To The Last Page

Born in Tehran in Iran but now living in Canada, Babak Lakghomi's writing seems to reflect personal experience that struggles to grasp the disparity of living under a repressive regime with the idea of a writer's ideal of personal freedom of expression. South , the author's second short novel, tried to put those ideas across in a more abstract fashion, establishing a mood that explores deeper, human concerns on a more universal level. The narrator of South , B, is a freelance journalist, planning to write an article about life on an oil rig in the South of an unnamed country. His intentions for choosing to write about this subject aren't entirely clear, especially as there are more immediate concerns and problems in the world. A drought, brought about by a climate crisis seems to have had a major impact on the country, particularly in the South. Arriving at a fishing village before being transported to the rig, strange rites take place that ominously foreshadow what lie...

Having finished the Victor Coste SDPJ 93 trilogy (The Banlieues trilogy in English translation), Olivier Norek has taken in several standalone books in a greater variety of situations. The first, Entre deux mondes  (Between Two Worlds), starts out in the complex contemporary real-world of global war, politics and espionage, and the impact it has on ordinary people. It's the kind of thing Gerard Seymour does so well, particularly in how what is happening in the Middle East connects with and touches on our shores. 'Our' meaning the UK but also as far as Norek is concerned and where he finds his own angle on the subject, with France. Where they often meet, in the dangerous crossing between one world and the next, is in the channel between Calais and the English coast. Entre deux mondes indeed opens with a situation that is turning for the worse in the Mediterranean, between Libya and the planned destination for 273 refugees on their way to Italy, before highlighting another t...

As we go into the fifth book in the DS Cross Thriller series, it wouldn't be unreasonable to wonder how much mileage there is left in a series featuring a police detective on the spectrum; a series that to some extent adopts some of the same characteristics. DS George Cross likes order and procedure to a far greater degree than even the most assiduous detective. He is not governed by gut feelings or intuition, has a habit of speaking his mind, sometimes in the most inappropriate manner considering the circumstances, with little sense of apparent sensitivity for the families of the victims. Well, the answer is there in the fact that each book so far has shown that DS Cross actually has more reserves of human empathy than you might think, while on the other hand the irrational, instinctive and adherence to social niceties can - certainly to DS Cross - appear even stranger and more disconcerting. Tim Sullivan, with characteristic skill, lays that out clearly in the critical but custo...

"Vos les ancêtres, m'avait dit Michée en me conduisant à mon arbre le soir de ma Mort, vous êtes des empêcheurs d'avenir." Zoonomia is the first volume of a proposed tetraology, La Dynastie des boiteux (The Dynasty of the Lame), already followed by Citizen Narcisse , the proposed Black Almanach (which appears to have been renamed as Vos les ancêtres , just published in France) and Le Livre de Michée (The Book of Micah), each a saga of a family line in a different period, inspired by real historical figures. Johann, the main figure of Zoonomia is based on Paul Bellini Du Chaillu, Franco-American explorer, adventurer and naturalist born in Réunion in 1831. The first book at least inhabits in places the same hallucinatory history of the world, race and colonialism as Steve Erickson ( Arc d'X ) or the Vorrh trilogy of Brian Catling. Not following any linear line across the tetraology, Zoonomia opens in 1846 with 15-year-old Johann, an illegitimate half-caste yo...

Having previously read many of Magnus Mills' books, the first thing that strikes this reader when going back to his first novel from 1998, The Restraint of Beasts is that while it is very recognisably a Mills situation involving men in a Sisyphean task or mundane employment that has strict rules, his first novel is slightly different in style and how it approaches its subject. It is however quintessentially Mills, hugely entertaining and opens up all kinds of consideration of society, people and the rules they live by. What is perhaps different, certainly to anyone coming back to this debut having read the other books, is that subsequent books become more refined, laid back and surreal in situations, while The Restraint of Beasts , …well …the beasts are rather less restrained, if I can put it that way. Which isn't surprising since that is the situation posed at the start of the novel.  Mr McCrindle's high-tensile fence has gone slack. Tam and Richie have only just put it u...