Tag Archives: books

Age of Assassins was one of my favourite books of last year. It had everything you could want: great characters, tense mystery storyline, political machinations of the most Machiavellian kind… The question is whether debut author RJ Barker could sustain the ...

When I was ten or so, my mother bought me the classic children’s book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. It sat on my shelf for twenty years. But with the film coming out in a few months, I decided it ...

Why do we still have ‘women’s fiction’ as a category in bookshops? Amazon, for instance, lists ‘Women Writers and Fiction Books’ as one of the major fiction categories, and ‘Women’s Popular Fiction’, ‘Women’s Literary Fiction’, and ‘Women’s Short Stories’ as ...

I’ve only recently started to appreciate collections of short stories. While I’ve always enjoyed short stories as individual entities, sitting down to read bite-sized stories never really appealed to me. Instead, I always preferred to get stuck into a novel, ...

One of my favourite people on this planet, Jon Spira, also happens to be a ruthless critic – yes, far worse than me – and a mentor of mine. When he began reviewing the recent behind the scenes tell-all, Jaws 2: ...

Having been racing my way through many SFF book series, I started to note the differences amongst how they approach certain issues of construction – how they deal with the continuing story, individual novels as part of a larger whole, and ...

Publishing industry insiders are predicting that 2017 will find readers turning to happier tales of escapism and hope. As a result, genre publishers are talking about the This is a big shift from the pessimistic dystopias that have dominated bestseller lists ...

It’s a bit of a long one this week. Get the three of us together and we can’t shut up about female villains! While I might be biased, I have to say that this is one of our best episodes ...

Guest post from Paige Orwin, whose debut novel, The Interminables, is out now, published by Angry Robot. Early on, I decided that I didn’t want any traditional fantasy creatures in The Interminables. No vampires, no werewolves, no figures taken from the mythology of ...

Here’s my theory: if more Brits were science fiction fans, the vote Leave campaign would never have succeeded. Despite how complex the issue of whether or not to remain in the EU really was, the campaign in the lead-up to ...