Shores of Night

Let's be honest, this century has been a cluster fuck so far. It's amazing how quickly things have gone from there being a glimmer of hope to, well, what? It feels a little as if the future has been snatched away, fear and uncertainty have become commonplace. The issues seems far more writ large than they were in the past, a growing juggernaut as the past does an ugly reach around and become the future. The century is still going through its teething problems, as all centuries have, change feels as if it is happening on a colossal scale. As is the case of the last two centuries Britain is either involved in a war or gearing up for one and there are questions over rights and responsibilities. Also, hideously familiar is the widening gap between rich and poor, yawning ever wider as if we were truly returning to the bad old days of the past. We're seeing the idea of the state changing it's relationship with us as a people, drawing back with one hand, cutting services, ma...

The first novel of the Split Worlds series is the first book I bought off the back of going to Edge Lit and to say I enjoyed it is an understatement. I'd read 20 Years Later by the same author last year and whilst I enjoyed that, I would say that there's a marked improvement in Newman's writing style. Even with the consideration that the book's aimed at a different market the prose felt more confident and the characterisation more deft. The plot is many layered, taking us into a world where there's a hidden world, the Nether, stuck between the human world and Exillium or if you prefer, Faerie. The protagonists come in the form of an ensorcelled man, a young girl on the run from her family, one of the stalwarts of the hidden world that serves the Faerie Lords, and an 'arbiter' investigating a strange case in London. Newman skillfully tangles the three together into a lovely plot that focuses on high society and low treachery. Perhaps more importantly sh...

Having read these books in a bit of blaze and a blur I thought I'd review them together. The sequels to the Hunger Games, the two novels take the world and expand it. The first, Catching Fire, deals with the direct aftermath of the Games as Katniss and Peeta are forced to undertake a victory tour to remind the various sectors of the horror of that's waiting for them. Almost immediately the stakes are raised as the President himself turns up to threaten Katniss with a fate worse than death if she attempts to raise revolution against the Capitol, reflecting the defiance of the final act of the Hunger Games where the she and Peeta pull off a fake suicide pact live on camera. Taken as an act of rebellion by the already discontented districts, defiance and riots against the Peacekeepers (a wonderfully euphemistic name, but so cliched you might as well just call them bully boys or fascists) it's spreading and it seems as i...

It was Edge Lit at the weekend, a small, Derby based, convention that's in its second year. The panels were very good and the convention itself really boosted my determination to write and get more done.  The other effect of conventions like this is that I come away with about a million more books I want to read. No more time, mark you, just a bigger list. This year I remembered something Meg Kingston mentioned at last year's Asylum, that with Kindle's you could get a download a sample and read that to see if you like the book - the ebook version of have a sneaky read in the bookshop, I suppose. With that in mind I grabbed about eight or nine samples ranging from Neptune's Brood, the new Charles Stross to Tom Pollock's The City's Son (which I'd never heard of but sounds like it probably does the magical graffiti thing that's been running around my head for the past year, so boo and yay to that in equal measure). The first sample I've tackled is...

It's been a while since I wrote a review, and I haven't reviewed anything to do with the Post Apocalypse sub-genre since last year, for various reasons (mostly because I haven't actually read anything in the area since last year. A sort out of my bookshelves has brought the Hunger Games Trilogy blinking into the light and I've got round to starting to read them as a result. Having just finished the first book (and started the second), it seems the right time to put down some thoughts. The books are set in a near future dystopia, after a disaster reduces North America to a series of feuding nations that slowly is consolidated into an empire called Panem (which I take to be derived from Pan America - which doesn't matter but I find interesting) after a rebellious war that led to the rulers using weapons of mass destruction against the area east of the Andirondack Mountains; dubbed in the series the Thirteenth Sector. The price of defeat is the brutal Hunger Game...