Very late to this thread's game am bringing my list and recent reviews over.
1 Plumdog by Emma Chichester Clark
2 The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J K Rowling
3 Bookworm by Lucy Mangan
4 Their Lost Daughters by Joy Ellis
5 The Restless Girls by Jessie Burton
6 The Princess Bride by William Goldman
7 The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Set after the end of the Second World War the novel is narrated by middle class Dr Faraday who is called to see the only maid left in the going-to-seed Hundreds Hall, inhabited by the three remaining members of the Ayres family. He is soon enmeshed in their lives and they struggle hopelessly to keep the estate from falling into complete ruin while an insidious menace steadily emerges and starts to infect the household. The first third of the book is fantastic; Walters slowly ramping up the delicious creepy tension as she lays the foundation for ‘is it madness or is it a ghost?’ premise. Amongst this she weaves class tensions, the changes in post war society and hints at the radical changes Britain waits with the emergence of the new NHS.
Disappointingly the latter two thirds of the book rather lost their way, Walters choosing to spend many pages getting bogged down on the relationship between the Dr and Caroline Ayres. The final few chapters were certainly gripping and rather grim but I was sad that she seemed to have chosen to pursue one explanation of the sinister goings on in the house, rather than leaving them ambiguous to the reader.
An enjoyable listen none the less.
8 Small Great Things by Jodie Picoult.
Book club choice.
Ruth is a black midwife in contemporary America who has the misfortune one day at work to come into contact with a family of white supremacists. Tragedy strikes and Ruth is arrested for the murder of the child.
My first Picoult and I won’t be reading more of her work in a hurry. Two dimensional characters that could only exist in a book. Ruth and her intelligent hard working honour student son are very very good and kind, the neo nazis are very bad, but they are also sad, but mostly they are BAD and the lawyer is good and clever but she has so much to learn about what it’s like to be black in America. She does learn though by the end so good for her.
I could see what Picoult was trying to do. Lots of themes reminiscent to Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race but it was so clumsily done.
Made for a good book club discussion though.
9 American Overdose: The Odioid Tradgedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal.
Random pick up whilst waiting in the queue in the library (aren’t these often just the best finds?) chronicling the rise of prescription opioid abuse in America. I finished this feeling horrified at the extent of this manufactured tragedy and the number of lives lost
The CDC estimate 200 people die every day in the States because of an opioid overdose. Whole communities have been ruined and the enormous cost to the nation because of prescription drug related crime, health costs and children taken into care because their parents are unable to care for them, incarcerated or dead.
All this lies at the feet of multiple agencies who should have all been working in the best interests of patients, but who instead pursued profit above all other concerns.
The pharmaceutical companies (particularly the creators of Ocycontin) who manipulated drug trials and lied to the public selling this painkiller as non addictive.
The doctors and pharmacists who created ‘Pill Mill’ towns where they would churn out hundreds of prescriptions for vast numbers of painkillers without any clinical governance in place for who they were giving these drugs to.
The government departments (namely the FDA) who turned a blind eye to reports from coroners and law enforcement as the deaths dramatically started to rise over just a few decades.
The politicians who refused to act to create and change laws to put curbs on opioid creation and prescribing, such was the power of the pharmaceutical companies' lobbyists.
The crisis America now faces is appalling, far far worse than gun crime. The book finishes with the line
“It is calculated that opioids have killed at least 350,000 Americans since 1999.”
10 The Hobbit: There and Back Again by JRR Tolkien
Audiobook Narrated by Nicol Williamson
Wonderful (although I was very shocked to realise that Williamson has made Gollum into a sibilant, fey South Walian. The spiders are also all Irish 
).