To The Last Page

The notion of Sarah Waters writing an old-fashioned ghost story is a strange one, but there's a lot more to The Little Stranger than at first appears, and while it may disappoint fans of the writer's earlier work, it turns out to be the logical next step for the writer of Fingersmith and The Night Watch .  Moving progressively towards more a more modern period, The Little Stranger 's post-war period is significant, with traditional notions of class being upturned, most notably in the narrator Dr Faraday who, born the son of a housemaid at the estate of the Ayers family known as the Hundreds, succeeds in becoming a doctor and somewhat accidentally ends up being the personal physician for the Ayers family and witness to their decline.  That decline into madness is caused by a spirit that appears to torment the household, but it could just as easily be the sense of personal guilt, gossip, prejudice and betrayal that have driven previous Waters' characters to the madhouse...

Presumably not by chance, Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel follows similar themes to Issui Ogawa’s The Lord of the Sands of Time , also published among the first wave of Japanese sci-fi novels under Viz’s new Haikasoru fiction imprint, but in reality the two books are very different in approach. Again the theme is one of using time-travel in order to combat the overwhelming invasion force that threatens to wipe out the entire planet, but in the case of All You Need Is Kill , the time-travel is on a smaller, more personal scale, but the outcome could equally be of global importance. Here, one fresh Japanese recruit in the United Defence Force, Keiji Kiriya, is caught-up in a Groundhog Day style loop, seemingly doomed to fight and repeatedly die in a major battle with the Mimics that, like a computer game, is continually reset until he can build up the necessary fighting experience and find a way - if there is a way - to overcome the merciless onslaught of the strange mechanical amphibian crea...

With effortless wit, Holt introduces the reader to another world where the underlying mechanics and physics of how the world works is closer to that of myth and fairytale, and only marginally more unreliable than the real world we know. For Chris Popham, a travelling salesman and amiable loser seeking to impress customers into buying a wider range of magical products than the inexplicably popular DW6 dried water (“just add…”), there’s always the risk of a malfunctioning product like the instant car-park space trapping him in another dimension. Not to mention the trouble with Demons. All fine and dandy when they’re held in objects like a SatNav kept secure by protective charms, but Chris has been encountering a lot of rather more dangerous ones while out on his rounds, and wonders if it has anything to do with his friendship with Jill, a high-ranking official at Demon Control in the Department of Metaphysics, the new work placement student tagging along with him, or the entity in his Sa...

One of the first wave of Japanese sci-fi novels under Viz’s new Haikasoru fiction imprint, Issui Ogawa’s novel The Lord of the Sands of Time is classic material of the kind you would expect to find in their manga range, with its exciting blend of action, tradition, and romance that takes on an epic scale not only across millennia, but also cuts across time-lines. In the Land of Wa, ancient Japan in 248AD, Lady Miyo, the shaman queen of the land, encounters Messenger O, a cyborg sent back in time from Triton in 2598 to meet the threat of an alien invasion which as entered the timestream in an effort to wipe out the whole of humanity at their most vulnerable points in history. The novel follows the attempts to defeat and understand the nature of the attacks through a number of time periods, each seeing an evolution in the nature of the enemies capabilities, but it raises other questions with regard to the splitting of time-lines, the intervention not only potentially having a profound i...