To The Last Page

In Reservoir 13 , like all of Jon McGregor's novels, nothing happens and yet everything happens. Life happens in other words, which is this author's area of interest and that's about as big a subject as you can expect anyone to deal with. Reservoir 13  demonstrates how brilliantly he is able to follow the rhythms of life that are barely discernible to the individual caught up in their own circumstances and unable to grasp any sense of a bigger picture, if one even exists. That's McGregor's gift and once again, he captures that sense of the small, the seemingly trivial and mundane moments of life and weaves them into a bigger picture that can be poignant and deeply moving. Reservoir 13  opens a little deceptively with a big event; the disappearance/abduction of a 13-year-old girl, Rebecca Shaw from a rural community in middle England. After all the press coverage however, interest seems to fizzle out fairly quickly and life slips back back into its usual rhythm. A de

Laini Taylor writes YA romantic-fantasy. That's what she does and she is very good at it, having a clear style and a distinctive fantasy worldview of her own. On that basis, you can hardly criticise her latest novel Strange the Dreamer  for being another well-written teen romantic-fantasy that is very much within that style, or at least that's the case for the opening setting-the-scene installment in the first part of a new two-part series. On the other hand, there is much that feels formulaic about Strange the Dreamer , the book seeming to go through the motions and meeting expectations without generating any real sense of conflict or danger and without even having any real heart of its own. But it's early days yet. In book one of the new series we are introduced to Lazlo Strange. Lazlo is an orphan (well, obviously since it is a fantasy - mysterious origins and 'special' qualities no doubt to be later revealed), an orphan of the wars in the kingdom of Zosma, broug

The cover of Kim Stanley Robinson's latest exploration of man, nature and science might be a little deceptive, but only just a little. The image of a future New York with lower Manhattan flooded, presumably in the year 2140, is certainly representative of the focus that the author places on an important city and how it might very likely be affected by climate change in the near future, but this is not just another work of speculative environmental disaster fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson doesn't waste time on the hows and whys of something that seems inevitable to anyone who knows that we've already passed the point of no return as far as environmental change is concerned and just how likely such disastrous repercussions will be. No, Robinson is more interested in how we choose to move forward after the inevitable happens. This is typical of Kim Stanley Robinson. He's not content to just spin an entertaining science-fiction adventure in a futuristic New York, nor does he

Whose turn is it this time? You can always be sure that one of Jackson Lamb's team of bottom of the rung intelligence agents is going to get put through the wringer, tortured and beaten up pretty badly, or worse, take a bullet.  As it happens, one of the regular 'slow horses' in the Slough House team gets whacked in Spook Street , permanently. Sorry for being blunt about it, but well, it goes with the territory, and there will always be plenty of other candidates to take their place in the secret service's dumping ground. Slough House is where the intelligence services demote those agents who need to be quietly 'let go', some of them having done time in the field and messed up really badly, others who will never be let anywhere near it. Since they can't be trusted to go back into normal society either, exile to Slough House means spending the rest of their days wading through reams of data to ensure that they never forget just how worthless they are. There&#