To The Last Page

My preferred title for my blog was '100 pages', but for whatever reason, Blogger wouldn't let me use that. That is the limit I will give a book the opportunity to grab me and want to keep on reading.  Anything that doesn't look promising I'll put aside, as I have a mountain of other books I'd much rather be spending time with. Such is the case unfortunately - but not unexpectedly - with Sara Cox's Thrown . I'm not sure it's fair to call this a review then, as I didn't get 'to the last page', but as long that's clear, here's a few thoughts impressions I have from the first 100 pages, which will at least ensure it is spoiler free. It's probably no surprise then that Sara Cox's debut fits very clearly under the category of 'Women's Fiction' or 'Female Interest'. I don't mean this to sound like a dismissive put-down, as it these are recognised and very popular genres, but as I am not the target readersh...

There's a certain comfort about coming back to familiar characters in a long running series. For most authors that is; with David Mark it's a mixture of emotions. You know that you're going to read another superlative crime thriller featuring his wonderful and warm human characters, you just don't know what horrors the author is going to put them through this time. As book 10 in his DS McAvoy series , you probably know that it's likely to be a case that no-one is going to get an easy ride or come out unmarked. Un-David Marked. Sometimes I'm not sure even the criminals deserve what they get in his books... Take for example the unfortunate individual at the start of Blind Justice . We don't know exactly what has gone wrong, just that he and a friend were attempting a house robbery, one that should have been a doddle, but he now finds himself lying in mud in the dark, while his friend is screaming in agony. As he feels half his leg being ripped off by a bear tr...

As she demonstrated in her impressive debut novel Big Girl, Small Town , Michelle Gallen can depict the problems and indignities of being a woman from a deprived background living in small provincial community with authenticity and humour. Even if you're not from this part of the world, a country that has stark divisions across religious and political lines, the experiences of feeling like an outsider and feeling held back from being yourself will still be recognisable to anyone.  The social and political context might also be recognisable however if you've seen Derry Girls . I might as well get the obvious comparison out of the way now (the title invites such comparisons), because despite the superficial similarities and the period of the Troubles covered, Michelle Gallen does move on and have other issues to deal with. If it helps however, you could see the teenage protagonist of Factory Girls as practically a sequel to the  Derry Girls  TV series. Maeve and her friend...

There's a great deal to admire in the works of B. Catling. Leaving aside his work as a sculptor and artist, his fiction has a distinctive character, a tremendously imaginative and original approach to dark fantasy, the writing evoking wondrous visuals. He is at his most expansive in The Vorrh trilogy, but equally creative in shorter works like Earwig . Hollow is another fabulous creation, creating a world so unsettling that it's not one you'd particularly want to revisit in a trilogy. It indeed starts out like a fable, one set in medieval times, where Follett and his group of mercenaries and knights of seemingly Dutch or Flemish origin have been tasked by the High Church with delivering a new oracle to the monastery of the Eastern Gate, Das Kagel, formerly known as the Tower of Babel. The nature of the Blessed Oracle is a little obscure but also somewhat disturbing. A creature of withered limbs, it feeds on the marrow of human bones treated fresh by the whispered sins of ...

The signs of what is to come are all there in Lawrence Block's A Diet of Treacle , although it ought to already be obvious from the suitably lurid cover on the Hard Case Crime paperback with the tagline 'She Went Looking For Thrills - AND FOUND MURDER'. To be fair, you don't even need to look beyond the author's name to know what to expect, but Block's 1961 crime thriller has plenty of lowlife pulp and seediness in the opening chapters to alert you to the nature of the trouble ahead. It's the counter-culture alternative living, hip drug taking community of Greenwich Village that houses characters like Joe Milani and his friend Shank. Right from the start Block describes them as being blissfully high in the middle of the day in a bar, neither of them with anything better to do but ponder their next move, or rather their next bout of inactivity. This day, Joe decides his confidence is running high enough to pick up a square chick who has come into the bar, but...

Tu rostro manaña  ("Your Face Tomorrow") consists of three books originally published separately as Fiebre y Lanza (2002), Baile y sueño (2004) and Veneno y sombra y adiós (2007). The books might not be primarily narrative driven, being more inclined to ponder themes and subjects - that's something I'll get into later - but there is nonetheless a consistent linear plot with a relatively small group of characters that means it has to be seen as a single novel. Taken as a trilogy or a single work, it is a quite extraordinary and ambitious achievement. Undoubtedly it may seem inconsequential, overlong and overindulgent to some, with rambling asides with no immediately evident purpose or dramatic tension, but Marías achieves an incredible depth through linguistic wordplay and in his exploration of human actions and sentiments. It's a kind of literary spy thriller that sidesteps any of the cliches of the genre, focussing (although 'focus' might not be the be...

As an idea for a science-fiction book, the theme of the planet going through a significant change related to a catastrophic event is a long-running theme and it's relevance certainly hasn't lessened in the light of recent developments. There is then perhaps nothing particularly new in Susannah's Wise's vision of the collapse of society in This Fragile Earth , but the author tries at least to show that it might not come in the way we expect, or be capable of being dealt with in ways that we might expect. What else it has to offer however is rather limited. More technology clearly isn't the solution to our problems in This Fragile Earth - at least not in a way we might expect. After beetles were introduced to eat the chemicals that were on crops, the beetles became a problem and a disease called Bovine Staph infected the water supplier, so technological solutions have been introduced in an attempt to correct the ecological balance of the world. Aside from pollen-dron...