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Babel, Or The Necessity of Violence. An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. Audiobook read by Chris Lew Kum Hoi and Billie Fulfprd Brown. Babel is an extraordinary book, a rich and deeply personal story. Robin Swift, taken from his native Canton and the arms of his dead mother, moulded into a facsimile of…
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This book is a fairly easy read, and Lily can be a sympathetic character at times, but ultimately this is an overstretched short story with a rushed and disappointing ending. What promised to be something in the vein of The Ninth Gate manages, instead, to be a self-indulgent Fifty Shades of Eat, Pray, Love.Lily Albrecht,…
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In Sunyi Dean’s first novel, we’re introduced to book eaters; a humanoid race who consume the written word to survive, literally living off of stories, and benefitting from the ability to retain and access all the information in the texts they consume. But, where one might imagine the state of enlightenment this might lead to,…
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Another fantastic magical history! Finding a way to weave an alternate plot into established history is no easy task, and often historical fiction finds greater freedom by looking at minor figures, on the fringe of history, to find the wiggle room to invent. But, as HG Parry so recently showed with her Shadow Histories duology,…
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Brian McGilloway’s earlier work, The Last Crossing, published in 2020 and nominated in 2021 for Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, was his first standalone novel, departing from his established, and bestselling, Lucy Black and Benedict Devlin series. That book was a beautiful, devastating story of regret and revenge caught in a…
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This debut novel by Rosie Andrews is a slow burn for much of its first half—building atmosphere, hinting at shadows, but keeping its cards quite close to its chest—before diving (pardon the pun) into a more authentically horrific vision as it gains considerable, and welcome, momentum in the second half. In 17th century Norfolk, Thomas…
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This is a very engaging expansion of the world of Dr Moreau, though it does suffer somewhat from the perennial problem for stories that rely heavily on huge time jumps: is it a novel, or a gathering of short stories? Barnes does a lot of work to scaffold the connectedness of these stories, but it’s…
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Ask me right now who my favourite author is, it’s HG Parry. And, A Radical Act of Free Magic is my favourite book. It’s probably the closeness of just finishing, and I’ll probably qualify the feeling later, but today: no book beats this one.
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This is an extraordinary book; unsettling and challenging, unexpected and compelling. Iris isn’t an easy character to connect with when you first meet her—goofy is an horrendous term to describe her, given where the rest of the book goes, but it’s the first impression one gets. It undermines her, it invites us to judge her,…
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The third instalment of the Black Iron Legacy, The Broken God, is a fantastic book, once again refreshing the world that Hanrahan is building and adding amazing new voices and faces to his extensive cast of saints, devils, mobsters and monstrosities. This book puts the Dragon-led criminal families of the Ghierdana to the fore, with…
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Damien Kelly 