I can't remember how this truly excellent fantasy novel found its way into our house. We know it was at EasterCon this year, but while my husband claims the credit for buying it, I'm not sure. Maybe I looked at it so often in the Books on the Hill bookstall that I merely think that … Continue reading Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
Sybille Bedford is a glorious writer. She's alluringly readable, and the two novels I have read by her were instantly absorbing. Her prose exudes authority and intelligence, her novels charm, intrigue, persuade and convince. She is magnificent, and I don't understand why she has received so much less attention than, say, Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth … Continue reading Sybille Bedford, A Legacy
Alice thrust this novel into my hands as I began running for my train, since we'd spent too long talking in a café after meeting up in person again after almost eight years. We had become friends in Brussels fifteen years ago or so, where I was an editor and she was a novelist, and … Continue reading Alice Jolly, Between the Regions of Kindness
This is the third in a series (but not necessarily a sequence) of novels about humans who fled a dying Earth and lived for centuries in their spaceships, looking for a new home. The first novel, The Long Way to A Small, Angry Planet, takes place on a spaceship, and the second, A Closed and … Continue reading Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few
Two mini reviews of science fiction and fantasy novels by Canadian writers, of Sylvain Neuvel's Sleeping Giants, and Nicholas Eames' Bloody Rose. Sleeping Giants I enjoyed this a LOT. Partly it was the plot: gigantic metallic pieces of what appears to be a body are found buried in remote, and less remote, locations on Earth. … Continue reading Canadian sff: Sleeping Giants, and Bloody Rose
Sibyl Sue Blue is a sergeant in the police, a mother and a widow. (Or is she?) When she cruises bars in disguise to picks up the information she needs, she manages to look decades younger than she really is with wigs and makeup (and by choosing rather dim men). She adroitly refuses advances from … Continue reading Sibyl Sue Blue
I pre-ordered Madeline Miller's Circe on learning its publication date, and then couldn't bear to read it for months in case it turned out to be not as good as I wanted it to be. I loved loved loved her The Song of Achilles, so I was hoping for great things of this second novel, more … Continue reading Madeline Miller’s Circe
