To The Last Page

Well, it's twenty years later and I've still haven't finished Sophie's World  (I keep meaning to go back to it) and I haven't kept up with Jostein Gaardner's work in the meantime, but the concept of the author's latest book to be translated into English is still a familiar one. The protagonist of The World According to Anna  is again a young girl who receives mysterious messages of grave importance to the world we live in. It's not the history of philosophy this time written for a young reader, but the future of the world itself that Anna is concerned about. Specifically, global warming and the consequences it is going to have in the future. And maybe a little bit of philosophy in there too. It could be very preachy, but Gaardner does his best to make The World According to Anna  a little more novelistic and interesting. The idea that these messages are being sent to Anna from her great-granddaughter in the future is a good science fiction device, partic...

Although English translations of Haruki Murakami's two earliest short novels have been made available in now rare Japanese editions, these new approved translations of Hear the Wind Sing  and Pinball, 1973  are the first time the works have been published in the UK and USA. Despite the author never previously wanting the books to be made officially made available outside of Japan, both early novels are good examples of Murakami's distinctive voice, a voice that is admittedly more obvious in Japanese, but clearly something must come through in the English translations as well. The author muses on how this 'voice' was developed in the introduction to Wind / Pinball . Having worked as a translator for a while (an occupation that is important to Pinball, 1973 ), Murakami hit on a style of writing his books in English first and then 'translating' them into Japanese. The distinct rhythm of this style does come through, and is obviously what is important to a translato...

You must need some kind of twisted mind yourself as a writer to be able to get into the head of a serial killer in a crime thriller. There's a considerable amount of planning required to devise a history and perhaps even motivations for such a character, but in the case of Blood and Bone , V.M. Giambanco has to also work it into the world of Seattle Police Detective Alice Madison, and that's a complicated place in its own right. There's no real need however to have background knowledge of Alice Madison's earlier cases in the two previous books by Giambanco ( The Gift of Darkness , The Dark ). Even if you haven't read them - and I'm new to this one myself - it's clear that there's an interesting detective creation here. Not only do you get an introduction to see her self-confidence and capabilities in action early on in a minor personal incident outside a bar, but there's even an intriguing glimpse of a troubled childhood here. This is really just a s...

It sounds like the plot of just about any youth fantasy novel, but there is more to Skin than meets the eye. Ailia, a foundling half-born, her parentage unknown, lacks the one thing that is important to everyone in the land she lives in - a totem animal, a 'skin'. Your skin - whether its that of dog, salmon or deer - not only defines who you are in this society, but who you can be. Without a skin, 14 year-old Ailia is lucky even to be working as a servant for her Tribequeen, Fraid of Northern Duntriga, but she has an unknown destiny ahead of her that will be important to her tribe. Wandering near the forbidden Oldforest one day, Ailia meets an injured young man called Taliesin, and from that moment on, her life starts to move in a new and unexpected direction. The location mentioned there might provide a bit of a clue that Skin is not set in some fantasy world, but in the real world, in England in fact, or Albion as it would have been known in the first century AD. Although t...