows of rude customers.

A fusion of literary biography, travel, and nature-writing

Further misadventures of Mr Finchley in the second volume of Victor Canning’s comic 1930s trilogy

More than the mother of Frankenstein

Impoverished widow Miyuki undertakes a hazardous journey.

Holiday plans derail in this lighthearted fictional travelogue from the 1930s

It’s a short, bitter chain from meet-cute to murder in Ernesto Sábato’s The Tunnel.

A novel of dolls, dwarves, and doppelgängers.

When three girls go missing at Hanging Rock, a darkening chain of consequences unbalances the lives of those left behind.

Rumours of a strange aquatic serpent ignite the fears of a riverside community…

This book whips up a sense of imminent possible adventure. Five stars.