To The Last Page

Andrew Miller’s observation of historical detail has a way of immersing you in the ways, thoughts and details of the lives of the characters in the historical period of their setting, and he does it with such authenticity that you almost lose sight of the bigger picture. I found that true of his Costa Book Award winning novel Pure , set in the years preceding the French Revolution, where the work of an engineer to clear the putrefaction of the cemetery in the centre of Paris would hint at growing unrest in the city and the notion of ‘purification’ and more death to come. Interestingly, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free takes place not long after the events in Pure , and the unrest that the Napoleonic forces have caused in Europe is seen – but not spoken about – by another figure peripheral to larger scale historical events. It’s 1809 and Captain John Lacroix has just returned to his home in Somerset after a spell in the war in Europe. Nursed back to health by his housekeeper Nell, his phy...

Prepare to put a considerable amount of your time aside, because Chris Wooding’s The Ember Blade is 770 pages long and it looks like it’s only the beginning of an imaginative, thrilling, suspenseful and action-packed epic fantasy series. Many of the expected swords and demons conventions of the genre are in there and the path followed is a familiar one, but there’s a slightly different twist on the nature of the warring kingdoms and on the kind of struggle that is going to take place between the forces of good and evil, with imagery and references that have a distinctly Nazi-like suggestion to them. With over 700 pages to lay out the situation it inevitably takes a while for the nature of the conflict to make itself known, but the roots of it can already be seen within the friendship of Aren and Cade, a pair of 16 year old boys. Aren is highborn of Ossian blood, while Cade is the lowly son of a carpenter, but the boys are good friends and enjoying an adventure hunting she-wargs at the...

It’s a familiar story: guy suspects his wife of cheating on him, hires a private detective, the PI provides photographic evidence and the guy decides to take matters into his own hands with a gun in his hand. Well, it’s a familiar story for a noir anyway, so it’s perfectly natural to expect something along those lines in a graphic novel called Noir . Written by Łukasz Bogacz and Wojciech Stefaniec, Noir inevitably has its own spin on how those events play out, and just as a noir cinema is in equal part defined by its style, so too Wojciech Stefaniec’s art brings a unique dark character to the work. Noir is all about situation and there’s a few intriguing elements that give Bogacz & Stefaniec’s graphic novel its distinctive flavour of almost grim inevitability. An opening scene on a shooting range not only puts guns in the picture from the start, but as Robert, Oskar and their father Norman discuss matters of wives and girlfriends, it’s already suggested that it’s going to be a cl...

The title Prague Spring probably promises more of a historical political thriller than it actually delivers, but another way of looking at it is that it captures more of a sense of the event from the varying perspective of ordinary Czech nationals, casual foreign visitors and the diplomatic personnel, none of whom would have had any real idea of what was about to happen. In Simon Mawer’s novel the main perspective that has to carry the weight of the political and historical implications is that of two couples, two couples that have an uneasy relationship with each other and with one another. For James and Ellie, two young students from Oxford on a hastily arranged and largely improvised hitchhiking trip across Europe in 1968, it’s a journey of discovery in more ways than one. Just as they are working out their feelings for each other, so too Europe at this time is finding its feet not that long after the war. Although they both study at Oxford, they come from very different background...

As you might expect from any good murder-mystery thriller, there’s more than one problem to be solved and many deeper issues and potential layers of conflict that need to be unravelled to get to the bottom of what leads to murder in M R Mackenzie’s In The Silence . Glasgow probably isn’t any different from other cities in how it is burdened with class differences, religious tensions, gender inequalities and racial prejudices and preconceptions, but Mackenzie not only weaves all this into the potential motivation of the crime, he manages to bring them together in the personality and the experiences of his lead character, Anna Scavolini. Anna has been away from Glasgow for ten years, studying sociology and psychology at the Sapienza University in Rome, making a life and career for herself there as a lecturer and expert in feminist criminology. She’s been away long enough for all the conflicts and differences in her home city to strike her all the more forcefully when she accepts an invit...

There’s not much of a traditional narrative in Come Back to Me Again ( Wróć do mnie, jeszcze raz ), the award winning graphic novel (Best Polish Album 2015) by Bartosz Sztybor and Wojciech Stefaniec. It’s clear enough what the subject is – that of a young man known as SW trying to come off his dependency on a number of different drugs – but it has the singular and ambitious aim of spending more time inside the head of the man in question as he struggles with his demons than it does in what we might consider the mundane material world. That’s a troubling place indeed, but it’s also a place that demands a very imaginative artistic response, and in that respect, Come Back to Me Again is certainly anything but mundane. Come Back to Me Again may be imaginative and responsive to the ebbs and flows of SW’s inner battle and struggle to come back down to earth and re-engage with reality, but it’s important that there is some compelling reason for him wanting to do so. That’s initially hard to...

Is there room for another Victorian era historical murder-mystery series? On the evidence of this first book from Ambrose Parry, there is definitely the makings of something special and a little bit different from the norm in The Way of All Flesh . Undoubtedly the reason for its success is in the authorship, ‘Ambrose Parry’ being a pseudonym for a writing team comprising of author Chris Brookmyre and medical historian Marisa Haetzman. The rationale behind the team-up, rather than the conventional route of an author relying on expert sources for specialised information, is that the book can enjoy the benefits of authentic detailed historical and medical knowledge of a fascinating period in the development of modern medical procedures and combine it with an established crime author’s sense of plotting and pacing that can tie it into a thrilling murder-mystery. One indication of the collaboration being seamless is that if I didn’t know the Chris Brookmyre was involved in this book, I cert...

We tend to associate the world of magical fantasy, spells and demons with a much darker setting, and even in those books where there are academies training aspiring young wizards. Comic artist Nicolas Sauge with writers Josselin Azorin-Lara and Sylvain Dos Santos take a different approach in Golam , setting their adventure of young magicians in training in a brighter and more colourful Arabian Nights setting, where the worlds of magic, spells and demons is actually just as much at home. Before we get to the training programme for aspiring alchemists, the first few pages of Golam -Volume 1: The Son of the Moon introduce us to the nature of those powers, how they are used and how one enterprising young tearaway somehow gets mistaken for a wizard and ends up on what looks to be a dangerous and challenging programme. We are in Aassima in the world of Naitoo, and a tournament between two alchemists shows how skilled individuals can call on and control the arcanic energy that flows around ...

Continually upping the stakes is something you would have come to expect in Steve Cavanagh’s fast moving Eddie Flynn courtroom dramas, but somehow he even manages to raise expectations from book to book and still delivers on them. Somehow he also manages to do that without losing credibility (or at least not stretching it any further than it already is) which considering the nature of the high drama in his books must make each of them a hard act to follow. Thirteen may be unlucky for some, but not for readers of Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn series . Maybe not so great for Eddie though, for wouldn’t you know it, just as he seems to be getting his life, career and family back together after quite a few knocks and setbacks along the way, he gets smashed in the face again; literally and metaphorically. Eddie’s quick-thinking actions in the courtroom hasn’t gone unnoticed, nor his ability to turn around seemingly impossible trials, pulling out witnesses and exert testimonies like a magician pull...