Dutch writer and actor Herman Koch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Koch) offers us a dark suspense of a novel in The Dinner (first published in Dutch in 2009). The summary is as follows. It’s a summer evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, […]
In 1974 Thomas Nagel (http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasnagel and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel) published a highly influential philosophy paper entitled ‘What is it like to be a bat?‘ In it, he argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it feels like to be a particular conscious being. We are not constituted likes
The Higgs boson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider (http://www.lhc.ac.uk/), the world’s largest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this
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Karen Rose (http://www.karenrosebooks.com/index.php), from Baltimore, was a chemical engineer and a teacher before taking up a full time career in writing. She has produced at least one novel per year since 2003. Her latest thriller is Watch Your Back. Here is the summary. Baltimore homicide detective Stevie Mazzetti has suffered losses no woman should have to
Plant biologist and President of the Genetics Society (http://www.genetics.org.uk/) Enrico Coen offers us a wonderful book in Cells to Civilizations. This is a unified account of how life transforms itself – from the production of bacteria to the emergence of complex civilizations. What are the connections between evolving microbes, an egg that develops into an infant, and a child who
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Born in New England Charles Palliser is an American citizen but has lived in the United Kingdom since the age of three. He went up to Oxford in 1967 to read English Language and Literature and took a First in June 1970. He was awarded the BLitt in 1975 for a dissertation on Modernist fiction. From 1974
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Patricia Cornwell (http://www.patriciacornwell.com/) has sold more than 100 million books and given us the character Kay Scarpetta, medical examiner. Her crime mysteries are distinguished by the level of detail offered concerning forensic science. An excellent place to start reading Cornwell is with the 1990 novel Postmortem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_(novel)). It received the 1991 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The summary
On the day (6th November 2013) in which the penultimate David Suchet version of Agatha Christie’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie#Archaeology) Poirot is being aired on television The Crime Writer’s Association (http://www.thecwa.co.uk/) has voted the classic 1926 mystery The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as the finest example of the crime genre ever penned. The novel is the fourth book in the Hercule Poirot
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When the cold starts to bite we instinctively turn to comfort food, warm fires and woolly jumpers. Why not indulge yourself in a heart warming story as well? Irish author Melissa Hill’s (http://www.lovereading.co.uk/author/569/Melissa-Hill.html) latest novel is a feel good read. The summary is as follows. Darcy Archer works in a small bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper West
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Peruvian born Daniel Alarcón’s (http://www.danielalarcon.com/) work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2004 and 2005. To get a flavour of this talented young writer, winner of many awards, try his latest novel, At Night We Walk in Circles (2013). The summary is
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A RADA trained stage and screen actress, Lynda LaPlante (http://lyndalaplante.com/) has had an illustrious career as a screen writer for television. Her works include Prime Suspect (starring Helen Mirren), Killer Net and Trial & Retribution. Her crop of novels, beginning with Bella Mafia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Mafia) in 1991, have earned her entry into the Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame (2009).
