One of the perils of being a book reviewer is accepting an author review copy of a book in a series when the book is not the first in the series. If you have no prior knowledge of the series ...
Read More »Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
No matter how many books I read, I never manage to stop judging books by their covers. After all, that’s the purpose of a cover, setting the expectations of the reader. I saw the cover of Revenger and I thought ‘Yes, ...
Read More »Bête: Wait here, the cat had said. Fuck that.
Adam Roberts is hardly a new voice in SFF writing, and yet he was new to me. Or, should I say, his fiction work was new to me. Long ago I had come across one of his academic works on ...
Read More »The Gospel of Loki by Joanne Harris
A number of reviews of The Gospel of Loki have talked about it as Joanne Harris’s first fantasy novel. I find that baffling. What about Chocolat and its sequel The Lollipop Shoes? They might not have been quite so ‘out there’ with the fantastical elements, ...
Read More »Flowers for Algernon: There are so many doors to open
Every now and then a book will take you completely by surprise. It will sweep you off your feet; your need to keep reading will border on an unhealthy obsession, and your emotional reactions to fictional occurrences will be questionable ...
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