Born and brought up in the Essex market town where she still lives, Stella is content with the everyday satisfactions that marriage and motherhood bring. Only when her own mother goes missing does Stella’s sense of herself, and the world she inhabits, shift . . . like her central character’s life, Rachel Heath’s novel has its own quiet pleasures.

Heath’s skill is to wind people together, some of them related to one another, others strangers with nothing in common except the place in which they live . . . This is a novel about personality, and behaviour – oh, and Saffron Walden. Much is convincing (Saffron Walden entirely so: I feel I know it). The Finest Type of English Womanhood was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award. The second is notoriously hard to pull off, particularly when the first has attracted attention. Part of the Spell goes a good way towards meeting that challenge.

This quiet, engaging novel ... casts its own enchantment on the reader, teasing you in through meanderings and byways to the crux of the matter – honest self-knowledge, engagement with the reality of our ordinary lives, facing up to ourselves with all our history, our limitations and faults, forgiveness of ourselves for not being bigger, better people ... Part of the Spell is a perceptive and warmhearted celebration of home, and of knowing and accepting who you are.

Beautiful. Haunting. If Ewan Morrison was a woman, Close Your Eyes would be destined for the Orange Prize shortlist.

A brave, sensitive, painful novel, Close Your Eyes is an alternative history of the last forty years, an exploration of the damage idealistic, well-intentioned parents can do to their children, and a reminder that it is sometimes the people who are absent who really fill our lives.

Told with impressive skill... a riveting read.

Close Your Eyes is an astonishing book... It takes us right to the heart of the turbulent social changes that defined our last quarter century and it is a revealing, honest, searing novel about mothers and children, about what it means to be part of a family. The story, the writing, the moral intelligence: all of it is a knock out.

Morrison is unsparing in the emotional ordeal he inflicts on both his protagonist and the reader, but his novel is always acutely and convincingly observed. It’s a telling and powerful study of the intersection between the political and personal (4 stars).

A novel that deals with post-natal depression that is both sensitive and unflinchingly honest, Morrison's story explores the bond and limits of motherhood

Admirable and intimate.

A fearsome read, it latches on and won’t let go.

This is more than a psychological novel – it’s a page-turning mystery too.

Intense and brilliantly sustained, this is a powerful, moving exploration of New Age life.

Gripping.

Fantastic…skillfully done… A rivetingly, well-told tale (4 stars).

Morrison's most accomplished book yet...a complex, thought-provoking and deeply ambitious book, and one that Morrison, now an exceedingly versatile writer, pulls off triumphantly.

Highlights include the page-turning pleasure of a well-turned plot, Morrison’s skilful crafting of character and dialogue and his confident handling of stylistic techniques.

Morally complex, emotionally resonant – Close Your Eyes is a fine, fine piece of work.

Mesmerising. Disturbing. Outstanding. Written with exquisite emotional perception, this is a tour de force from Morrison – the kind of book which comes along rarely but lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned.

Often the sense of impending disaster makes you sick with nervous tension. At other times, Morrison creates calm from the most unlikely circumstances. In a book that is somewhere between Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky and Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem, Morrison creates something both uncomfortable and beautiful to read.

This week we’re devouring Ewan Morrison’s new novel.

Strange and beautiful.

I found this a really gripping, moving read, brilliantly told in the first and second person

A compelling narrative.

Robert Harris is the master of the political thriller and his latest finds him in fine form.

Both gripping thriller and Buchanesque adventure: its revelations impeccably paced and its original material used to poignant effect… An Officer and a Spy is carried throughout by the peerless characterisation of Picquart… But most of all it is the honest, implacable soldier’s dawning realisation that the institutions in which he has placed his faith are appallingly corrupt that has the most tenacious hold on the reader. It still has power to shock – and it leaves us in no doubt as to an old story’s continuing resonance.

An event that obsessed France and the world is retold here, in forensic detail, with great clarity and humanity.

I have just had a preview copy of Robert Harris’s new novel An Officer and a Spy, a thriller based on the Dreyfus case. Like John le Carré, Harris is interested in rogue intelligence, corrupted by politics. Unlike le Carré he does not lay it on too thick. The story of Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer convicted in France for spying for the Germans then exonerated, is one of history’s great political dramas. Harris backs the power of argument and reason. Politicians reportedly took Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography with them on holiday. Harris’s thriller would be perfect for the trip home.’