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...