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 […]
Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? Paul Cornell Pan Books Release Date: May 19, 2016 ISBN 978-1-4472-7326-4 London detectives James Quill, Tony Costain and Kevin Sefton, and analyst Lisa Ross form a unique team; they have been “gifted” with the Sight – the ability to see the hidden, supernatural side of London. […]
Fellside M. R. Carey Orbit Release Date: April 5, 2016 ISBN 978-0-316-30028-5 Just what is Fellside, the newest novel from The Girl With All the Gifts author M. R. Carey? Is it a horror story set inside a women’s penitentiary? A ghost story of elusive redemption? A legal thriller where […]
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 […]
Someone was shot in the alley on my block last Sunday. He died of those gunshot wounds on Monday morning. He lived five doors down from me. My daughter heard the shots; we were home at the time. She thought it was just a car backfiring, since neither I nor […]
The Severed Streets Paul Cornell Tor Books Publication Date: May 20, 2014 ISBN 978-0-7653-3028-4 It’s modern day, London, summer, hot. The city is in the grips of social unrest: masked mobs march in protest of funding and service cuts while perceived graft and waste in government flows on unabated, the […]
“…I’d rather die standing up than live on my knees.” Those words, spoken in 2012 by Stéphane Charbonnier, lead editor of the satirical French weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, echo tragically as I write this, one day after he and 11 others were murdered in an attack on the magazine’s Paris […]
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.