Carol Naylor's REVIEW it...

                    Light Shining in the Forest by Paul Torday. Book Review. "Why did you give him to me, if you were going to take him away again?" The debate continues here on stigmata and divine intervention versus atheism and agnosticism. Torday stated that the atheists and agnostics might be wrong and that there might be a God. If this makes your blood run cold then perhaps you'll relish the opportunity to be immersed in a story that fuses the genres of thriller, satire, horror and the supernatural as well as love and sex. Forget the religion. Recently in Madrid a number of young children have been abducted from Ciudad Lineal, one from the Dominican Republic, another Japanese and a Chinese girl as well as some Spanish girls. Torday responded to the Baby  P case in the UK by writing this novel in an attempt to highlight the inadequacies of the Social Services and the breakdown of the family unit. Who's to blame? This is his most disturbing and ang

     Theo A Novella by Paul Torday . "The mind can play tricks on you. Sometimes people see things just because they want to see them." Trailers have always been popular in promoting new films about to be released. The new trend in novels is to release a prequel or a parallel story to lead into the main novel. Writers seem to favour the ebook to promote their latest novel. Theo is a prequel to Light Shining in the Forest, a macabre tale of murder, child abduction and the supernatural. John Elliott is the main character, a disillusioned priest, questioning his beliefs and deciding that he was a failure. He is the vicar of St. Joseph's church although he could quite so easily have been an accountant or a solicitor. His world was turned upside down when his father, a Minister of the Church of Scotland died suddenly at the age of 50. John was devastated and believed that by studying theology at Durham University would be the best path to follow. Initially, he w

      The Railway Man by Eric Lomax. Film Review . "Sometimes the hating has to stop." Engraved on Eric Lomax's tombstone. The film was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2013 and released in the UK in January 2014. Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and starring Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Jeremy Irvine ( War Horse ) and Stellan Skarsgard. The book was published in 1995 and it was a lifelong ambition of Lomax's to retell some extremely harrowing stories of POW beatings and torture during the second world war. The film captures some of his enthusiasm for the railway and his childhood fascination with locomotives but fails to show his passion although the book is far more successful. In other ways too. Eric was an officer in Singapore until its fall and then he became one of many POWs to be sent by the Japanese to work on the Thai-Burma railway, known as death railway because of the high number of fatalities. I was fortun

                The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. "Someone told me you can tell if a person's monogamous by the size of his testicles. Gene sent me to a genetics expert to settle the bet." The Rosie Project is just one of professor Don Tillman's ideas to indulge his passion of science. The Wife Project is the first, followed in hot pursuit by the Father Project, culminating in the Don Tillman Project and of course the Rosie Project. Take a 39 year old geneticist called Don whose brain is wired or configured differently from the majority of people, a brilliant scientist but rather socially challenged and you'll be right in assuming he has Asperger's. Ironically he lectures on Asperger's but when asked who shows symptoms of obsessive behaviour he doesn't recognise his own behaviour as being autistic. He quotes Lazlo Hevesi in the Physics Department. He is "literal-minded to the point of lunacy." Don doesn't display any