To The Last Page

The notion of Sarah Waters writing an old-fashioned ghost story is a strange one, but there's a lot more to The Little Stranger than at first appears, and while it may disappoint fans of the writer's earlier work, it turns out to be the logical next step for the writer of Fingersmith and The Night Watch .  Moving progressively towards more a more modern period, The Little Stranger 's post-war period is significant, with traditional notions of class being upturned, most notably in the narrator Dr Faraday who, born the son of a housemaid at the estate of the Ayers family known as the Hundreds, succeeds in becoming a doctor and somewhat accidentally ends up being the personal physician for the Ayers family and witness to their decline.  That decline into madness is caused by a spirit that appears to torment the household, but it could just as easily be the sense of personal guilt, gossip, prejudice and betrayal that have driven previous Waters' characters to the madhouse...

Presumably not by chance, Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel follows similar themes to Issui Ogawa’s The Lord of the Sands of Time , also published among the first wave of Japanese sci-fi novels under Viz’s new Haikasoru fiction imprint, but in reality the two books are very different in approach. Again the theme is one of using time-travel in order to combat the overwhelming invasion force that threatens to wipe out the entire planet, but in the case of All You Need Is Kill , the time-travel is on a smaller, more personal scale, but the outcome could equally be of global importance. Here, one fresh Japanese recruit in the United Defence Force, Keiji Kiriya, is caught-up in a Groundhog Day style loop, seemingly doomed to fight and repeatedly die in a major battle with the Mimics that, like a computer game, is continually reset until he can build up the necessary fighting experience and find a way - if there is a way - to overcome the merciless onslaught of the strange mechanical amphibian crea...

With effortless wit, Holt introduces the reader to another world where the underlying mechanics and physics of how the world works is closer to that of myth and fairytale, and only marginally more unreliable than the real world we know. For Chris Popham, a travelling salesman and amiable loser seeking to impress customers into buying a wider range of magical products than the inexplicably popular DW6 dried water (“just add…”), there’s always the risk of a malfunctioning product like the instant car-park space trapping him in another dimension. Not to mention the trouble with Demons. All fine and dandy when they’re held in objects like a SatNav kept secure by protective charms, but Chris has been encountering a lot of rather more dangerous ones while out on his rounds, and wonders if it has anything to do with his friendship with Jill, a high-ranking official at Demon Control in the Department of Metaphysics, the new work placement student tagging along with him, or the entity in his Sa...

One of the first wave of Japanese sci-fi novels under Viz’s new Haikasoru fiction imprint, Issui Ogawa’s novel The Lord of the Sands of Time is classic material of the kind you would expect to find in their manga range, with its exciting blend of action, tradition, and romance that takes on an epic scale not only across millennia, but also cuts across time-lines. In the Land of Wa, ancient Japan in 248AD, Lady Miyo, the shaman queen of the land, encounters Messenger O, a cyborg sent back in time from Triton in 2598 to meet the threat of an alien invasion which as entered the timestream in an effort to wipe out the whole of humanity at their most vulnerable points in history. The novel follows the attempts to defeat and understand the nature of the attacks through a number of time periods, each seeing an evolution in the nature of the enemies capabilities, but it raises other questions with regard to the splitting of time-lines, the intervention not only potentially having a profound i...

Maybe it’s the title or the back-cover blurb, but the impression you might have of Death of a Ladies’ Man is that of a lot of laddish humour, smooth patter and pickup lines and plenty of explicit sex scenes, with the protagonist getting his come-uppance at the end. You’d be right to think that, but you also couldn’t be more wrong. There’s a lot more going on in Bissett’s powerfully compelling novel than that. It’s not that the book has any great narrative storyline - the main character is a 30 year-old teacher who lives with his mother after a painful divorce, but has started recently dating one of his colleagues at the school, a more mature 41 year-old woman. Charlie however just can’t help himself when it comes to women - he’s worked out all the tricks a long time ago, knows what he wants and knows how to get it. Could his ladies man reputation prevent him from a more mature and loving relationship - or is that even what he really wants? Plot-wise there’s nothing here to get too exc...

Not in any chronological order, but acting all the same as a fine introduction to Maurice Leblanc’s master criminal, the short stories in this earliest Arsène Lupin collection commence with his arrest, followed just as quickly by his miraculous evasion from justice. The remainder of the other stories lack the ingenuousness and incredible twists of the longer works, but there are some hints here of what would follow; Lupin’s run-ins with Inspector Ganimard and his first encounter with his most capable adversary, the great English Detective Herlock Sholmès (Conan Doyle none too impressed by this character); his daring burglaries and his solving of great mysteries. No safe is secure, no locked room inaccessible and no house is without a secret passage in Lupin's world, his romantic adventuring and his boastful relationship with the press, L’Echo de France, making him a figure of legend, setting the tone for what would become one of the most thrilling creations in French pulp crime fic...

Prefiguring Chekhov’s theatre work, Turgenev in dramatic form can perhaps seem to lack the precision and beauty of his prose work. On the page, A Month In The Country seems to offer little more than the romantic complications of Russian ladies and gentlemen in a setting isolated from the rest of the world with little in the way of any defining national or social characteristics, but its openness necessarily allows much more to be drawn from it in a stage setting. Despite the lack of any real drama - the romantic entanglements are almost entirely verbal, the complications and realisations agonised over in soliloquies - structurally the drama and the interaction between the various players of differing ages and classes is purposefully and powerfully achieved, reaching a conclusion of complete devastation of almost everyone involved without anything actually seeming to have occurred.