Bookgeeks

The Bookgeeks Interview: Tad Williams

Reviewed on March 8, 2010

Tad Williams’ debut fantasy series Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sold millions of copies around the world and established him as one of the greatest fantasy writers of modern times. His virtual reality saga, Otherland, [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Brian Thompson

Reviewed on March 3, 2010

Brian Thompson was born in London in 1935 and now lives in Oxford. He has written two award-winning volumes of memoir: Keeping Mum (2006), winner of the Costa Prize for Biography and the PEN/Ackerley Prize, and Clever Girl (2007), longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. More recently, he has written two two volumes in the [...]

Merry Christmas from the Bookgeeks!

Reviewed on December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas to our readers from everyone here at Bookgeeks Towers (which only exists in our imagination at the moment, but one day, will bestride the literary landscape like a colossal… well, you get the idea). We hope you have enjoyed our reviews and competitions in 2009, and we look forward to bringing you much, [...]

Win six signed Robert Rankin books including his newest, Retromancer

Reviewed on December 21, 2009

We have a Christmas treat in store for you this week: to celebrate the release of his newest book, Retromancer, the lovely, festive-spirited people at Gollancz have given us five (as in five gold rings) sets of the following books, ALL signed by the Robert Rankin:

Retromancer (hardback)
Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse (paperback)
Witches of Chiswick [...]

Do you feel lucky? Enter to win Clint Eastwood. Icon [closed]

Reviewed on November 10, 2009

Courtesy of publisher Titan Books, we have three copies of Clint Eastwood. Icon: The Essential Film Art Collection available to win.
Clint Eastwood is not just a man; he is a nameless vigilante, a detective, bare-knuckle boxer, Secret Service agent, and Academy Award-winning director. His laconic one-liners can be heard in numerous languages, preceding the demise [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Dave Simpson, author of The Fallen

Reviewed on October 8, 2009

Ever been held hostage in a dressing room with your parents? Ever been thrown off the bus in the middle of a Swedish forest or abandoned at a foreign airport? Ever been asked to play at one of the UK’s biggest music festivals with musicians you’ve just met who are covered in blood, or taken [...]

Five copies of Fire by Kristin Cashore to be won [closed]

Reviewed on September 28, 2009

As recently reviewed by Jennie Blake here on Bookgeeks, the lovely people at Gollancz have given us five copies of Kristin Cashore’s Fire to give away to those who can answer a not-too-taxing question.
Set in a world of stunningly beautiful, exceptionally dangerous monsters, Fire is one of the most dangerous monsters of all – a [...]

Dust of Dreams (Malazan Book of the Fallen), by Steven Erikson

Reviewed on September 24, 2009

Fans of Steven Erikson should know what to expect by now, and Dust of Dreams, the ninth and penultimate instalment of the monumental, genre-redefining Malazan Book of the Fallen, is in every respect classic Steven Erikson. It’s all here in profusion, from his marvellous strengths – a lyrical, poetically infused writing style that’s a cut [...]

Win limited edition proofs of Stephen Donaldson’s Fatal Revenant [closed]

Reviewed on August 21, 2009

Fatal Revenant, Book Two of “The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,” begins where The Runes of the Earth ended: Linden Avery watches from a balcony while Thomas Covenant and her adopted son, Jeremiah, ride desperately toward Revelstone. But their reunion has vast consequences which she could not have foreseen. Soon she is betrayed by the [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Chris Hannan, author of Missy

Reviewed on August 5, 2009

Chris Hannan’s work as a playwright has been produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican (1991) and by Sir Peter Hall at the Old Vic in London (1997) as well as by the National Theatre of Scotland in its inaugural season (2006).
He often creates big central roles for women.  The Guardian hailed Elizabeth Gordon Quinn as [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Ben Kane, author of The Forgotten Legion

Reviewed on July 31, 2009

Ben Kane was born in Kenya and raised there and in Ireland. He studied veterinary medicine at University College Dublin but after that travelled the world extensively, indulging his passion for ancient history. Now he lives in North Somerset, where he researches, writes and practises as a small animal vet. He is author of The [...]

Competition: Horror Reanimated: Echoes [closed]

Reviewed on July 16, 2009

A few months ago Mathew F. Riley teamed up with Bill Hussey and Joseph D’Lacey to create and collaborate on the Horror Reanimated blog – a celebration of all things horror.
At the end of May we went on a short but sweet Horror Reanimated tour, officially launching the blog, but also celebrating the publication of [...]

Geeks in Print…*

Reviewed on July 14, 2009

We hope you won’t mind normal service being interrupted for a day so that we can give ourselves a little plug.
As you may know if you’ve read our biographies, Simon A and Mathew have day jobs working in the new media industry. We work with several publishers and we’re proud to announce we’ve just completed [...]

Competition: going underground with The Dwarves [closed]

Reviewed on July 4, 2009

Whatever trends may sweep across the fantasy landscape, most fantasy fans cut their teeth on Lord of the Rings, perhaps with a game of Dungeons & Dragons on the side, and many of us would admit that we love to revisit these classic fantasy tropes. Now we can do that, focusing on the doughty and [...]

Competition: win signed copies of the David Simon classic Homicide [closed]

Reviewed on June 10, 2009

David Simon is perhaps best known as the creator the The Wire, widely acclaimed as one of the best TV dramas ever made – but before Simon’s amazing scripts hit TV screens, he made his name by reporting on crime and deprivation in Baltimore, and by writing two amazing books on the subject: Homicide: A [...]

Competition: win a copy of Ben Kane’s The Forgotten Legion [closed]

Reviewed on June 6, 2009

Roman adventures never seem to go out of fashion: from Conn Iggulden to Simon Scarrow, we are spoiled for choice when it comes to tales of the Roman Republic / Empire and its famous denizens. The latest book in the genre to grace Simon A’s reading pile was Ben Kane’s The Forgotten Legion – it’s [...]

Say hello to Bookhugger!

Reviewed on June 1, 2009

Today marks the launch of our new sister site for Bookgeeks.
Bookhugger is a great place for you to find articles, competitions, podcasts, interviews, author panels and much more, from a range of the UK’s most interesting quality publishers. So far, we are pleased to announce we are working with:

Canongate
Faber and Faber
Gallic Books
John Murray
Sceptre

All of these [...]

Competition: win copies of Edge of the World, Kevin J. Anderson’s new fantasy [closed]

Reviewed on May 31, 2009

Kevin J. Anderson has over 16 million books in print, in 29 languages worldwide (that’s a hell of a lot of books). He is the author of The Saga of Seven Suns, numerous X-Files and Star Wars novels, and the co-author of the bestselling Dune prequels and sequels. Now he has turned his attention to [...]

Competition: win copies of Alex Bell’s new novel, Jasmyn [closed]

Reviewed on May 27, 2009

Following on from her spledid debut The Ninth Circle (which our own Simon A called “a great, character-driven, urban fantasy novel”), the fantasy-fiends over at Gollancz have give us three copies of Alex’s second novel to offer to you lovely people as prizes. Jasymn looks set to do for fairytales what The Ninth Circle did [...]

Competition: good things come in threes! [closed]

Reviewed on May 25, 2009

Good things certainly come in threes this week. To celebrate the conclusion of two very enjoyable trilogies, Orbit have given us threes sets of both of them as prizes. Three lucky winners will each receive:

Brian Ruckley’s Godless World trilogy: Winterbirth, Bloodheir and the final instalment, Fall of Thanes, as well as…
Sean Williams’ Astropolis trilogy – [...]

Competition: play your cards right to win the new Jake Arnott [closed]

Reviewed on May 13, 2009

Jake Arnott made his name with his gangster debut The Long Firm, but now he’s turned his hand to a very different period of history in his new novel, The Devil’s Paintbrush. Here’s a taste of what it’s all about.
Paris, 1903. Major-General Sir Hector Macdonald, one of the greatest heroes of the British Empire, is [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Jay ‘Bird’ Dobyns, author of No Angel

Reviewed on May 11, 2009

Jay Dobyns, alias Jaybird, is an ATF undercover agent who infiltrated the Hells Angels motorcycle club from 2001 to 2003. He was offered membership into the gang after faking the murder of a rival Mongols Motorcycle Club member and providing ‘evidence’ of the staged murder to Hells Angels leaders. Dobyns and his partners worked undercover [...]

Bookgeeks Bonus Giveaway: Show Me The Sky, by Nicholas Hogg [closed]

Reviewed on May 3, 2009

Reviewed on Bookgeeks by Simon A last year, Nicholas Hogg’s Show Me the Sky (Canongate) is out in paperback on 7th May, with a shiny new cover, and we have a copy for one lucky Bookgeeks visitor. Simply fill in the form below for a chance to win (UK entrants only).
Closing date is May 10th, [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Marcel Theroux, author of Far North

Reviewed on May 2, 2009

Marcel Theroux is a British novelist and broadcaster, who has written The Stranger in The Earth and The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes: a paper chase for which he won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2002. His third novel, A Blow to the Heart, was published by Faber in 2006, and  his fourth, Far North in [...]

Competition: five signed copies of No Angel by Jay Dobyns to be won [closed]

Reviewed on April 29, 2009

No Angel is the story of Jay Dobyns, an undercover cop who spent several years infiltrating the Hells Angels in Arizona – and came dangerously close to ‘going native’ in the process. Simon A is reading it at the moment, so expect a review on Bookgeeks soon; in the meantime Canongate have given us five [...]

Freebies for new users over at Canongate’s cultural hub

Reviewed on April 21, 2009

Congratulations to Canongate on the official launch today of their Meet At The Gate website – not just a publisher website, but rather a forum devoted to books, film and everything good in the arts.
Andrea See, who is Online Marketing Executive at Canongate (and thus our kind of person) says:
A publisher’s name often doesn’t mean [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: John Wray, author of Lowboy

Reviewed on April 15, 2009

John Wray was born in Washington, DC in 1971. His first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep won a Whiting Writers’ Award. He was recently chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists 2007. Jennie recently enjoyed and reviewed his latest offering, Lowboy, calling it “a thriller, a coming of age novel, and an [...]

Competition: Name that (Angry) Robot

Reviewed on April 11, 2009

Angry Robot, who describe themselves as the new ‘SF&F&WTF imprint from HarperCollins’, are giving Bookgeeks readers a chance to name their rather stern-looking mascot (pictured). The reader who comes up with the winning entry will receive a copy of each of their first 7 books.
So without further ado, point your browser at the Name That [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Giles Kristian, author of Raven: Blood Eye

Reviewed on April 8, 2009

Born in 1975 to an English father and a Norwegian mother, Giles Kristian has led a varied and somewhat unconventional life and admits that this suits him just fine. As the lead singer in nineties pop group Upside Down, he achieved four top-twenty hit records in the official UK sales charts and appeared on countless [...]

Bookgeek link love (3)

Reviewed on April 4, 2009

In which we expound on the joys and bookish wonders that lurk on the incredible Interweb:

Via the Book of Face, we came across Brian Dettmer: Book Autopsies – amazing sculptures crafted from books
Nick Harkaway has released a new story on his blog – read The Stolen Daughter now
Some SF writers talk to the BBC about [...]

Competition: three copies of The Stranger up for grabs [closed]

Reviewed on April 1, 2009

The Stranger by Max Frei is a very good book indeed, a fantastic new take on fantasy – you’ll be able to read our review soon enough, but in the meantime, Gollancz have offered us three copies to give away. The Stranger is the first volume of the hugely successful Labyrinths of Echo series, which [...]

Vote for the Galaxy British Book Awards online

Reviewed on March 22, 2009

You can vote for a several of Bookgeeks’ favourite books of last year in the Galaxy British Book Awards, including The Gargoyle and The Mighty Book of Boosh – and if you vote you will be entered in to a draw to win £200 worth of book tokens.
Vote for the Galaxy British Book Awards

The Bookgeeks Interview: Josh Bazell, author of Beat the Reaper

Reviewed on March 21, 2009

Josh Bazell has a BA in writing from Brown University and a MD from Columbia University. He has worked as a screenwriter, and while in medical school investigated suspicious deaths for the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York. He is currently a medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco, and [...]

The Third Bookgeeks SF and Fantasy Author Panel – “The Others”

Reviewed on March 13, 2009

Welcome to the third Bookgeeks SF and Fantasy Author panel. Once again, we asked some of the leading lights of SF and Fantasy to give us their thoughts on a specific issue that affects them all as both writers and fans – and they said they would! Third time around, here’s what we asked our [...]

Bookgeeks Reading Group Highlights: The Bird Room, by Chris Killen

Reviewed on March 9, 2009

The Bookgeeks Virtual Reading Group got together (virtually, of course), to talk about Chris Killen’s bijou debut The Bird Room; here are some of the best bits of the discussion, including what we talked about when Chris dropped in to answer some questions…
SA: So, let’s get the discussion kicked off with some talking points:
Do you [...]

Happy Birthday to us! To celebrate, we’re giving you presents! [closed]

Reviewed on February 22, 2009

Yes, today Bookgeeks is one year old. Simon A’s first review, of Iain M Banks’ Matter, went live a year ago today. Since then, Simon and Mathew have been joined by some superb additions to the crew, and between them have reviewed about 150 books in a year.
We have moved to our own server, had [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Douglas Jackson, author of Caligula

Reviewed on February 21, 2009

Douglas Jackson’s debut novel Caligula (recently reviewed and enjoyed by Simon A) is the first in a three-book series set in ancient Rome, and centres on the character of Rufus, a young slave. Douglas Jackson was born in Jedburgh in the Scottish borders and now lives in Bridge of Allan. Caligula grew out of [...]

Prize-winning geek

Reviewed on February 8, 2009

We are pleased to report that our very own Mathew F. Riley has been writing more than just book reviews…
With three short stories forthcoming in genre magazines All Hallows, Necrography and Dark Horizons, the exciting thing is that he’s just won the British Fantasy Society’s Short Story Competition, 2008, with the spooky little number, Seems [...]

Competition: Get your pieces of Hate! [closed]

Reviewed on January 30, 2009

Things get out of hand on February 19th when Gollancz release David Moody’s Hater, an awesome vision of Britain as society breaks down amidst an outbreak of a virus that turns normal people into frenzied murderers. Hater follows one family’s struggle to survive in this seething urban landscape. Have a look at Mathew’s review of [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World

Reviewed on January 28, 2009

Nick Harkaway is the author of The Gone-Away World, which we at Bookgeeks thought was rather marvellous and is now available in paperback (and which was recently nominated for the BSFA Best Novel Award).
Nick was born in Cornwall in 1972. He studied philosophy, sociology and politics at Clare College, Cambridge, and then worked in the [...]

Bookgeek link love (2)

Reviewed on January 25, 2009

A few things that have caught our eye and led us seductively in to a secluded corner of the Internet for an intense one-on-one:

Bob Fischer, author of Wiffle Lever to Full!, is reliving 1984 day-by-day, through the diary entries of his eleven year-old self.  With the added commentary, this is a labour of love, and [...]

BSFA Best Novels shortlist 2009

Reviewed on January 24, 2009

The British Science Fiction Association have announced the shortlist for the 2009 Best Novel Award – and you can find reviews of two of the four nominated titles right here on Bookgeeks – Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World and Stephen Baxter’s Flood. Look out for our interview with nominee Nick Harkaway in a few days [...]

Competition: Banish those winter blues with brand new SF and fantasy from Gollancz [closed]

Reviewed on January 2, 2009

It’s January, Christmas is over for another year, and don’t even mention the credit crunch! What you need to cheer you up are some proof copies of some of the exciting SF&F titles that will be hitting the shelves in 2009, courtesy of those warm-hearted people at Gollancz:

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercombie – this [...]

The SF and Fantasy Review Website Meme

Reviewed on December 19, 2008

Time for Bookgeeks to join in with this – a list of speculative fiction and fantasy review blogs started by John at Grasping for the Wind which has grown hugely in the last week as people have added themselves and other blogs to it.

7 Foot Shelves
The Accidental Bard
A Boy Goes on a Journey
A Dribble Of [...]

Competition: Win a limited edition of Tolkien’s Tales of the Perilous Realm, signed by Alan Lee [closed]

Reviewed on December 14, 2008

Well, fantasy geeks, we’ve got a treat in store for you. To celebrate the launch of the new Official J.R.R. Tolkien Bookstore website, those lovely hobbitses over at HarperCollins are giving one lucky reader the chance to win a copy of their new Special Edition of Tales Of The Perilous Realm, signed by the artist [...]

The Bookgeeks Interview: Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody

Reviewed on December 13, 2008

Michael Kimball’s first two novels are The Way The Family Got Away (2000) and How Much of Us There Was (2005), both of which have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. His third novel, Dear Everybody, has just been published in the US, UK, and Canada, and here on Bookgeeks we really [...]

Competition: Win a Faber Diary and get 2009 off to a great start [closed]

Reviewed on December 11, 2008

Whether you’re a design aficionado, or you’re just looking to stay organised in 2009, the Faber and Faber Diary 2009 is what you need, and we’ve got three of them as prizes for anyone who can answer a simple question. Being published as part of Faber’s 80th birthday celebrations in 2009, we can confirm that [...]

Bookgeek link love (1)

Reviewed on December 9, 2008

First in an occasional series of links to other book-related stuff that we have enjoyed and think you might enjoy too:

Austenbook is a clever re-telling of Pride and Prejudice as seen through the Facebook news feed
HarperCollins literary imprint 4th Estate have a new animated short to celebrate their impending 25th birthday – and it’s rather [...]

Take part in the first Bookgeeks Virtual Reading Group – we’ll even give you the book!

Reviewed on December 5, 2008

Reading groups and book groups are all the rage at the moment. Never ones to buck the trend, we at Bookgeeks thought it would be fun to try an online reading group. Here’s how it will work:

Participants will read the chosen book – The Bird Room by Chris Killen, which is published on January 22nd [...]

The Second Bookgeeks SF and Fantasy Author Panel – Science and Magic

Reviewed on December 3, 2008

Welcome to the second Bookgeeks SF and Fantasy Author panel. Once again, we asked some of the leading lights of SF and Fantasy to give us their thoughts on a specific issue that affects them all as both writers and fans – and they said they would! Second time around, here’s what we asked our [...]