Personalized profile picture drawn by comics artist Eleanor Crewes.

My favorite genres to read and review are literary fiction and memoirs. For blog reviews, I generally focus on recent and upcoming UK releases in these categories (see also my “Reading Interests” below), although I also read U.S. offerings through NetGalley and Edelweiss.

I am open to offers of review books, especially when connected with specific opportunities like a blog tour associated with a literary prize.

I prefer to receive finished print copies or print proofs for review, although I can read e-books when necessary. Unsolicited review copies are very unlikely to get read.

Please note that I am very unlikely to accept books directly from authors or to consider self-published books for review.

As a rule, I do not read crime, romance, science fiction, or fantasy.

Reading Interests

I read 300+ books a year and, in addition to the above genres, enjoy contemporary poetry, graphic novels, self-help, popular science, popular theology and nature writing.

Broadening my experience of literature in translation is an ongoing priority.

Specific subgenres that I particularly love include medical and bereavement memoirs, “foodoirs” (food-themed memoirs), “graphic memoirs” (memoirs in the form of a graphic novel, that is), true stories of faith and doubt, epistolary and campus novels, Victorian pastiches and books about cats.

Other Literary Interests

• Bibliotherapy
• Authors’ houses and graves
• Victorian studies
• Literary prize races (especially the Barbellion Prize, Booker Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, Rathbones Folio Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award)

My big dreams are to be involved in bibliotherapy in some way and to judge a literary prize. The latter came true when I was asked to be a judge of the 2022 McKitterick Prize.