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.
With the third book’s first draft completed and no more deadlines at this point in time, I’ve begun recharging after years of frantic scribbling. The first book I chose to read after coming up for air is a book I wish I’d read before starting writing at all. I’ve read one previous book by Robert…
Byron, Keats and Shelley – check. Vampires – check. Life or death adventures through London, Venice, Rome and the Alps – check. As with the other Tim Powers novels I’ve read (The Drawing of the Dark, On Stranger Tides and Last Call), The Stress Of Her Regard pits a hopelessly outclassed protagonist, here Michael Crawford, against…
Hearing that I hadn’t read any of Gabriel García Márquez’s work, when his death was announced, a friend kindly bought me this, as he had Wolf Hall. Clearly, he knows what’s good for me. This twentieth century classic in the magical realist tradition was my first foray into the realm, unless Calvino’s If On A…
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,…
I recently read, back to back, Ben Aaranovitch’s Rivers of London and Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, the latter a long overdue read for me as a fantasy author. It was because of their similarities that I’m writing about (and recommending them) together.
James C. Scott’s fascinating book argues that we have enslaved ourselves to grain production and the ‘civilisation’ that followed. The inevitable outcome of grain cultivation and sedentism’s propensity to increase birth rates has led to both a patriarchal system that reduces women to breeders and promotes warfare to enslave yet more people to sustain the…