I've been picking my favourite reads of 2023 for a great new book recommendation site: Shepherd.com You'll find them here. I read a lot of books in any one year - usually on my Kindle, far into the night - so it's always hard for me to choose. There were plenty of contenders, but here are the ones I picked, with great difficulty, I might add!
Also, if you would like to see what other people have recommended on this excellent new site, you'll find lots more 'best books' here.
A little while ago, I wrote this piece for a fairly new site called Shepherd.com
It was a great pleasure - and certainly related to the massive amount of research I had undertaken, both for my new book, The Last Lancer, about the Polish side of my family, and a previous 'companion' volume, A Proper Person to be Detained, about the Leeds Irish side.
But in considering which books to pick, I was also taken back to the research I had done for my novel The Jewel, about Jean Armour, Robert Burns's longsuffering but largely unsung (except by the poet himself!) wife - and back even further to my radio dramatisation of Stevenson's great adventure story.
Most writers are very fond of reading so it's good to be able to write about the books that we've loved enough to want to recommend them to other people.
