To The Last Page

As a former employee of Hewlett Packard, Company is another of Max Barry's early books dealing satirically (ie. wholly realistically) with the absurdity of business corporate interests and trivial office politics (or perhaps trivial business interests and absurd office politics). I was going to say that he has moved on from that, but if you look deeper even into his SF adventure Providence , you can see that the office and corporate experience is still there, so it goes deep. In Company however it's completely - and I mean completely - immersed in the world of business. We get full-on corporate speak, mission statements and productivity targets for Zephyr Holdings, a company that delivers training packages. Its business objective however is not as you might expect to increase productivity and sales, but to make the business look lean and competitive in the financial market for its shareholders - or at least that's how it appears. Hence one of the four sales reps in Zephyr...

I'm not sure where to start describing this book, so I'll put this plainly upfront: The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes is extraordinary and one of the best books of its kind I have ever read. What 'its kind' is might be harder to define and that's where the difficulties come in. It's literary science-fiction, fantasy, gothic horror, satire, comedy, and just dazzling in all those areas. I don't know if its wholly original - several references come to mind now and again - but Ennes really strikes out in an area and style that is distinctive and original, wholly compelling body horror, bug horror (if that's even a defined genre). If there's one defining characteristic of the author's typical subject matter - and we only have the award-winning Leech and now The Works of Vermin so far to base his on - it's possibly monster bug horror. But as I say, also considerably more than that. Set in the city of Tiliard, a place that sits or hangs over the...

If there is one important life lesson you learn as you get older, it's to try to be more generous, understanding and less judgemental about other people as you come to recognise that you can't know what troubles and problems others are living through. That's not entirely the purpose of Arnold Thomas Fanning's memoir on suffering from mental illness, depression and living with a bipolar disorder to give you such pause for thought; to a greater or lesser degree, we all have our concerns, issues, insecurities and regrets, but it certainly helps put your own issues into perspective when you hear about the author's personal experience in Mind on Fire . Having picked up this book from Amazon, I'm aware now through further recommendations that there are many books about coping with mental illness and relating personal experiences of living with mental health problems. What is different in the case of Mind on Fire is that it is an account by someone who was a writer be...

Liadan Ní Chuinn's debut collection of short stories has been proclaimed by The Irish Times as a "remarkable debut that deserves to be considered among the best Irish books of the 21st century", which kind of sets a high bar for any reviewer coming along and reviewing the collection's UK publication this month from Granta. Making it a little more complicated is the fact that the author using the name Liadan Ní Chuinn is unknown: no biographical information has been provided on them other than the claim that they were born in 1998 in the year of the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement and they are not doing any interviews or publicity for the book. Conspiracists have already been claiming the stories were written by AI, but anyone who has actually read the book will find it reassuring that AI will never be able to write a book so steeped in the essence of humanity as to be able to distil that lived experience into a remarkable collection of stories that do ind...