Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining and recontextualising of Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece. Satirical, cutting, compassionate, but also in many ways reverential to the original text. Francis Spufford delivers an amazing alternate history crime novel in Cahokia Jazz. Noir detective styling allows an exploration of a richly imagined alternate America of the 1920s with a…
When John Le Carrè died he was keen to see his literary legacy live on. He specifically asked his family to do so, leading to a number of successful TV adaptations of his work and the publication of his letters (A Private Spy). Based on this wish, the family asked Nick Harkaway, Le Carrè’s youngest…
Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet loves playing meta-textual games. And that’s patently evident in his trilogy of crime novels featuring French police detective Geroges Gorski, of which A Case of Matricide is the third and last. The books are purportedly written over forty years ago by a little known French author Raymond Brunet and merely…
William Boyd is one of the many authors to write a James Bond novel (Solo) and he did so very much in the classic mode. So it might be no surprise that he has set his new venture into the world of espionage, Gabriel’s Moon, in the 1960s. Much of the enjoyment here comes from…
Warlords of Wyrdwood is the second book in RJ Barker’s Forsaken trilogy. It does what all good middle books do: broadens out the world that readers were given hints of in book 1 – Gods of the Wyrdwood – deepens and complicates the relationships between the main characters and antagonists and sets everything up for…
Jo Nesbo’s 2020 book The Kingdom was a violent story centred around anti-hero Roy Opgard and the criminal machinations of Roy and his brother Carl in the small Norwegian town of Os. That book was marketed as a stand-alone crime thriller. And to some extent the story was wrapped up, tragically as expected, by the…
The opening of Tim Winton’s new novel Juice cannot help but put readers in mind of Cormac McCarthy’s seminal work The Road. A man, possibly an ex-soldier, and a young girl travel in a vehicle across a blasted future landscape: So I drive until first light and only stop when the plain turns black and…
In her seventh novel, Rapture, Australian author Emily Maguire takes readers to ninth Century Europe and a story that feels like it could almost be true. That story, of a woman who dresses as a man to enter a monastic order, does have its roots in both reality and myth. Only in this case, the…
Multi-award winning indigenous American author Louise Erdrich has set her new novel The Mighty Red in the heartlands of the Ojibwe people (Erdrich herself is a member of the Turtle Band, a tribe of the Ojibwe). Set on the banks of the Red River in North Dakota, country used for growing sugarbeet but also subject…
Multi-award winning Australian crime writer Candice Fox returns her fiction to Australia for the first time in a few years with the high octane thriller High Wire. High Wire is a little bit Jack Reacher and a little bit Mad Max but all Fox who once again takes some familiar tropes and twists, embellishes them…
