To The Last Page

It doesn’t take much imagination to consider that humanity as a species is facing a crisis at the moment, one that it is looking increasingly likely to have a major impact on how we live our lives in the future. It’s a little more difficult to imagine any creative solutions to those problems – if there is even time to implement them and turn things around – and it’s even more difficult to imagine how humanity as a species will react when it is forced to adapt, but chances are that it probably won’t bring out the best in people. Writer Daniel Odija and artist Wojciech Stefaniec push those boundaries to their limits in imagination, in writing and in visualisation of a realty that humanity potentially faces in Stolp , the first volume of a proposed Bardo tetralogy. If the circumstances of the fictional dystopian city of Bardo are somewhat fantastical and surreal rather than conventional in terms of depiction of a pre-apocalyptic society teetering on the brink of collapse, in Stolp Odija a...

In terms of plot, a serial killer who is leaving a signature beside his victims isn't anything new, even if the killer is copying the method of another serial killer, but Maryse Rivière has a few interesting elements to throw into the mix of Peur sur Montmartre as well as an intriguing group of characters.  Whether they ultimately contribute anything of substance is doubtful, but there's certainly an escalating series of events with unusual connections to keep you hooked here.  It's Lulu, Lucien Despoisses, a homeless person (SDF) who is the first to get a premonition of what is to come.  Fearful of an attempted attack on a fellow tramp beside the Seine in the centre of Paris, he relocates to the north of the city, to the bohemian district of Montmartre with its booksellers and antiquarian dealers.  Just before Christmas however, a Polish tramp sleeping beside him is murdered with the signature of a chalk face left at the scene, and soon after that, the editor of a ...

From the Moebius-inspired cover image to the very attractive interior artwork and a science-fiction plot that pits human life against an alien environment half a million years in the future, Diego Agrimbau and Lucas Varela’s Human has all the makings of a thrilling quality SF graphic novel. If it doesn’t quite live up to expectations in terms of delivering any new ideas or insights into what it means to be human it certainly meets expectations elsewhere and is unlikely to disappoint. Without any dialogue, the opening section presents an intriguing scene of a space-craft making a crash landing on what looks like an alien planet. An AI with its files are corrupted and unable to determine what its mission is emerges from the ruin of the craft and barely has time to grasp the situation to avoid getting ripped apart by one of the primitive red-faced monkey like lifeforms on the planet. Assisted by a robot protector however, it manages to remain in one piece and establish that the remainder...

Michelle Gallen’s Big Girl, Small Town is being promoted as Milkman meets Derry Girls , setting up expectations that Michelle Gallen’s debut novel almost certainly cannot hope to meet. Inevitably, even though it opens with a quote from Anna Burns’s extraordinary work, it doesn’t measure up to the literary merits and philosophical insights of Milkman ‘s view of living in a world shaped by the inescapable stranglehold of the twin authoritarian influence of religious observance and paramilitary terror, nor does it have quite the humorous exaggeration of the same conditions of Derry Girls . And yet in its own way, and from a Northern Irish small town perspective, Big Girl, Small Town is another small masterpiece that draws from that wealth of observations to be made about ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances. It seems a little bit of a familiar literary contrivance use a character with some minor level of autism who is unable to comprehend all the subtleties insinuations and soc...

The truth and facing up to it can be a scary thing, particularly when you look around at the reality of the world we are living in today. There are few authors so attuned to the nature of truth and the scary implications of it than Claire North; her ability to find different ways of exploring it are continuously inventive and, despite the sometimes fantastical setting, eerily plausible. Her latest novel The Pursuit of William Abbey is another terrifying experience. It’s not just that North’s observations about human nature and its relationship with the truth that are pertinent and terrifying in their implications, but her writing makes it painfully real, and that can be hard to bear. And in a way, North’s necessity to deal with the painful realities are mirrored in the protagonist of her latest novel. William Abbey is a doctor working on the front during the First World War, an experience that for many revealed the ugly truth of the nature of war, the people who wage it and the ordina...

Maud Tabachnik chooses a place of extremes for her latest novel; the remote frozen tundra and small town life of Manitoba in Canada.  Major events however in Jours de glace (Days of Ice) shake up the small town of Woodfoll where Lou Gyrnspan is sheriff, events that have repercussions and reveal underlying prejudices in the characteristics of its inhabitants, characteristics however that Tabachnik isn't quite able to convincingly grasp and turn to the advantage of the thriller plot. The temperature in Woodfoll rarely rises above -15° and conditions in the region seem to be worsening, making life difficult for its inhabitants and for the law authorities.  It's considered the perfect place however for a new experimental high-tech penitentiary built 25km outside the town that is going to treat 60 of North America's most dangerous criminals, with only 20 guards and a group of psychoanalysts.  Among the psychotics, schizophrenics, sociopaths, paedophiles and rapists with recid...

Usually in a typical crime thriller there’s a mystery at the start that has you intrigued and keep you reading, but with Jo Spain ( The Boy Who Fell , Sleeping Beauties ) the situation also invites the reader to have something of empathy or concern either about a victim or perhaps someone wrongly accused. With Six Wicked Reasons , Spain seems to take more of a risk and break from convention, choosing instead to present the reader with a victim who you don’t much care about and six siblings of a wealthy family who you quickly find are just as difficult to like, each of them with a good wicked reason why they might have killed their father Frazer Lattimer. The Lattimer siblings have all gone their separate ways and been mostly estranged from each other over the years, their lives (and personal enmities and problems) taking them in other directions. Something however has happened to bring them back together. Adam who had vanished 10 years ago has returned from the dead and their father Fr...

You’ve got to hand it to Sophie Hannah; she is wonderful at presenting you up-front with an intriguing and seemingly impossible situation so absurd that you are completely drawn in. There’s no option but to keep on reading to see how she is going to resolve this. The other great thing about Sophie Hannah and particularly in the case of Haven’t They Grown is that while the outcome and resolution might not be wholly convincing, the author never resorts to cheating the reader or lets them down. She has her work cut out for her with this scenario. Beth Leeson’s world turns upside down when she decides on a whim to check out the former home of a couple of old friends, Flora and Lewis Braid. She and her husband Dom haven’t seen the Braids for 12 years; once close, going on holidays together, their lives have gone in different directions with some underlying tension adding to them drifting apart. Beth is surprised to find that Flora is still at the house, but what is shocking and what makes ...