To The Last Page

Intelligent, precocious seven year-old Elsa doesn't quite fit in with the world and is bullied at school. She remains distant from her business-like mother who is separated from her obsessive-compulsive father, but Elsa has the support of her rather eccentric and anarchic grandmother. Elsa even shares a secret language with her grandmother and delights in her magic fairytale stories of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. When her grandmother dies however, Elsa finds that the world and the strange creatures that inhabit it might not be a figment of her imagination, but she has been strangely cut-off from flying off to it in her imagination since her grandmother died.  Backman's book is curiously pitched, not quite children's fiction, not quite adult. It's not without charm - the descriptions of the characters in Elsa's apartment block is well-observed and entertaining - but it feels like it is trying a little too hard, and veers close to sentimentality. Whether it manages to b...

According to the publisher blurb, Wake is a "breathtaking tale of horror and survival", but after the initial nightmarish situation that wipes out most of the population of a small New Zealand coastal town, there would appear to be much more survival than horror in the story. The way the remaining 14 survivors deal with their situation isn't entirely conventional however, finding themselves in more of a surreal 'Lost' type situation that you begin to think might never live up to its promise. But hang in there, it does eventually deliver... It doesn't help that you find it hard to relate to how any of the characters react to being trapped within what effectively seems to be a bubble, cut off entirely from the outside world. Their actions seem strange, there's little evidence of anyone sympathising with anyone else, and although some couples form, there's little real sense of them bonding as a group as you might expect in order to organise and resolve t...

There are two ways you can approach Steve Canavagh's first novel featuring Eddie Flynn lawyer-extraordinaire. You can try to justify whether the whole set-up is credible, or you can try and figure out where it's possibly going to go. Canavagh makes the choice an easy one to make. From the first line, first page, you're wondering - 'where is this going next?' If you're hoping that the whole idea might eventually stack up, The Defence is a bit more of a tough sell. Eddie Flynn, top lawyer, hustler, con-artist, pickpocket, former prize-fighter, just happens to be near superhuman, invincible and impossible to out-wit. There's a backstory in his unconventional upbringing that accounts for this to some extent, but still... the situation he finds himself in at the start of The Defence is unusual and about to reveal many more surprises. Just out of rehab, having packed in his practice, Eddie is given an offer he can't refuse to represent a Russian mafia boss. ...