book recommendations
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The final instalment of the HMRC saga sees the end of the world. I mean, we saw it coming, but we kinda hoped… Ciara had been unmasked as her sister Niamh’s killer, but she’d also rid the world of evil warlock Dabney Hale. And she’d managed to reconcile herself with Leonie and Elle at the…
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So, I’ve been a huge fan of Chuck Wendig’s for many years, and I may now be at a point where just his voice on the page means I’m just primed to enjoy what he writes. And so it was here, where I really enjoyed and stuck with this story, even though nothing and no…
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This is my fifth book of HG Parry’s and she never fails to impress. Like The Magician’s Daughter before it, this is a gentler, more involved story than the Magical Histories. But this also has a fullness that the previous book did not, following every moment of the deep friendships that this book is about…
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“We’re coming to get you. Me and Alice and Ribs, we’re coming. There’s a second orsine. Were going to find it and then I’m going through it, to find you. I’ll bring you out. Can you hear me? Mar? Can you hear me?” He shook his small head. He tried to warn Charlie but no…
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This is an exceptional addition to the world of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, establishing not only the idea of a community of witches and warlocks at the highest levels of British society, but also the rich diversity of magic and its grey relationship with heaven and hell alike. But the incredible success of this slim…
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This is another deeply passionate and lyrical cautionary tale from Beth Lewis, and a powerful page-turner. It’s a real emotional companion piece for The Origins of Iris, and develops some of the themes begun there. The terrible ache to take back our mistakes forms the heart of the Atlas community and it’s leader Sol’s teachings,…
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I think the best indication of my response to HG Parry’s, The Magician’s Daughter, is that I cannot wait to be able to give this book to my own daughter. This is, unashamedly, just a story about growing up, with a fairly straightforward plot, but it’s also cleverly constructed, immaculately paced and the prose is…
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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 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…
Damien Kelly 