Category Archives: Book Reviews

Immortal is the third novel by British SF author Nick M. Lloyd, following the excellent and successful Emergence, and his follow-up Disconnected. With his first two novels he crafted a niche of tackling big science themes with a British twist, and Immortal is no different. To be sure, it’s a strange beast. Even a bookContinue reading “Book Review: Immortal by Nick M. Lloyd”

A suite of light and airy dreamscapes from the master. Usually Murakami’s majesterial and delicate prose is coupled with narrative heft. His novels are usually weighty and imperious so as to provide an anchor of substance to the strands of silk he weaves. Here the silk is untethered from the earth, leaving each of theContinue reading “Book Review: Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami”

What you’d expect, really. A fiendishly difficult puzzle which has a deceptively simple reveal at the end, leaving one to think, “Ah, of course, well it was obvious really.” I formulated several hypotheses as to what had happened on Soldier Island, and all were spectacularly wrong. It’s easy to deride Christie for her characters beingContinue reading “Book Review: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie”

As with my review of The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe (LWW), I’ll be reviewing this tale with the feedback of my five year-old daughter in mind, to whom I read the story over several bedtimes during the past few weeks, as well as my own. The first thing to mind is that thereContinue reading “Book Review: The Magician’s Nephew”

It’s pretty well known that middle books in series are tricky customers, providing neither a beginning nor an end to a story in which one is already invested. It’s admirable indeed, then, that The Empyreus Proof is a remarkable book. It’s a book that adds not only depth and profundity to its characters but also its world.Continue reading “Book Review: The Empyreus Proof by Bryan Wigmore”

Over the last few weeks I’ve read LWW to my five-year-old daughter at bedtime, so I’ll be reviewing the book not only through my eyes and understanding of it, but also her reaction to it, seeing as she’s more the book’s target audience than I. And it is, thoroughly predictably, fabulous. Much has been writtenContinue reading “Book Review: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis”

In a sea of dystopian, post-apocalyptic SF and speculative fiction, Seoul Survivors bucks the trend by being a pre-apocalyptic novel. SS focuses on the different reactions people have to the news that a massive meteor, dubbed Lucifer’s Hammer, is going to hit Earth imminently. We follow a gaggle of morally ambiguous characters, primarily based inContinue reading “Book Review: Seoul Survivors by Naomi Foyle”

It’s no exaggeration to say that Crime and Punishment is one of the most staggering achievements in all of literature. I don’t think I can possibly say anything new about C&P which hasn’t been said before, but I will try and express my own thoughts about the book. What I found particularly fascinating was theContinue reading “Book Review: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky”

I’d not read this Hugo winner before, but enjoyed it immensely. It’s anti-war in the most absurd sense, and does its work by juxtaposing the almost surreal horror of the events leading up to the fire bombing of Dresden in WW2 with the banal comings and goings of death. For a book that makes aContinue reading “Book Review: Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut”

The thought occurred to me the other day that Snowbooks acquired two new authors last year. Two, out of what was most likely hundreds or perhaps even thousands of submissions. And it tickles me unendingly that those two authors are me, and Bryan Wigmore. To give that a bit of context, Bryan and I areContinue reading “Book Review: The Goddess Project by Bryan Wigmore”