The City & the City China Miéville Del Rey Release Date: May 26, 2009 ISBN 978-0-345-49751-2 I enjoy exploring literary works whose titles have been short-listed for awards in my preferred genre; the Hugos and the Nebulas, the World Fantasy Awards. Doing so has led me to many talented authors […]
Six Wakes Mur Lafferty Orbit Books Release Date: January 31, 2017 ISBN 978-0-316-38968-6 Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes is a science fiction novel about clones and a space mission gone awry. But it’s also a murder mystery, with many moving parts. Both aspects of the book feed off the other, and […]
After Atlas Emma Newman Roc Release Date: November 8, 2016 ISBN 978-0-425282-40-3 Last year, Emma Newman’s novel, Planetfall, chronicled the aftermath of an interstellar expedition whose participants thought they had found the resting place of God. Led by the unshakable faith of the genius scientist known as the Pathfinder, a […]
Arcadia Iain Pears Alfred A. Knopf Release Date: February 9, 2016 ISBN 978-1-101-94682-4 Recently, I attempted to explain the plot of Iain Pears’ novel, Arcadia, to a friend who is both an author and a literary scholar, well versed in folk stories and fairy tales. I told him that it […]
Ithaca Falls Steve Thayer Conquill Press Release Date: April 15, 2015 ISBN 978-0-9908461-1-6 I have a couple of confessions to make. I picked up Steve Thayer’s new novel, Ithaca Falls, for two non-literary reasons. The first is that the author lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, just over the river from […]
Career of Evil Robert Galbraith Mulholland Books Release Date: October 20, 2015 ISBN 978-0-316-34993-2 Career of Evil, the third book in the crime thriller series starring private detective Cormoran Strike, is the grittiest one yet. It’s no wonder that author J.K. Rowling stuck to her non de plume of Robert […]
Lock In John Scalzi Tor Books Release Date: August 26, 2014 ISBN 978-0-7653-7586-5 It just isn’t right. Every time I read a synopsis of a new John Scalzi book, I think to myself, this just ain’t gonna work. It’s either too simplistic of a premise (Redshirts), or too convoluted of […]
The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit Graham Joyce Doubleday Release Date: August 5, 2014 ISBN 978-0-385-53863-3 The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit is a coming of age story – not about a boy becoming a young man; rather, about young man cutting ties from home and courting the […]
The Three Sarah Lotz Little, Brown and Company Publication Date: May 20,2014 ISBN 978-0-316-24290-5 Conspiracy theories. New ones pop up every day, and old ones just don’t ever seem to go away, no matter how conclusively they are debunked. But what if something happened that seemed to defy coincidence? That […]
The Cuckoo’s Calling Robert Galbraith Mulholland Books Release Date: April 30, 2013 ISBN 978-0-316-20684-6 I’ll admit it – I’m one of those superficial ne’r-do-wells who would not have read The Cuckoo’s Calling if word hadn’t gotten out that author Robert Galbraith was really J.K. Rowling (of the “Harry Potter” books […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.