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…
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…
Epistolary novels are always a bit of a tightrope. How do you explain, particularly in this day and age, why people are writing lengthy letters to each other with pen and paper. In her latest novel The Sleepwalkers, Scarlett Thomas walks this tightrope, mostly successfully, to deliver an unsettling, gothic mystery that holds its secrets…
There’s only one word to describe award winner crime writer Chris Whitaker’s new novel All the Colours of the Dark: epic. It is an intimate epic, focussing on two characters from a small town in the United States. But the narrative ranges over forty years of their lives and the investigation into a series of…
Joseph O’Connor fictionalises a true story from World War 2 in the first of a planned trilogy, My Father’s House. The tale revolves around the work of Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty who used his position at the Vatican, a neutral territory within Rome, to help Allied prisoners of war escape. The tale involves the recollections…
Crooked Seeds by Booker-prize longlisted author Karen Jennings is a dark indictment of white South Africa and the legacy of apartheid. Centred around an irredeemably self-centred character, Jennings takes readers into a possible future South Africa while also interrogating the sins of the past. The opening of Crooked Seeds clearly draws on the recent South…
Katy Massey draws on her own family history as the basis for her downbeat and gritty debut crime novel All Us Sinners. The book is set in Leeds, in the North of England, in the late 1970s, during the reign of terror of the killer who came to be known and The Yorkshire Ripper, All…
