Welcome, Sully! As others have said, this is definitely the best bit of the internet 
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Piggy, your review of Part of the Family made me howl. Thank you!
I bought Literary Landscapes when I went on a purchasing binge during the Book People closing down sale, BadSpella! Glad to hear that you enjoyed it (although a bit apprehensive now that it will lengthen my TBR list even more…)
Have just added After Midnight and Yrsa Sigurdadottir’s books to my TBR list as well!
With these reviews, I’ll finally have caught up:
49. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
I read this after it was recommended by (I think) Jux. It took a while to grow on me, but I was totally sucked in by the end! It’s 1883 and Thaniel Steepleton is a telegraph operator in the Home Office, which is on high alert after bomb threats by Irish republican groups. Thaniel comes home to find that someone has broken into his apartment – but instead of taking anything, the burglar has instead left an intricately worked gold pocket watch. Six months later, the watch is implicated in a series of bombings, and Thaniel is drawn into a plot that involves Scotland Yard, a mysterious Japanese watchmaker with unusual powers, a female Oxford undergraduate physicist in search of the luminiferous ether, suffragettes, 19th-century feudal Japan, Gilbert and Sullivan, and a pseudo-sentient clockwork octopus called Katsu. The whole thing is a very enjoyable (and occasionally confusing) mixture of historical fiction, mildly intriguing political mystery (although this is definitely not where the author’s heart is) and low-key romance, with touches of steampunk, magical realism and fantasy. The fantasy elements are (thankfully) treated with a very light touch, so remain almost plausible – and the steampunk elements are (also thankfully) more about delightful clockwork creations than about airships or corsets. Keita Mori, the reclusive watchmaker at the centre of the story, is an enigmatic but charming figure and the other characters are generally well-drawn, remaining just on the right side of hackneyed (although Grace Carrow, the undergraduate physicist, is a bit much to swallow at times). The novel also manages to avoid too much cliched Victoriana (sometimes going too far the other way and sounding anachronistic), and Pulley has managed to base her novel on events and settings that seem fresh (I enjoyed learning about Samurai culture and the Japanese Village in Knightsbridge). The plot is a bit … full at times (a common occurrence with first novels, where the authors tend to chuck absolutely everything in), but the premise is original and intriguing, and the writing is fresh and often funny.
50. Slow Horses by Mick Herron
Thriller set in Slough House, a dumping ground for the Slow Horses – MI5 agents who have blotted their copybooks and are forced to push paper around under the supervision of Jackson Lamb, until they have redeemed themselves. A young Asian undergraduate is kidnapped and his captors threaten to stream his beheading live on the internet. Some of the Slow Horses are peripherally involved in the operation to rescue him, and come to realise that there is more to it than meets the eye. Jackson Lamb and his band of misfits end up in a race against time to save Hassan’s life, and become embroiled in a tangled web internal politics and machinations by the spooks in Regents Park. Luckily, Herron avoids some of the clichés suggested by this plot outline: this is not a band of misfits who work seamlessly together and discover respect and comradeship in the process. By definition, they have all fucked up at work in some way, and their operation is consequently ramshackle and bedevilled by arguments. Jackson Lamb is not a heroic figure at all – actually, he reminds me a bit of Fat Andy from Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe books, and his gross, boorish exterior similarly hides a shrewd brain. Like some of Hill’s later books, the shadowy world of spooks provides a sinister and untrustworthy background to the whole thing. I enjoyed this a lot, and have already downloaded the sequel, Dead Lions.
51. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Much reviewed on here! I read this on holiday last week because my MIL had just read it for her book group and wanted to know what I thought of it. I really enjoyed parts of it, but it wasn’t quite the stunning experience that I’d been led to believe from breathless reviews in the press. The parts dealing with Kya’s early life and her struggles to survive alone were engrossing, and the descriptions of the natural world around her were brilliant. But I was left cold by the investigation of Chase’s death (the interspersion of these chapters with Kya’s earlier life really disrupted the flow for me). The court scene was quite gripping, and I genuinely didn’t know which way it would go (although I had my suspicions that it would all go a bit Richard and Judy Book Club in the end 
, which it kind of did).
52. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
This was an audiobook read, designed to distract the children during a 12-hour drive to the south of France (which it did very effectively). I haven’t read this since I read it, if you see what I mean, so I was keen to see how well it bore up. The answer is: pretty well, actually – it’s the first book where the focus moves away from the school story and more onto the wider struggles in the wizarding world, and the action is correspondingly darker (luckily my children are pretty hard-boiled so weren’t freaked out by the dementors or the escaped murderer who’s supposedly blown up 12 muggles in cold blood). There’s a lot of back-story that nicely fleshes out the magical world beyond --Mallory Towers—Hogwarts, and I was struck on this reading by how neatly all the plot elements fit together – very satisfying.
The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend
Not sure what to make of this! Eva Beaver 
is a put-upon wife to Brian (a charmless, bearded astronomer) and mother to 17-year old genius twins Brian Junior and Brianne ( ). One day, she decides that she’s just had enough, retires to her bed, and refuses to get up again for a whole year. Brian, who has secretly been having an affair with his colleague Titania (“Tit” ) can’t believe that there’s nobody to make his dinner, the twins feel betrayed (when, that is, they can tear themselves away from hacking into their university’s HR systems or coming up with hitherto-unknown mathematical proofs ), and Eva’s mother is both worried and exasperated. Still, Eva remains in bed, convinced that she has to stay there and that something bad will happen if she doesn’t. After she inadvertently saves a taxi driver’s life, she becomes lionised in the press and crowds begin camping outside her bedroom window, convinced that she is a saint.
The problem for me was that this book couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. The initial premise suggests that it’s going to be a satire of middle-aged motherhood (haven’t we all had that “stop the world, I want to get off” feeling?!) taken to a ridiculous but logical conclusion. It certainly is that, and Sue Townsend pokes fun at several other targets along the way (modern celebrity, Brian’s pompous self-regard, Poppy the fey but grasping university student), albeit with a rather broad brush. The trouble was that these bits weren’t really that funny. However, these parts were interspersed with moments of genuine poignancy (especially the parts involving Stanley, the terribly scarred war veteran). And, although most of the lampooning was rather obvious, there were occasional observations that were absolutely spot on. So a bit of a mixed bag, really! Also, the characters were mostly gross caricatures, with the exception of Eva (who was ultimately a bit tedious) and her love interest Alexander (a dreadlocked “man with a van”, who turns out to be a widower with a tragic history, but also a sensitive amateur painter and former city banker who was educated at Charterhouse ).
At one point, I thought this was going to turn out to be my second turkey of the year, but it just about redeemed itself by the end. It was a frustrating read, though, and probably my second worst book this year!