Book Reviews

In At Home, Bill Bryson applies the same irrepressible curiosity, irresistible wit, stylish prose and masterful storytelling that made A Short History of Nearly Everything one of the most lauded books of recent times, and delivers an entertaining and illuminating history of the way we live.

Most of the key discoveries for humankind can be found in the very fabric of our houses. This inspired Bryson to start a journey around his own house, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be. Along the way he did a prodigious amount of research on the history of anything and everything, from architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the spice trade to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets; and on the brilliant, creative and often eccentric minds behind them.

Stevie Duveen is striking, brilliant, gifted in seven languages and all kinds of combat; she's a strategic analyst for an international trouble-shooting outfit specialising in discreet and very dangerous missions.

Called to Moscow by an old friend to assess the security risk to the head of the Russian Central Bank, she arrives to find the bank regulator’s teenage daughter has been kidnapped. What they are demanding of him is unthinkable, but they have his beloved Anya. And they will stop at nothing to silence him. Stevie uncovers unspeakable evil as she penetrates the very heart of the Russian mafia and finds herself caught up in the terrifying world of people trafficking and sex slavery. From the murky alleys of Moscow to forests blanketed in mid-winter snow to Switzerland’s exclusive alpine resorts, Stevie tries to stay one step ahead of danger as she edges ever closer to Anya and the terrible fate awaiting her.

It is 1920. The Great War has been over for two years, and it has left a very different world from the Edwardian certainties of 1914.

Following the death of his wife and baby and his experiences on the Western Front, Laurence Bartram has become something of a recluse. Yet death and the aftermath of the conflict continue to cast a pall over peacetime England, and when a young woman he once knew persuades him to look into events that apparently led her brother, John Emmett, to kill himself, Laurence is forced to revisit the darkest parts of the war. As Laurence unravels the connections between Captain Emmett’s suicide, a group of war poets, a bitter regimental feud and a hidden love affair, more disquieting deaths are exposed. Even at the moment Laurence begins to live again, it dawns on him that nothing is as it seems, and that even those closest to him have their secrets...