The Buddhist Handbook by John Snelling

Good, comprehensive and easy to understand

Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet

Clem's story begins as the chimney of his mother Ruth's house shatters into pieces as a Spitfire goes through it in pursuit of a German bomber and she goes into labour. He emerges into a loveless house, his grandmother Win despises her daughter for falling pregnant to a soldier just as she did, and at the age of three has to adjust to the arrival of the large strict stranger who is his father. Growing up in a council house under the great skies of Norfork in a house marked by puritanical sexlessness he endures grammar schoool before falling for the daughter of the manor, the beautiful Frankie as in the wider world the Cuban missile crisis and the specter of Mutually Assured Destruction unfolds. Her father employs his and their furtive assignations culminate in a literally explosive tragedy that brutally sunders the pair. Peet weaves his story with great skill and uses Norfolk dialect to create a real sense of life in a Norfolk village between the wars, and the devastating closing pages of the book are shocking and yet, on reflection, give a sense of completion to a book about a man who's life has been defined by life shaking explosions.

Doctor Who Serpent Crest 1: Tsar Wars by Paul Magrs (AUDIO)

Tom Baker stars in this adventure, he and Mrs Wibbsey are kidnapped and taken across the universe to a distant kingdom where the Tsar and Tsarina rule over the Robotov Empire.  The mystery of why they have been brought there unfolds with questions about the rights and humanity of artificial intelligence and the life of a child who may hold the key to resolving the conflict between robot and human kind.  A case of mistaken identity leads the Doctor to the shadowy forces lying behind the conflict that are playing a far more long term and sinister game.  A good audio play, good fun but a little archaic at times with regard to some of the attitudes.

Cake Angels by Julia Thomas

This is a review I will probably update once I've had a go at the few of the recipes, but on looks alone Thomas' book is a winner. It's a nice size at about nine inches high and stays open easily, a small thing but essential for a cookbook!

Most of the recipes are well illustrated in full colour divided into cakes, traybakes and cupcakes / muffins. There are sections on equipment, ingredients, decoration and stockists which give really helpful pointers as to what to use as alternatives to gluten and dairy and where to find them. The recipes themselves are well laid out and the text is friendly and easy to use. A delightful addition for a person who still stands longingly near bakeries to torture myself with the smell of what I cannot have.

Wonder Struck by Brian Selznick

It would be enough for this to be a wonderful narrative, but Selznick has done it again, creating something even more wonderful than his The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

In 1977 Ben, a young boy dreams of wolves and grieves for his recently dead mother. Unable to sleep he wanders from his aunt and uncle's lodge in the woods on the edge of Gunflint Lake, Minnesota, the short distance to his former home and finds a mysterious book about the first kinds of museums known as Cabinets of Wonders and telephone number. Lightning strikes as he tries to dial the number and he is deafened.

In 1927 Rose, a deaf girl of a similar age to Ben, gazes across the river at Manhattan and runs away to find the beautiful silent movie star Lillian Mayhew and seeks shelter in the company of her brother Walter, creator of an entire room of Wonders.

This story would be in and of itself delicately and achingly rendered, but Selznick's combination of text with stunning pencil drawings is unique, not a comic but not simply illustrations either, the drawings having a narrative value of their own like a comic without the speech bubbles. Just as Ben and Rose's stories speak to each other across 5 decades the pictures and words are in a dialogue creating something truly spellbinding.

Touch by Alexi Zentner

In less deft hands Zentner's plot is historical romantic fiction, a man sits by the bedside of his dying mother recalling his memories of the small northern logging town founded by his grandfather.  There is drama and pathos, hard winters, terrible choices and losses set against the backdrop of goldrushes and lost dreams.  But this book is far more than that, invoking the spirits of the forests and the mythology of a family where the fantastical and the everyday live side by side.  Zentner speaks  the snow and ice of the frozen winters and the terrible dangers of logging and living on the edge of human existence into being in a book I didn't want to end.