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Feast by Catherine Kurtz - 8/10
Taking inspiration from Patrick Suskind's novel Perfume, Feast follows the story of Minha, a young woman with an extraordinary sense of taste. After travelling from London to France, Minha winds up working as a poison taster for a Duc at his lavish chateau. From there, Minha spends her days in a cramped room tasting small portions of his extravagant and often overpowering meals. When a life-altering moment sees the young woman lose her gift, she is forced to leave the walls of the grand estate and fend for herself.
This historic novel is fast-moving and explores themes of race, sexuality and class in an era defined by aristocratic wealth and absolute poverty. The sensory language used by author Catherine Kurtz allows the reader to vividly imagine and experience the foods tasted by Minha. While dark at times, Minha's ability to keep pushing forward in the face of hardship makes the novel a real page-turner.
Feast by Catherine Kurtz is published in hardback by Renegade Books, priced £20 (ebook £11.99). Review by Georgia Bates.
Bad Deeds by Andrew Hunter Murray - 8/10
Andrew Hunter Murray's fourth novel is a clever and smart take on the classic murder mystery, building on his previous release – A Beginner's Guide To Breaking And Entering. The story crackles along, moving frequently from London to the remote wilds of Scotland, and revolves around a small firm whose job involves the paid testing (by means of burglary) of business security systems. This leads them into a dangerous world, completely out of their depth and hurtling from one crisis to the next, all described by chief protagonist Alex, from whom emanates the majority of the sharp humour. Just when you think you've got the storyline sussed, the twists and turns keep on coming, making this a rollickingly good read.
Bad Deeds by Andrew Hunter Murray is published in hardback by Hutchinson Heinemann, priced £18.99 (ebook £9.99). Review by Karl Hornsey.
Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer - 6/10
It's 1999, and a young American fresh out of college arrives in deepest Tuscany to catalogue the private collection of an eccentric, elderly baronessa. While the narrator, nicknamed Giovedi, struggles with the freedoms and constraints of youth, he's shown alternate ways of experiencing life by the whimsical characters who inhabit Villa Coco: a pragmatic artist, a charming conman, a dotty princess, a handsome nephew, and the baronessa herself, a nonagenarian powerhouse who will stop at nothing to regain her lost love. The descriptions of Tuscany before the advent of the smartphone read like a hymn to a lost paradise. Andrew Sean Greer, who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Less, conjures hazy summer afternoons and sharp autumn mornings with ease. Though the prose is witty and polished, it can also feel superficial, the story flip-flopping from moments of real depth to a smug self-consciousness. Sitting awkwardly between frothy beach-read and literary novel, it would still look good on a sunlounger.
Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer is published in hardback by Sceptre, priced £16.99 (ebook £11.99). Review by Amy Crowther.
Rewilding by Jane Green - 6/10
Once the queen of 'chick lit' with bestsellers including Straight Talking and Babyville, Jane Green's burgeoning career in the UK fizzled after she moved to Connecticut – and this memoir is her first book from a UK publisher in nearly a decade. In it, she reveals how she had devoted herself to pleasing people, worried about how she should dress and behave and how thin she needed to be. In the wake of bringing up four children and two stepchildren, harbouring the stress of being the sole breadwinner and her subsequent marriage break-up, she set out to find herself again. She tries various therapies, drugs and some online dating along the way and seems to have found peace. It's a far cry from the 'looking for love' worlds she created in her early fiction but bangs the drum for women not being shackled by convention.
Rewilding: Freedom, Friendship And Finding Our Way Home by Jane Green is published in hardback by HarperCollins, priced £16.99 (ebook £10.99). Review by Hannah Stephenson.
Let's Play Football! by Gordon D'Arcy and Paul Howard - 7/10
Let's Play Football! is perfect for any sports-mad child, timed to coincide with the 2026 World Cup. For this book, retired Irish rugby player Gordon D'Arcy turns his attention to football, with the help of author Paul Howard and illustrator Ashwin Chacko. It puts readers in the driver's seat for a football match, taking them through everything from the warm-up to tense moments throughout the match – with plenty of goals along the way. While it's designed to get kids involved – instructing them to do high knees to get ready for the match, to make tackles and how to score the winning goal – to be truly interactive, it might have been nice to have more tactile elements to the book that kids can play with (such as sliders or flaps). Still, a fun and energetic book to celebrate the World Cup.
Let's Play Football! by Gordon D'Arcy and Paul Howard, illustrated by Ashwin Chacko is published in paperback by Little Island, priced £9.99 (ebook £3.99). Review by Lily Rose.
Prices correct at time of publication.
