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 it's 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 ove...

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...

In any good continuing series there are often some unresolved matters, some with the potential to be time-bombs that could go off at any time. There has been a few such open threads left throughout Ambrose Parry's Raven and Fisher series, mostly in the romantic tension between Raven and Fisher which has been complicated by their differing backgrounds, personalities and their experiences in the medical profession. Since this is set in Victorian Edinburgh, those experiences would have been markedly different for a man and a woman. And then there is the fact that, in the three year gap between the events of The Way of All Flesh and The Art of Dying , both got married to other people.  It's fair to say however - in keeping with the general tone of the series as a whole - neither of those marriages were conventional and certainly didn't resolve the feelings that they had for each other. As we reach what is expected to be the final episode in the five part series, time is runni...

There are a number of features that give Si la bête s’éveille ('If the Beast Awakens') a somewhat unusual character for a crime thriller, much of them likely to do with the author Frédéric Lepage having an extensive CV in film, essay writing, TV and documentary outside of his crime fiction writing. Whether you think there is maybe too much emphasis on subjects not directly related to the crime, or whether this is an advantage that lifts the novel above the average - the novel won the Prix Cognac for the best French language crime novel in 2021 - it does raise some interesting philosophical, psychological and behavioural questions that are worth considering outside the context of the crime thriller. In the first chapter of Si la bête s’éveille  we are introduced (in italics in the past) to Adam Leaf as a young man being brought up by grandmother Ariana. It's hinted that he has a strong sense of justice, preparing to attack a store that short changed his grandmother. He lear...

Nicci Cloke's Her Many Faces takes a little time to get its murder mystery drama going, but ultimately that's because it has other factors and relevant contemporary issues to raise that are to prove to have a significant impact on the case. Those issues feel just a little 'manufactured' in terms of the plotting, and it all seems a bit too neatly and novelistically constructed. Those are minor reservations however, and once you get past that, the courtroom drama that follows really takes on a momentum this makes this a hard book to put down. An initial difficulty, for me, is its choice of perspective. What we have are five different viewpoints, all of them men, all of them focussed on their experience with Katherine Cole, a young woman who has been arrested and accused of the murder of four extremely wealthy, important and influential men. Katherine was the only waitress working at their private members club when the men were served a poisoned bottle of brandy. Since Ka...