Review Category: Books

FORMAT: HARDCOVER | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

When a storm arrives at the tourist spot of Willerton Castle, visitors and staff alike find themselves having to take shelter. But it’s more than the rain they’re hiding from; strange creatures are also falling from the sky, vile slimy and tentacled things that show no mercy and exist solely to destroy. Paul Kane’s latest will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a monster movie, or read horror stories like The Mist, but there’s a charm that makes it stand out while paying respect to and toying with everything the reader is expecting.

Our hero is Keegan, a military veteran with a troubled past. Naturally he’s misunderstood, in particular by Gemma, the love interest who finds it difficult to completely trust anyone. Add to this the young boy Dillon, tormented by prophetic visions, and you’ve got what could be a cliched collection of characters. Not in Kane’s hands, though; various points of view allow the reader into the heads of all his protagonists, sharing their doubts and fears, their hopes and dreams. As some of them are picked off, there is genuine sadness to be felt; we never linger too much, but Kane’s tight prose is enough to tell us all we need to know and get the emotions flowing.

The pace never falters either, with wave after wave of increasingly powerful creatures attacking. There are some wonderfully grisly deaths at the various appendages of these monsters, and just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes another, culminating with the biggest and meanest of all. The Storm is a story told with great relish, and the author’s enthusiasm is transferred to the reader; yes, we may have seen these tropes many times before, but they feel fresh here, while at the same being imbued with a sense of nostalgia for similar tales. Above all, it’s huge fun and an absolute delight to read; a superb slice of escapism that is, ultimately, a story of love, sacrifice and courage in the face of adversity.

AUTHOR: ROBERT WEBB / PUBLISHER: CANONGATE/ RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Kate Marsden met her future husband Luke when they were both teenagers at university in York and they were together for twenty-eight years. But Luke has recently died, struck down by an undetected tumour lurking in his brain. Kate, now a tired forty-five-year-old, is devastated, rattling around the disintegrating Clapham home she shared with Luke, knocking back booze, ignoring offers of help from her friends, unable to see the point in going on. She has some damning visual evidence that will incriminate her insufferably smug boss with the unsavoury activities of a notorious Russian gangster but she can’t decide what to do with it. She goes to bed one afternoon, determined to take an overdose when she’s slept off her hangover. But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly eighteen again, back at York on the day she arrived at university but with all her knowledge of her adult life still in her head… and armed with information that could save her future/late husband’s life if he only she can somehow make his nineteen-year-old self listen…

Comedy actor Robert Webb follows up his refreshingly raw autobiography How to Be a Boy with his first novel and it’s a dazzler. The central conceit is clever and concise and commendably vague – is Kate a time-traveller and if so, how has she done it? Or has her mind conjured up an elaborate fantasy in an effort to help her come to terms with her grief? Webb keeps us guessing right the way through his bold, witty, confident novel, populated by richly-drawn, believably realised characters in two very different worlds and his depiction of university life in the early 1990s – the fumbling awkwardness of new friendships, the shabby bars and sticky discos – is achingly accurate and clearly hewn from personal experience. Kate is an unflinchingly-raw figure, outspoken and single-minded, riven by grief and desperate to seize this extraordinary opportunity to change the course not only of her late husband’s life but also her own. Her uni friends are a colourful, extravagant bunch, vividly drawn and instantly recognisable to anyone who has spent time at one of our esteemed higher seats of learning.

Come Again (the title is inspired by a Philip Larkin poem) is a tightly-plotted page turner, an immaculate character study that makes an unexpected gearshift into action/adventure territory in its final section  – a  tonal about-face that some might find a bit jarring, admittedly – that sometimes threatens to upend the entire narrative but actually enables Webb to pull the threads of his story and his characters together in one final spectacular coup de grâce and to deliver an ending that is perfect in its imperfection. Come Again is written with real wit and insight and an innate sense of how to put together a clever, imaginative and innately human story of life, love and grief and little miracles. More please, Mr Webb.

AUTHOR: DAVID SOLOMONS / PUBLISHED BY PUFFIN / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

 “There’s a Minotaur loose on the London Underground!” Only in Doctor Who. David Solomons follows up last year’s The Secret in Vault 13, a lively, Galaxy-hopping romp that occasionally buckled under the weight of all the fan-pleasing continuity reference-crammed into its text, with another breathless scramble of an adventure. This time, it mirrors the globetrotting tone of the most recent version of the show on TV. Largely Earth-centric, Series 12 saw the Doctor and her ‘fam’ fighting aliens and assorted extra-terrestrial odd bods in locations as diverse as London, Australia, 1940s Germany, New York in the early 1900s, Hong Kong, Madagascar, and 19th-century Lake Geneva. Similarly, Solomons sends team TARDIS hurtling across the planet in another breathless high octane yarn. After a prologue featuring the return of a long-forgotten old enemy set on Crete circa 2000 BC, it kicks off in the near future at the Palace of Whitehall in Westminster, before moving to a secret underground base in the Alps, and a crashed alien spaceship at the bottom of the Aegean Sea.

Back in the 1970s, Doctor Who was occasionally given to borrowing from classic myths and legends in its quest to find new ways to tell its adventures in Space and Time. In The Maze of Doom, Solomons has chosen to revisit one of the era’s less well-regarded stories – 1979’s creaky, cash-strapped Horns of Nimon. A massive starship comes to Earth in Crete in 2000 BC and the wreckage becomes a source of interest for the scientist Daedelus and his son Icarus. The repercussions not only of the crash but also the curiosity of those keen to explore and exploit its bizarre and unfathomable secrets reverberate down through the ages. This culminates in a desperate race against time in the year 2028 as the Doctor and her friends confront the rampaging metallic Minotaur and two ambitious 21st-century philanthropists and their plan to provide a new and enduring energy source for the world at any cost.

The Maze of Doom is aimed squarely at younger fans (assuming that there are any younger fans left). Still, Solomons never writes down to his audience, and he’s kept the tiresome references to a minimum too, this time. His story bounces along at a decent pace, is packed with incident, scares, nasty monsters, and a little bit of tame body horror here and there. Once again, Solomons captures perfectly the relationship between the Doctor, Ryan, Yaz (who gets a bit more to do here than she ever does on TV) and Graham, who provides most of the dry, laconic humour. Frothy, flippant stuff, but hugely readable even for those of more advanced years, The Maze of Doom is commendably tightly-plotted. It makes good use of its mythological origins, offering some neat contemporary twists on classic Greek myth while delivering a propulsive, expansive yarn entirely in keeping with the style of the current series. Stubborn old-school fans, as ever, won’t want to touch this with a bargepole but this is a thrilling little read for any youngsters invested in the antics of the Timeless Child and her chums.

A GIRL MADE OF AIR  / AUTHOR: NYDIA HETHERINGTON / PUBLISHER: QUERCUS / RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 3RD

Known to the world as ‘the greatest funambulist who ever lived’ and as ‘Mouse’ to her circus mentor and idol Serendipity Wilson, A Girl Made of Air tells a story about stories in rich, lyrical magic realism. It shows how we are forever running both in search of and escape from the adults who made us what we are, but with a tendency to tell more than to show. Heavy reference to reader, journalist and diary sometimes weighs down the story it frames, entirely consistent with the message about the destructive power of the stories we tell ourselves but still clipping the wings of narrative voice.

The combination of circus magic and magic realism provides a resplendent psychological canvas for the physical thrashing out of trauma, dependency and jealousy in elegant and elaborate imagery. Mouse, our otherwise nameless heroine, is both fascinated by Serendipity’s life and jealous of those who get to share the mysterious adult world with her, while Marina, the alcoholic mermaid mother’s own story – and the lack of love it engendered for her daughter – holds deeper mysteries the closer Mouse gets to the story she has most right to call her own.

Our lives being ‘the thread of narrative we travel along like high wire artists’ (the quote from Angela Carter which opens the story) will only hold as true as the apparent danger, drama and consequence of our actions in the world outside our heads. Yet, when Mouse journeys from England to New York to make peace with herself by making good on the damage done by her childhood jealousy, the characters she meets in her new world are abandoned and moved beyond when it suits her, not suggesting a great change from the self-involved choices of her youth. It’s a lesson we’re told by the heroine she has learned but, in the real world as with a performance onstage, the illusion only fully convinces with action: we believe what we feel we’ve been shown. That said, as a diary-based internal-monologue path towards self-forgiveness, the language is elegant and beautiful and an atmospheric success in itself.

THE COURT OF MIRACLES / AUTHOR: KESTER GRANT / PUBLISHER: HARPERVOYAGER / RELEASE DATE: JUNE 4TH

Kester Grant’s The Court of Miracles is both an alt-history story and a retelling of Les Miserables. Set in a version of 19th century France whose revolution was quashed, Paris is divided between the wealthy elite, the starving poor and the titular Court – a union of the city’s criminals, bound by strict codes of honour. But a cruel tyrant is corrupting the Court, and only a young thief can stop him.

Grant’s tale owes as much to the likes of Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows as it does to Victor Hugo’s magnum opus (though it does take its title from another one of his novels, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), so whether you’re a fan of the tragedy of Jean Valjean or not, there’s much to enjoy from this dark, thrilling tale of what goes on in a fantastical Parisian underworld.

The world-building is a particular highlight, with the reader discovering the various guilds of the Court, its laws and its secret past as the novel progresses. The city itself could have had a stronger presence and felt like a character in itself, considering it’s all about the battle for the fate of Paris, but there’s always room for this to be improved in the follow-ups.

If you come for the world-building and Les Mis connections, stay for the heroine – the highly capable, cunning Nina. A very loose adaptation of Hugo’s Eponine Thenardier, this Nina is far from the lovelorn girl who sings about how Eddie Redmayne doesn’t fancy her. She’s fiery, determined and her motivation – to save her sister from the villain’s clutches – is clear from the off.

Though the references to Les Mis peppered throughout are fun to spot, The Court of Miracles is largely standalone. There are things to embellish and avoid in the sequels – Nina’s storyline could veer into “oh, which boy do I choose?” territory if handled poorly – but, overall, Grant delivers a promising first instalment of a planned trilogy.

THE BOOK OF KOLI / AUTHOR: M.R. CAREY / PUBLISHER: ORBIT / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Mike Carey is no stranger to apocalyptic sci-fi. He is best known for his book (and inevitable movie adaptation of) The Girl With all the Gifts. Thankfully for these current times, Carey’s latest novel (the first in a planned trilogy), is not about a horrific viral outbreak. Instead, it’s about the folly of trusting too much in technology that you don’t understand and taking on too much too soon. A classic sci-fi trope, but given the sort of clever twist we’ve come to expect from Carey.

Set in the far future, mankind has adapted following some sort of environmental apocalypse. Most of the biosphere is actively hostile to mankind. Even trees have to be killed repeatedly (mostly by poison) before their timber can be used. At some point in the past, mankind saved the world at the cost their own future. Conflict is still a thing, but there are so few people left that civilisation is divided into villages, people rarely travel and everything on the face of it seems simpler. However, this is not a simple tale of a world gone strange, instead this is a more measured mystery, bundled with a touch of coming of age drama and some world class weird fiction.

Our hero is Koli Woodsmith, a young man who seeks to a better life for himself and the remains of his family. His home of Mythen Rood owns four pieces of ancient technology, each one, if wielded well, could vastly improve their lot in life. The heart of this story are the complications that arise from people trying to interact with things that are frankly beyond them. The book is told from Koli’s perspective and yes that means he speaks in a strange and futuristic patois, which can slow down the storytelling on occasion. Koli is a sympathetic character and knows just enough to know nothing, making him a fine person to tell the tale.

This is a tale in two parts. The first part focuses on letting the reader explore the world through Koli’s eyes and the problems one would have growing up in such a strange world. Just as the reader gets a handle on things, the author cheerfully changes gears and the book moves from casual to utterly gripping.

The Book of Koli is a fine start a fascinating world and we have high hopes for the next two novels.

THE CONSTANT RABBIT / AUTHOR: JASPER FFORDE / PUBLISHER: HODDER & STOUGHTON / RELEASE DATE: JULY 2ND

Anthropomorphised rabbits notwithstanding, this satirical literary fantasy is very much of our own world. Its wit, wisdom, and filmic physicality will be no surprise to Jasper Fforde fans; it’s elegant, intelligent, enjoyable, and as deeply funny as it is moving.

‘The Event’, an unexplained anthropomorphising phenomenon, has left rabbits living beside humans, sharing our language, size, and intelligence – but not our intolerance for difference. Peter Knox lives a quiet life in an English village with his daughter, Pippa. He has happy university memories of his friend Constance Rabbit whom he failed to ask out; then their adult worlds collide as Connie’s family move in next door, to the shock of vehemently anti-rabbit villagers. Peter’s job, like everything else about village life, is another problem: he’s a Rabbit Spotter, providing information to UKARP (United Kingdom Against Rabbit Population). Peter and Pippa must confront their own tacit racism when they fall for, and finally need to stand up for, their Rabbit neighbours.

While the initial concept’s introduction may be a little heavy-handed, humour and philosophy more than sustain momentum. The sense of having grown up in a small world, and lacking courage or imagination to see beyond it geographically or ideologically, is particularly well played. So is our culture’s embarrassed prejudice when sensing better ecological or moral choices in others.

A victim of its own stylistic success, Peter’s reserve and embarrassment can distance Pippa, Connie, friends and enemies, but that’s consistent with his voice. A likeable but spineless hero is a gamble, but the right choice when here but for the grace of circumstances go us all: Peter is the embarrassment and awkwardness of the well-off and well-intentioned, allowing evil to flourish, recognising their part very late. The rekindling of his friendship with Connie is a satisfying exploration of the importance of doing what you can, how incremental change both of self-awareness and social action really can add up.

Fforde’s exquisite command of how our assumptions about animals have seeped into our language blends with elegant comparisons of how racism does the same. His deftly blended satire, literary fantasy and horror forces Peter, and us, to have the balls to look ourselves in the face, learn about the violence and racism we’re capable of as individuals and species, and note the call of action, whether satirical or natural, to do better.