Simon Appleby
God Collar, by Marcus Brigstocke
Reviewed on June 27, 2011
Are you there Marcus? It’s me, Simon. I’m pretty sure you exist, because I’ve been to see you recording The Now Show, so there might be a little less existential angst in this review than in your book, but I just wanted to say (assuming that you do in fact exist) how much I enjoyed [...]
The Lost Fleet: Fearless and Courageous, by Jack Campbell
Reviewed on June 24, 2011
Following on from the first book, Dauntless, these are the second and third volumes in Jack Campbell’s military SF series The Lost Fleet, republished this year by Titan Books. They tell the continuing story of the attempt by the Alliance Fleet to get home after its defeat and betrayal by its arch-enemies, the Syndics. By [...]
Diary of a Dog-Walker: Time Spent Following a Lead, by Edward Stourton
Reviewed on June 18, 2011
Based on a fortnightly column in the Telegraph that Edward Stourton wrote for several years, Diary of a Dog Walker is a worthwhile addition to the pet memoir canon. Stourton acquired Kudu, an English Springer Spaniel, while he was still presenting The Today Programme on Radio 4, on the basis that he was mostly out [...]
Leviathan Wakes (Expanse Series), by James S.A. Corey
Reviewed on June 18, 2011
This large slab of space opera is the first in a new series, and marks the debut of James S.A. Corey, which is actually a pen name for the writing combo of fantasy author Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who is George R.R. Martin’s assistant. Abraham has many books to his credit already, but this [...]
Songs of the Earth (Wild Hunt Trilogy), by Elspeth Cooper
Reviewed on June 16, 2011
The first volumes of new fantasy series are not exactly a rarity, so it takes something special to stand out in the current market – and with certain authors pushing the genre in new directions, it takes even more courage to stick relatively close to the classic swords-and-sorcery template. That’s what Elspeth Cooper has elected [...]
The Subterranean Railway, by Christian Wolmar
Reviewed on June 14, 2011
Love it or loathe it, the Tube is a massively important aspect of London’s transport system, hardly ever out of the news for one reason or another (strikes, safety problems, cost overruns, overcrowding). I am a Central Line user who has become acclimatised to overcrowding, delays and poor facilities – but Christian Wolmar’s important and [...]
Kaboom, by Matt Gallagher
Reviewed on May 4, 2011
Based in part on a blog that he wrote while serving in the US Army in Iraq between 2007 and 2009, Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War is Lieutenant (later Captain) Matt Gallagher’s account of what it was like to be in the forefront of the US ‘Surge’, the massive influx of [...]
Winter Quarters, by Alfred Duggan
Reviewed on May 4, 2011
Winter Quarters is a classic piece of historical fiction first published in 1956, written by Alfred Duggan, a prolific author and contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell at Oxford; and in the interests of reading an author who has influenced many modern historical novelists, I thought it would be a worthy read. I was [...]
The River of Shadows, by Robert V.S. Redick
Reviewed on April 30, 2011
River of Shadows is the third volume in Robert Redick’s planned trilogy, after The Red Wolf Conspiracy and The Rats and The Ruling Sea – but, as other writers have discovered, it can be difficult to wrestle a long story arc in to submission, and the series will now conclude with a fourth volume. Another [...]
Chinaman, by Shehan Karunatilaka
Reviewed on April 20, 2011
Sri Lanka is not a place one necessarily associates with contemporary literature, but this former Dutch and then British colony is well known for its cricketing heritage, having become a significant power in the game since its team won the World Cup in 1996 (and recently lost out in the World Cup final for the [...]
Equations of Life, by Simon Morden
Reviewed on April 4, 2011
There’s always room in my life for books like Equations of Life. What’s not to like about a cyberpunk dystopia set in London (the only surviving city in the country), populated by Yakuza gangsters, armed nuns, vicious criminal gangs and genuis hackers? Samuil Petrovitch is a Russian emigre making a living in the London Metrozone, [...]
Odin’s Wolves (Raven 3), by Giles Kristian
Reviewed on April 1, 2011
Odin’s Wolves is the third of Giles Kristian’s tales of Raven, the young Englishman who becomes part of Sigurd’s Wolfpack, a ferocious and marauding pack of Norsemen. Vikings are a popular subject for historical fiction, with no less a writer than Bernard Cornwell making the struggle between King Alfred and the Danes the focus on [...]
The Dead Hand, by David E. Hoffman
Reviewed on March 29, 2011
As Japan faces the most serious nuclear incident that the world has seen since Chernobyl, prompting a global re-evaluation of the safety of otherwise of nuclear power. it seems somehow fitting that David E. Hoffman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Dead Hand is here to remind us of a time when not just nuclear power but [...]
The Wise Man’s Fear (Kingkiller Chronicle 2), by Patrick Rothfuss
Reviewed on March 28, 2011
The long-awaited sequel to Patrick Rothfuss’ debut novel The Name of the Wind is here – and it’s a monster. Weighing in at 994 pages of reasonably close-set type, it’s the kind of book that strengthens your arm muscles as you’re reading. Authors who publish books of such monstrous size have to work extra hard [...]
Sea of Ghosts (Gravedigger Chronicles 1), by Alan Campbell
Reviewed on March 14, 2011
Alan Campbell has a delightfully dark imagination. When he sets out to craft a new fantasy setting, he seems to have the ability to create something highly original which does not, as so much fantasy does, labour under the weight of previous authors’ conceptions. While there are faint echoes of China Mieville’s The Scar in [...]
The Crippled God, by Steven Erikson
Reviewed on March 9, 2011
WARNING! Review contains some spoilers! And so it ends – a series of ten of the most remarkable fantasy tomes you could ever hope to read. Steven Erikson’s masterpiece weighs in at three million words. And I’ve read them. I can’t say I remember all of them, but I have done The Malazan Book of [...]
I Was Douglas Adams’s Flatmate, by Andrew McGibbon
Reviewed on March 8, 2011
Based on the Radio 4 series of the same name, I Was Douglas Adams’s Flatmate is based on the conceit of interviewing someone whose relationship with a famous person was based not on straight friendship or peerdom: thus we have Douglas Adams’s flatmate, Johnny Cash’s tailor, Chet Baker’s last ever tour manager, and Andrew McGibbon [...]
The Ground is Burning, by Samuel Black
Reviewed on March 6, 2011
Nobody could accuse debut novelist Samuel Black of a lack of ambition: for his first outing, set in Renaissance Italy, he has told his tale from the perspective of three famous men, Cesare Borgia, Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo Da Vinci. Black weaves this story over a period of around fifteen years, overlapping and intersecting the [...]
End Game, by Matthew Glass
Reviewed on March 2, 2011
For his second outing, pseudonymous thriller writer Matthew Glass has chosen to tackle the machinations of the international money markets and the realities of international diplomacy. So confident are publishers Corvus in this book that the jacket brashly proclaims “The best thriller you’ll read this year or your money back” – and they mean it [...]
The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, by Jack Campbell
Reviewed on February 21, 2011
Dauntless is the first volume in the six-book Lost Fleet series, now reissued with a fetching new series of jackets by Titan Books. Sitting firmly in the sub-genre of military science fiction, they tell the story of the human Alliance fleet, which is defeated, demoralised and cut off deep in the home space of its [...]
The Afrika Reich, by Guy Saville
Reviewed on February 16, 2011
Guy Saville’s debut novel follows in the tradition of imagining a world in which the Nazis were victorious in World War Two – Len Deighton’s SS-GB and Robert Harris’s Fatherland are big jackboots for Saville to fill, and I am pleased to say that he manages to fill them with aplomb in this, the first [...]
The Living Daylights (Penguin Mini Modern Classics), by Ian Fleming
Reviewed on February 14, 2011
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penguin’s Modern Classics series, they have released a series of 50 dinky, £3 paperbacks by a diverse range of the authors they have been lucky enough to have in their lists over the years – view the full list. This particular volume contains two of Ian Fleming’s James Bond [...]
Shadowheart, by Tad Williams
Reviewed on February 7, 2011
So, Tad Williams’ epic Shadowmarch series, originally a trilogy but now a much classier-sounding quartet, reaches its weighty (722 page) conclusion in the form of Shadowheart, and in it, Williams proves that he has matured and improved as a writer since his previous fantasy series, Memory, Sorrow & Thorn, which held me spellbound as I [...]
WG’s Birthday Party, by David Kynaston
Reviewed on February 6, 2011
David Kynaston’s small but perfectly formed cricket history tells the story of the annual Gentlemen vs Players fixture that took place at Lord’s, and that was one of the showpiece events of the English cricket season. What made the 1898 version of this fixture so notable was that it coincided with the 50th birthday of [...]
Hart of Empire, by Saul David
Reviewed on February 3, 2011
I admit I was somewhat underwhelmed by the first outing of Saul David’s half-Zulu soldier and adventurer George Hart in Zulu Hart. Highly conspicuous problems with dialogue and with the likeability of the central character marred my enjoyment of what should have been a much better book than it was. The excellent news to report [...]
Son of Heaven (Chung Kuo, Book 1), by David Wingrove
Reviewed on January 28, 2011
The Chung Kuo series was originally published between 1989 and 1999, in 9 volumes – but with an apparently rushed ending that author David Wingrove was unhappy with. Now with a new publisher (Corvus), two new prequel novels, a planned series of 20 (yes, 20) volumes in total and a release schedule taking us through [...]
The Hammer, by K.J. Parker
Reviewed on January 24, 2011
The third of a triptych of standalone novels (the previous two being The Company and The Folding Knife), shows K.J. Parker once again doing what she does best: fantasy fiction that’s much more about the fiction than it is about the fantasy. Set on a distant peninsula, Parker shows that she understands the effects isolation [...]
The Black Prism (Lightbringer 1), by Brent Weeks
Reviewed on January 18, 2011
The emergence of so many new and boundary-testing fantasy authors in the last ten years or so – Steven Erikson, Joe Abercrombie, K J Parker to name but three – as well as the development of urban fantasy as a genre, has as times felt like it is in danger of making traditional, swords-and-sorcery high [...]
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Reviewed on January 1, 2011
Hugo and Nebula award-winning since its publication in the US last year, The Windup Girl is now available in the UK – and it’s definitely been worth the wait. Combining dystopian speculation about the future of the world following the exhaustion of fossil fuel supplies, and a storyline that encompasses genetically engineered beings, political intrigue, [...]
The Thick of It: The Missing DoSAC Files, by Armando Iannucci et al
Reviewed on December 20, 2010
Armando Iannucci’s deadpan political satire The Thick of It is, without a doubt, the 21st century’s answer to Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay’s wonderful Yes, Minister, and like that immortal series it has now spawned a book. The good news is that just like the Yes, Minister diaries, which adapted the scripts and introduced elements [...]
Kraken, by China Miéville
Reviewed on December 9, 2010
Tales of hidden London are an established sub-genre within urban fantasy – from Neil Gaiman’s seminal Neverwhere to offerings like Kate Griffin’s A Madness of Angels and China Miéville’s own debut King Rat and his more recent Un Lun Dun. However, with Kraken, it’s possible that he’s written the definitive ‘alt-London’ novel. Many of the [...]
The Legion, by Simon Scarrow
Reviewed on November 30, 2010
For the tenth instalment of his Macro and Cato series of Roman historical novels, it’s destination Egypt for Simon Scarrow. Our heroes have come a long way from their beginnings on the German frontier: Macro is still a Centurion but Cato, with his intelligence and diplomatic skills, has now gone from being his underling to [...]
The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie
Reviewed on November 19, 2010
Whatever happened to the heroes?, asked the Stranglers – well, one thing’s for sure, they didn’t make it as far as Joe Abercrombie’s latest substantial slice of fantasy, because, you see, the Heroes of the title are a group of standing stones plonked on a hill in the North. It’s the kind of hill that, [...]
Lightborn, by Tricia Sullivan
Reviewed on November 9, 2010
Tricia Sullivan’s Lightborn initially appears to be a new twist on the zombie novel: in a near-future society, technology has been developed which allows neural stimulation and recreation via patterns of lights watched by the user. These Lightborns, colloquially known as Shine, are an accepted part of society, being used for pleasure, for learning new [...]
Return of the Crimson Guard, by Ian Cameron Esslemont
Reviewed on October 28, 2010
The second novel by Ian Cameron Esslemont, co-creator with Steven Erikson of the world chronicled in the Malazan Book of the Fallen, gives considerably more of an idea of what Esslemont is capable of than his first novel, Night of Knives. Where that book was relatively short and simple, describing events over the course of [...]
Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks
Reviewed on October 7, 2010
Surface Detail is the eighth of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels – Banks likes to make his readers wait, as its predecessor, Matter, was the subject of my first Bookgeeks review (indeed, the first review on Bookgeeks), back at the start of 2008. There has never really been such a thing as a ‘typical’ Culture [...]
The SS: A New History, by Adrian Weale
Reviewed on September 28, 2010
The SS as an organisation is in many ways synonymous with Nazi Germany – while the brownshirted SA may have provided Hitler’s muscle during his ascent to power, their leadership was brutally suppressed and they had little impact on the actual period of Nazi rule, especially by comparison with the SS. Originally conceived as a [...]
I Shall Wear Midnight, by Terry Pratchett
Reviewed on September 26, 2010
As someone who started reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, as a logical progression from Douglas Adams, I confess I have always found the distinction between his ‘normal’ and young adult books slightly hard to understand. The ‘normal’ books contain no sex, no swearing and only cartoon [...]
A Loyal Spy, by Simon Conway
Reviewed on September 23, 2010
Like many things in life, it’s possible to stop thinking about the real meaning of the labels that we apply to the stuff that surrounds us – and in my case this is certainly true of the notion of the thriller novel. In my younger days I hoovered up Tom Clancy, Jack Higgins and Alistair [...]
Warrior of Rome: King of Kings and Warrior of Rome: Lion of the Sun, by Harry Sidebottom
Reviewed on September 15, 2010
The second and third instalments of historian Harry Sidebottom’s historical series continue in the same vein as the first book, Fire in the East. At the start of King of Kings, the barbarian-turned-Roman Ballista and his retinue are fleeing the fall of Arete, following the betrayal of the city to the Persians at the end [...]
Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes
Reviewed on September 10, 2010
For a conflict that has made such a huge impression on film and video games, the Vietnam War has not made the equivalent impact on literature: to my mind, there is no Vietnam equivalent to For Whom the Bell Tolls or Catch-22. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American explored the origins of the war, but the [...]
The Temporal Void and The Evolutionary Void, by Peter F. Hamilton
Reviewed on September 3, 2010
With the second and third volumes of his Void Trilogy, set in the same universe as his two-book Commonwealth Saga, Peter F. Hamilton makes it clear why he is one of the paramount writers of space opera working today. Hamilton’s books have a tendency towwards high page-counts, and the two being reviewed here are no [...]
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, by Christopher Andrew
Reviewed on August 20, 2010
MI5, Britain’s Security Service, tasked with counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, hit the headlines recently when their work in Northern Ireland was criticised. Public attention for MI5 is a relative rarity and undesirable, on the whole, so it’s perhaps surprising that they invited an independent historian to write an authorised history of their work to celebrate their [...]
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin
Reviewed on August 6, 2010
Henry Ford is famous for the invention of the production line, for creating a motoring revolution that transformed America, and for saying “history is bunk” and “you can have any colour as long as it’s black”. What he’s definitely not known for is paying millions of dollars to establish a rubber plantation in the Amazon [...]
Black Lung Captain – A Tale of the Ketty Jay, by Chris Wooding
Reviewed on August 4, 2010
In the second of Chris Wooding’s series of standalone adventures featuring the dysfunctional crew of the barely functioning aircraft the Ketty Jay, we are treated to more of the same kind of page-turning, larger-then-life techno-piratical adventures as we experienced in the first book, Retribution Falls. Having assembled a crew who could just about tolerate one [...]
Shoedog, by George Pelecanos
Reviewed on July 31, 2010
George Pelecanos is a writer with a considerable body of work under his belt, a chronicler of urban crime who has made his native Washington D.C. the setting for most of his work – but I confess I would not have picked up Shoedog were it not for his involvement in immortalising the life of [...]
Rockers and Rollers: An Automotive Autobiography, by Brian Johnson
Reviewed on July 29, 2010
Brian Johnson, frontman of perennial rock’n’roll favourites AC/DC is, as anyone who has seen his appearance on the BBC’s Top Gear not so long ago knows, also a car fiend, a racer through and through, so the emphasis in this autobiography is firmly on the automotive side of his existence. AC/DC get plenty of mentions, [...]
Warrior of Rome: Fire in the East, by Harry Sidebottom
Reviewed on July 17, 2010
In to the cut-throat, blood-soaked arena that is the world of so-called swords and sandals historical fiction comes Harry Sidebottom – gasp as he beheads an opposing novelist who was armed only with a trident and a net; swoon as he eviscerates a ravenous lion; marvel as he hacks his way through the throng. Fire [...]
New Model Army, by Adam Roberts
Reviewed on July 16, 2010
Adam Roberts can be relied upon to never be predictable in his choice of subject matter: his previous two novels were a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels and a tale of alien invasion and cover up in the Soviet Union. With New Model Army, he turns his attention to the profound effects that modern Internet technology [...]
The Fields of Death (Revolution 4), by Simon Scarrow
Reviewed on July 10, 2010
The culmination of Simon Scarrow’s Revolution series sees things brought to a close in suitably epic style. There are no surprises about the scope of the story: Wellington’s campaigns in Spain, culminating in the invasion of France; Napoleon’s ill-judged invasion of Russia, abdication and return; and to round it off, the bloody Battle of Waterloo, [...]
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Mark Oldfield
Mark Oldfield has worked in criminological research for over 20 years. He has a PhD in Criminology from the University of Kent and has carried out research in the areas of risk assessment and prediction and as well as evaluative research on policing, prisons and probation. He has also taught in various Universities on research, crime and criminal justice.
