To The Last Page

Human trafficking is a pretty nasty business. You think you know how bad it is and have maybe come across some news reports and true stories about it, but living through it is probably a lot worse than you imagine. There are certainly a few well-documented accounts of young women abducted as children who have been kept in sex slavery for years, but it’s still hard to imagine how traumatic and damaging an experience that can be. You would hope that Will Dean’s fictional story of just such an occurrence with a young Asian woman in T he Last Thing to Burn might make it a little more palatable but the experience and circumstances of Thanh Dao is still horrific enough, so horrific that what keeps you reading is the hope – and since it is fiction not unreasonably have some expectation – that there’s a way out of it. And if you can feel like that, then you have some idea of what keeps Thanh Dao going, kept captive in a farmhouse in the north of England. To Lenn, the farmer, her name is Jane,...

Spirou, like many characters in long running children’s adventure comic series, is essentially ageless, or at least never seems to get older. Since the series has been running since 1938, it would be a bit odd for the main character to still be wearing a hotel bellboy outfit when he is over 80 years old. Even though the series originates from this very period, it still comes as a bit of a surprise however to see Spirou - and indeed Belgium, since the series originates from there – getting ready for the grim reality of WWII. The sense of a culture shock is even more pronounced since Émile Bravo establishes a rather more serious and sober tone to its historical background than the Stasi hi-jinks behind the Iron Curtain in 1989 of the previous Spirou adventure by Flix,  Spirou in Berlin . “This isn’t an adventure Fantasio. This is war”, as Spirou observes half way through Part 1 of Hope Against All Odds . It’s not just that the tone here is markedly different but Bravo’s artwork also...

As an English historian, a biographer, a television presenter and a novelist who has also successfully managed to adapt to a range of styles including period pastiche, it can be hard to know when we’re getting the real Peter Ackroyd in his fiction writing. It’s of course by no means essential for a writer’s own voice to be identified with the content of his work, but in the case of Mr Cadmus the tone is so uneven, falling somewhere between comedic and sinister, that you are left not quite knowing what to make of it, but feeling that whatever its objective might have been it hasn’t been entirely successful. Mr Cadmus starts out like a comedy of smalltown English manners, introducing us to Maud Finch and Millicent Swallow, two single middle-aged ladies who occupy the outer edges of a row of the three cottages in The Coppice in the village of Little Camborne. The middle house between them has been vacant since the death of the previous owner who they didn’t really approve of, but there ...

There’s something ominous about a science-fiction book that has a title like Soon . Soon doesn’t necessarily have to mean something bad – and in this case of Thomas Cadène and Benjamin Adam’s graphic novel there’s another meaning to Soon as an ambitious space project – but in any science fiction book, particularly one that comes from an environmental perspective, the future is never going to look too bright. In fact, it’s actually through comparing darkness and light that Soon emphasises very effectively right from the outset what we are in danger of losing. The opening scene takes a look at our own society now viewed from the perspective of children in New Winnipeg in 2140 visiting a museum of the past. To their amazement they are able to see a reconstruction of the early 21st century, look on in wonder at the now unthinkably dazzling Times Square, marvel at the space everyone has in their cars, and marvel at devices that once allowed people to communicate instantaneously with anyon...

Christian Ego's first novel, Commissioner Évelyne Delmas novel Le premier appelé had a historical characters connected with events in the Ukraine during the war in 1941. The author seems to follow a similar path in his second Commissioner Delmas thriller, Les voies majeures . Here however, the path to follow isn't initially clear and the principal problem the Versailles police force face is in eliminating those issues before they can hope to start unravelling an age old mystery. The case is set in motion by the murder of Jérôme Peyrat, shot dead at his Inn on the outskirts of Paris, the motive far from clear. It seems that he belonged to a far-right group, one the reader will know about from the opening chapter detailing them going about defiling mosques. Although Peyrat has a cache of weapons, he appears small time, more involved in printing pamphlets. The killer could just as easily be a disgruntled employee or the jealous husband of the chief waitress that Peyrat was seeing...

Claire North, as I’ve discovered in previous literary encounters, doesn’t write books to comfort or reassure you. Or at least that’s the way it seems looking at things on a superficial level. Her 84K was a disturbing and wholly realistic twist on 1984, on a world of surveillance and enslavement to corporate interests with political power behind them and most recently the legacy of the horrors of colonialism were given a supernatural twist in The Pursuit of William Abbey . You don’t have to look too far into the past or ahead into the near future to see that these ghosts of the past and the present circumstances point all too credibly towards an unpleasant and worrying future. The dangers of technology and artificial intelligence expanding beyond a level that we can control has however been thoroughly explored elsewhere in science-fiction, but Claire North has a unique take on it here in Sweet Harmony . Again, it’s not that reassuring an outlook, but perhaps there’s more here than it j...

It isn’t often that you review a book where you quote the entire text of the book and where even the title alone can be considered a spoiler. Even at this point the review is already longer than the entire text content of They Called Him Charles . Such is the nature of reviewing comics, which don’t even necessarily have to have any text at all to tell a story. In the case of They Called Him Charles by Jerzy Łanuszewski and Ewa Ciałowicz, the idea of the providing those four words as the punchline to every page in the book might seem limiting – and admittedly that does make it predictable to a certain extent – but there’s a lot you can do within those restrictions to make this amusing and even pull a few surprises as well. At the risk of labouring a review and stating the obvious about a 32 page comic with only four words of repeated text, They Called Him Charles consists of 32 single-page strips, each depicting a situation where someone presumably called Charles, is killed in a varie...

If you haven’t come across Mop and Monkus before (or Tif et Tondu in the original) it’s probably not surprising, as regrettably few of these classic long-running French children’s comic books – many like this one actually of Belgian origin – have made it into English translation. If your only reference is Tintin , you’d maybe think that Mop and Monkus are a variation on that where the young reporter and his friend Captain Haddock have let themselves go a bit. And although they are quite different personality wise that’s not entirely an unreasonable reference point. Tif et Tondu in the original series which ran from 1938 until 1997, are an investigative team and much like the Spirou series that they are related to in Dupuis publishing house, there’s always a fresh way of reworking and developing the series for a new audience. Where is Kiki? a new ‘Mop and Monkus‘ tale from Blutch and Robber, is a hugely promising fresh adaptation that one can only hopes leads to further new episod...

When you open up a retirement village I suppose someone has to be the first to take up a place there. In Pascal Garnier's Lune captive dans un oeil mort , it's Martial and Odette Sudre who take up the first residence in Les Conviviales, a secure gated community for elderly residents in the south of France. It seems a bit strange at first, some concerns about who else will turn up, but all seems well enough when another couple, Maxime and Marlène Node take up residence, and then a single lady Léa whose female partner has just died. Eventually there's enough for Mr Flesh the security guard to keep an eye on, and for the community to bring in to keep the club-house going. " Tout le monde a ses petits défauts... " Each of the residents have their own little quirks or personality flaws that becomes exaggerated in the environment under an oppressively hot summer, and they are further gripped by fear when Flesh tells them of a camp of gypsies in the vicinity. This comes ...

What are we to make of books that are really just metaphors about writing? On the one hand they can be rather self-indulgent or very occasionally they find a way of plunging deep into the nature of artistic experience, inspiration and creation. The process of serious writing does involve a great deal of soul-searching and, rather like some of Paul Auster’s novels, Stephen Hall uses something of a literary detective plot in Maxwell’s Demon to ‘investigate’ and explore the strange process, purpose and meaning of putting words on a page and putting it out before the public. The hook is a good one that is irresistible for anyone who is interested in books; Hall creates a great literary mystery around the enigmatic writer of an extraordinary masterpiece of crime fiction, Cupid’s Engine by Andrew Black. More than just a crime novel, Black’s only published work has been met with universal acclaim, popularity and success, but for Tom Quinn the book holds even greater depth and meaning, like s...

Written by Dominik Szcześniak with art by Rafał Trejnis, London is an outsider’s view of the capital, a graphic novel about what it’s like to be a European worker in the city and unsure how you fit in. It’s the kind of story that seems obvious and one that everyone thinks they know all about. In reality the issues of coming from one country to work in another are more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you’re talking about coming to work in London. The attraction is obvious for Polish plasterer Mikołaj. It’s money, it’s the promise of a better future if you can put up with the inconvenience of living in an ant-infested house with no basic utilities and being away from family and friends for long periods. These aren’t minor things, and there are no guarantees it will work out the way you might hope with no health insurance, no worker rights, dodgy employers and being at the mercy of fluctuating exchange rates. Mikołaj however is counting on it all being worthwhile, as ...