To The Last Page

The beginning of the end The best thing about Edan Lepucki's California is not just the way that the author envisions and describes the social breakdown of a near-future United States, but the fact that she makes it seem scarily inevitable. It's closer to JG Ballard then than the more fashionable Cormac McCarthy that California will inevitably and misleadingly be compared to. While it's just as good as capturing that sense of a world turned upside down by natural disaster - with some man-made assistance - and even has some of Ballard's ambiguous character types, California doesn't quite bring it all together into a conceptual whole with the same sense of deranged visionary zeal as Ballard.   Only touched upon in passing, the sense of what has happened to the US is nonetheless convincingly real in the light of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. A cataclysmic earthquake, the depletion of oil reserves, a few other natural disasters and a flu epidemic following in quic...

Extracurricular Akunin As in the case of Altyn Tolobas , the first of Boris Akunin's novels featuring Nicholas Fandorin (the great-grandson of his Imperial Russia great detective Erast Fandorin), the first volume of this two part follow-up is very much concerned with blood-lines, with heritage and with its relevance to what it means to be Russian in the present day. Like the earlier book this is brought out in Extracurricular Reading (as its Russian title translates) by a comparison in alternative chapters between Nika in the present day and the adventures of one of his other ancestors in the past. That ancestor this time is Danila Fondorin (a variation on the name of Von Dorn, Cornelius Von Dorn being the ancestor who brought the bloodline to Russia in Altyn Tolobas ), a doctor and former personal secretary to Catherine the Great. The historical part of the story however mostly focuses on another unusual character, Mitia, a gifted six-year old, well-read and with a prowess in math...

Chasing demons It's 1945 and someone is killing soldiers in Berlin. That might not sound terribly surprising, but the war is supposed to be over at this stage. These killings however seem to be connected to the atrocities that occurred in Berlin as Russian and allied troops arrived in the city and divided it up into French, Russian, British and American sectors, and soldiers from all those nations are being lured, ambushed and executed by an unknown killer. What has this to do with Kasper Meier? Like most Berliners who survived the war, he keeps alive doing small favours, trading goods and information for scarce basic provisions and medical supplies on the black market. Kasper Meier knows the benefits of lying low and minding your own business, but a young woman, Eva Hirsch - a rubble girl working on one of the clearing teams of Frau Beckmann - has approached him using blackmail to obtain information on a British pilot they are looking to find. As if that's not enough leverage,...