Strong Words Issue 28

Strong Words was launched in 2018 by Ed Needham, the multi-award winning former editor of various magazines including Rolling Stone.  It’s for people who love books, love reading about them, and need an entertaining, useful and reliable source of suggestions as to what to read next, without feeling as if they are doing homework in the process.

Published nine times a year, it covers new fiction and non-fiction in depth, including biographies and memoirs, history, photography, graphic novels and cookbooks. There are over 100 titles in every issue. It has developed a fanatical following who can’t get enough of its witty enthusiasm and its utter refusal to admit blurb, cliché and academic jargon. Strong Words is the magazine that leaves every reader saying, “That’s the book for me.”

“A description of this particular issue…”

An issue dedicated to “the reading season” when the publishing industry whips itself into a frenzy trying to sell books tailor-made for holiday-makers. So if your idea of a “beach read” is something literary, a great thriller, an adventure, or an offering from the “big thoughts” table, there’s plenty to tempt all tastes, regardless of whether you intend to go near a beach or not.

It includes reviews of several of the summer’s most anticipated new books, such as Michael Lewis on the pandemic, or red-hot newcomer Francesca Reece’s novel Voyeur, plus an exclusive with Lisa Taddeo, author of the bestselling Three Women, on her first novel Animal, about a New Yorker who moves to LA in search of an outlet for her lifetime’s accumulation of cold fury.

All the regulars are here too, such as How to Write… about how authors produced their masterpiece (this issue is Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl), and six of the finest horrors-of-Hollywood autobiographies from legendary leading ladies.