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At first glance, Elizabeth Kostova’s second novel would seem to owe a lot to the subject matter of Patrick McGrath ( Port Mungo , Asylum ) in its exploration of artists and madness, the passions that drives one to create but which leave one unsuited to the mundane acts of everyday living and love. This is the case here with Robert Oliver, an artist who has become obsessed with the image of a woman that he continually finds himself compelled to paint in minute and realistic detail, even though she doesn’t physically exist – at least not in this time period… Caught up in his own interior world, Robert becomes increasingly distant from the realities of the present-day, from his wife and children, neglectful of his duties as a father and as an art tutor. When he attempts to attack a canvas of Leda in the National Gallery however, he is taken into care and hospitalised for psychiatric examination. It’s here that the tone of McGrath is most evident, the psychiatrist Marlow becoming overly in...

Following up an obscure lead left to him by a criminal about to be executed, Maigret discovers a hidden side to a group of Parisians of respectable professions, and becomes a witness to what they get up to in their leisure time. At the weekends, these respectable gentlemen - engineers, businessmen, shop owners, doctors - and their wives, all make their way to a tavern on an outlying location on the Seine known as the Guinguette à deux sous, where they indulge in dressing up, role-playing, heavy drinking, fine eating, and a little bit of fishing and canoeing. Extramarital affairs are also indulged during the partying, often with the tacit consent of all the couples involved. Such matters are not of great concern to Maigret and not why he is at the Guinguette à deux sous when he should be on holiday in the country with his wife. He's been told by the criminal to be executed, Lenoir, that there is a murderer among the group who was seen six years ago dropping a body into the canal Sai...

Wonderful though Reynolds' Revelation Space novels are, you could argue that particularly in regards to his more recent work, he seems to operate or a freer, more imaginative and simply more expansive manner in the galaxy spanning books outside his more famous universe. That was certainly the case with Pushing Ice and now with House of Suns , he finds another way of compressing time and space on an unimaginable level across millions of years (and light years) through the agency of a race of cloned humans of the Gentian Line. The Gentian line have been around long enough to observe and record the vast changes that take place in the galaxy, watching cultures come and go, intervening when asked to create Star Dams using the ancient technology of the advanced Priors, but primarily seeking information about the mysteries of the universe. Campion and his consort Purslane have however inadvertently stumbled upon a piece of information that someone doesn't want revealed, a secret that...

Featuring a spectacular flying battle between two opposing individuals with psychic powers,Katsuhiro Otomo's first extended work  Domu, The Dreams of Children is the classic stuff of manga comics, one moreover that sets the tone for the artist's only other major comic work – the masterful Akira . A series of unexplained deaths at a high-rise block have the police baffled, the deaths being too varied and frequent to be explained as suicides, accidents or even the action of a single murderer. This is because the deaths, mostly falls from the upper floors of the tenement building, are being caused by a malevolent person or entity with psychic powers. However there is someone else within the building – a young girl who has noticed who is behind the events and who has the power to oppose his random and senseless actions. There could be some social commentary in the generational struggle that ensues, but principally, and after the slow build-up, what Domu really presents is an oppo...

Although the novel opens with the evacuation of young Anna Sands with a trainload of London children to the Yorkshire countryside at the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the young child's story falls into the background in favour of the romantic complications of the owners of Ashton Park, a large country estate that is to become the home to eighty-six children for the duration of the war while the capital is attacked nightly by bombing raids. The situation of Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, the childless couple who are to become the temporary surrogate parents for these children is a complicated one, Elizabeth finding that it doesn't satisfy the longing for a child that she is unable to have with her crippled and wheelchair bound husband. The situation might bring to mind Lady Chatterley's Lover where it not for the fact that it is Thomas here who longs to commune once again with nature and discover a pure love that he has never really known. These complications dom...

Turgenev's first short novel takes place in a setting familiar from his dramas and indeed many of his later novels - a country house setting where a widowed society lady from St. Petersburg, Darya Mihailovna entertains local dignitaries and distinguished men of letters. Almost invariably, the setting is one where romance takes place, Turgenev thereby pitting the men against each other in ways that brings out their strength or lack of moral character. In Rudin , it is Darya Mihailovna's daughter 17 year old Natalya who becomes the centre of the romantic entanglements that ensue when a new guest comes into the household, Dimitri Nikolaitch Rudin. Natalya is dazzled by the eloquence and wisdom of the man, who eclipses the empty pose, cynicism and 'bon mots' of the others, and Rudin comes to replace the rather dull and inarticulate Volintsev in her affections. Some of the men who have known Rudin in the past have doubts however about Rudin's strength of character and th...