BOOK OF THE YEAR 2013: House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill

ShadePoint's Book of the Year 2013 is House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill.

Choosing the Book of the Year here at the Point is a very informal, unsober process, and roughly speaking it amounts to spending a few days over the festive season mulling back over all the books featured on the site that year with a view to deciding principally which one resonated the most, which one left so many little dark corridors and cupboards in the memory that stumbling into them from time to time now seems guaranteed.

REVIEW Entry Island by Peter May

He crouches down to touch the earth, and in doing so feels a direct connection with history, communicating with ghosts, a ghost himself haunting his own past. And yet not his past.

Peter May's Lewis Trilogy has been tremendously successful, with sales for the series topping the million copies mark. ShadePoint reviewed the first in the sequence, The Black House, back in May 2012 and was greatly impressed by the emotional weight of that story - the way that police procedural formed one layer of the story, and the tortured life and history of the investigator another, even deeper one. This led to ShadePoint musing on the tonal similarity between the book, set in the Outer Hebrides, and those set in Scandinavia by some of our favourite writers. May's writing seemed to have that appeal a writer like Mankell has, where the human experiences forming the story are not neglected, but are often the element that sustains, long after the book is finished. This is always something that can set crime novelists apart from each other and a skill that Scandinavian crime fiction seems at times to have hardwired in.

REVIEW The Ghost Hunters by Neil Spring

As I read, I was hardly aware of the hours passing, the faded pages seeming to turn themselves; and by the time I was done, the fire beside me had long since died down, its embers glowing like eyes somewhere in the distant past, watching me.

ShadePoint last crept around the history of the Borley Rectory in Roger Clarke's quite superb A Natural History of Ghosts, which we reviewed last year. For fans of the paranormal, the story of Borley is hard to beat. Now, Neil Spring's delightful The Ghost Hunters opens the door once again to "the most haunted house in England" and more than fills the place with eerie chills and great storytelling. From start to finish, The Ghost Hunters seemed a book custom-designed to be enjoyed here on the Point.