Books

Humber Boy B is the latest novel from Ruth Dugdall, who previously won the Debut Dagger award for The Woman before Me. This is my first exposure to the author and I found this a deeply frustrating read. The book ...

Man Booker prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro has got a new novel out, The Buried Giant, which is causing something of a furore in literary circles. The battle is on the much-contested grounds of genre and is proving a classic example ...

No stranger to pushing boundaries, Alan Moore has done it again. Since 2008, Moore has been working on a novel that not only puts the standard novel length to shame, it outright challenges readers everywhere to develop a tenacious reading ...

Pain. Loss. Grief. Sorrow. Anger. Disbelief. These are not the emotions you usually expect to be bombarded with on your social media. But that was what was rolling over the internet yesterday as news broke of the death of Sir ...

I was pulled into the hype surrounding The Fire Sermon by its clever marketing campaign – well, clever and prolific. It sounded like a fun (can we call dark dystopias ‘fun’?) premise and I was excited to read a novel ...

After seeing Ancillary Justice recommended by practically every one of my favourite authors I had to find out what all the fuss was about. Not only that, the novel has been awarded a number of prestigious awards, including the Hugo ...

The premise of Liam Brown’s debut novel Real Monsters is intriguing, tapping into a general worldwide malaise when it comes to misplaced anger, pointless war, and a widespread fear of this ungraspable ‘terrorism’. A tale in two halves, a soldier ...

When I hear people fawn over their favourite writers or novels I often notice giant blind spots mixed in with their idolization. That isn’t to say there is necessarily a problem with that, no one should need to justify their ...

After reading Joe Hill’s brilliant comic book series, Locke & Key (review here), I couldn’t wait to try one of his novels. Having seen the film adaptation of Horns (and I really enjoyed it, review here), I thought I’d try ...

Urusla Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Awards last year reminded me of the long-standing snobbery when it comes to genre fiction, especially SFF (if you haven’t seen her speech, you can watch it here). When I first started ...