To The Last Page

You may have heard of Welcome To Night Vale , or you might not. Created by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, it's become something of a iTunes podcast phenomenon since its first episode was broadcast in 2012. If you aren't aware of the bi-monthly broadcasts that Cecil makes on Night Vale Community Radio, well it could be that you just aren't clued in to hot new cultural phenomena, although there are some conspiracy theories going around that it is being blocked by the World Government, and in Night Vale all conspiracies are true. Night Vale, for the uninitiated, is a small desert town that seems to exist and operate in isolation to obscure and arcane laws of its own. Things work differently in Night Vale. Some things, like Time, don't seem to work at all. Surreal events are all a part of everyday life in this small community, strange creatures are known to exist there, from ghosts to sentient houses. And librarians. Don't EVER go near a librarian. Angels don't exi...

So brilliant was the opening book in the Red Rising trilogy - a debut novel too - that it should have made the follow-up Golden Son all the more near-impossible to live up to. The promise of Book 1 Red Rising however and the potential it opened up left little doubt that Pierce Brown had the ability to take it to the next level. If it doesn't quite raise the game substantially, Golden Son is nonetheless an impressive follow-up every bit as good as the first. Every bit as good, but despite taking the battle to a new arena, not really any different. It was always going to be interesting to see where Brown would take the space opera elements of the trilogy after the rather earthbound (or planet bound) war gaming adventures of Red Rising . Anyone expecting a continuation of the war games in space will soon find that this side of the story is discarded rather quickly. Darrow, our hero, has rather bigger fish to fry, or bigger ships to fly, in his role as an underclass Red agent of the ...

What an ingenious and sinister little book this is! It subtly manages to unsettle the reader right from the outset when Justine Merrison has a strange premonition. She, her husband Alex and their daughter Ellen are moving out of London, Justine leaving a stressful job as a TV drama executive to settle for a quieter life in their new home in Devon. The premonition isn't wrong, and Justine's life is far from quiet with the strangest things that go on in that part of the world. What is terrific about A Game For All The Family is how Sophie Hannah builds on similar little hunches and feelings in several other simple little events that on the surface don't seem worth worrying about, but are very odd if you think about them too much. As a TV drama producer, Justine is well aware of the concept of the 'unreliable narrator', but you begin to doubt yourself the reliability of what Justine is telling you. How much is real and how much is cumulatively built up and blown out o...

Grégoire Delacourt previously worked in the world of publicity, working on a number of notable advertising campaigns for companies in France, including Apple. He should know a bit then about the importance of appearances, which is the subject of his most recent book to be published in English, The First Thing You See (' La première chose qu'on regarde '). An alternative title for the book could be "What's Right in Front of your Eyes". That's the sentiment behind the story, a simple philosophical look at learning to not get caught up in appearances and ideals, but in accepting what you have, and finding happiness and beauty in it. It's a noble sentiment, but unfortunately it doesn't have anything much to say about it other than the obvious and simplistic observations. The First Thing You See  does however have an interesting spin on how it gets it message across. Arthur Drefuss is 20 and looks a bit like Ryan Gosling ("only better looking...

Pretty Is is a fictional survivor's tale of childhood abduction and living with the aftermath. It's not a particularly inspiring subject, and one that you would imagine has been well-documented in fiction and non-fiction literature alike. Maggie Mitchell's debut novel however has an unusual and surprisingly clever literary take on the subject that makes it work exceptionally well as a psychological study and as a thriller, with a little bit of a self-reflective take on the nature of writing and adapting material to fiction. The first thing that is unusual about Pretty Is is how two 12 year-old girls are taken from their small-town lives in Connecticut and Nebraska; both girls seem to willingly accept the ride from a stranger, the first abducted girl Carly Mae even playing her part in encouraging the second girl Lois to come along. The nature of what happens when they are taken to a remote cabin in the woods by the man inevitably has a major impact on their lives almost 20...