book recommendations
-
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.
-
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,…
-
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…
-
The follow-up to the excellent, frenetic Beneath the Rising, sees our odd couple (increasingly at-odds couple) Nick and Johnny thrown back together and back into the fray against Them, the vast cosmic horrors seeking to gain entry to our world. In the previous book, the truths behind their tense dynamic — she, the child savant,…
-
Alix E Harrow’s, ‘The Once and Future Witches’ is a book with a righteous temper. Telling the story of the three Eastwood sisters, Juniper, Agnes and Bella—brought up in witchcraft, an old witchcraft that has been otherwise lost to the rest of the world—and their part in fighting for women’s suffrage in a subtly alternate…
-
HG Parry’s, A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians is an astounding book, and I really can’t say when I last read a novel as good as this one. I try, to the best of my ability, to only post recommendations for books I love, and I’m always writing reviews full of praise, so it…
-
When I got wind of Shaun Hamill’s, ‘A Cosmology of Monsters’, I said it looked, “so far up my street, I might already be living there.” Well, I’ve walked through his haunted house and out again and—while I genuinely loved the experience—I’m glad I don’t really live there, because it’s really fucking scary. This is…
-
I have to preface my thoughts on Brian McGilloway’s latest novel, The Last Crossing, by saying that I knew Brian in his twenties, during that part of Northern Irish history that half this book is set in. We were in university together during the early nineties, in Belfast, during the Troubles. Both Catholic, but from…
-
BOOM! Studios continue to show me love, giving me this amazing collected volume to read ahead of its UK release in June of this year. It’s a blinder of a title and writer James Tynion IV and artist Werther Dell’Edera (and aren’t those a couple of names to conjure with?) are instant follows for me…
Damien Kelly 