It’s Snakewood launch day :)
Edited 26.08.22
This page contained a link to the soundcloud audio for chapter 1 of Snakewood.
You can get that and more here.
“I was brilliant. Not just your run-of-the-mill brilliance either. I was extraordinarily brilliant.” Patrick Rothfuss has written an astounding debut that I cannot unequivocally recommend. Well, that’s not strictly true. I can, but it’s clear why, despite its assured place in the modern canon, it’s divisive. It’s easy to see why the book is captivating….
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, is a masterpiece. It is one of the best books I will ever read. I know this because I’ve lost count of the times I’ve paused over a page, muttered ‘Fuck off’ at the sheer and dazzling quality and control of the form and the narrative, and then carried on reading,…
This book has no right to be a debut. It’s exhilarating, a tour de force. The Quantum Thief is a heist thriller the threads of which are woven into a sinuous and densely realised future. It’s a challenging read, I’ll admit hard to follow in places, as Hannu Rajaniemi displaces the awesome intelligence and agency…
These two wonderful books, by Michael Cisco and Lavie Tidhar respectively, set me thinking about the role of a protagonist.
Whiteshift, by Eric Kaufman, is an easy book to recommend you read, in part because it is a thoughtful, detailed presentation of some challenging ideas and in part because its subject matter couldn’t (coronavirus aside) be more important. There are aspects to the thesis I don’t accept or understand, but I now accept, more clearly…
Theo Decker, the protagonist of Donna Tartt’s brilliant novel The Goldfinch contemplates the way Carel Fabritius’s painting of the same name has dominated his life, a complicated connection beginning with the shocking opening as his mother is killed in a terrorist bomb blast in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in their hometown of New York. …