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Tsotsi, Athol Fugard Analysis
So these are the ideas which I have been discussing with my class. Tsotsi is set in 1956, give or take, in Sophiatown, a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa. It was written by...
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Hamlet and Women, discussion
Hamlet, perhaps the most famous and most argued over play by Shakespeare, was written between the years 1599 and 1601 as Elizabeth I was reaching the end of her reign. The play features two of the most...
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The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
Ah, Doctor Jekyll I presume! This is one of my favourite concepts for a book and, like Dracula and Frankenstein, such a hugely evocative character and concept. It is intuitively resonant that lurking...
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Black Swan Green, David Mitchell
This is a truly exceptional book! And, before I discuss the book, a truly exceptional reading of it by a chap called Chris Nelson. Now, I don’t know who Chris Nelson is. I have googled his name idly...
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The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Do a book club, they said! It’ll be fun, they said! We’ll call it Addiction to Fiction, they said! Okay, fair enough that’s cool! It won’t take much time, they said. Oh. Right. Of course not. So now,...
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Here Lies Arthur, Philip Reeve
For some reason, I cannot read this title without intuitively reading it in Latin hic iacit Arcturus. I attended a literacy conference this week where Philip Reeve was – for wont of a better phrase –...
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Mortal Engines, Philip Reeve; Railsea, China Miéville
Right, following on from seeing Philip Reeve in person – gabardine clad, animated and inspirational – and having had the question posed to me of how you could not read a book whose opening paragraph is...
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The Way Of Kings, Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson writes high, epic fiction: huge worlds in which the very nature of the earth is as much a character as the creatures that he inhabits it with. In the Mistborn trilogy, the ashen and...
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The Passage, Justin Cronin
Horror is not usually my thing at all. I don’t like blood. I get bored by violence. I get worried by crime writing’s increasing interest in hugely violent bloodied crime scenes and the minutiae of...
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The Shakespeare Curse, J. L. Carrell
The last book I read, The Passage by Justin Cronin, took me a month to read. This book, The Shakespeare Curse, took me 72 hours. That’s not a good sign. Not good at all. I like to lose myself in a...
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World War Z, Max Brooks
My teeth grated together in horror as soon as I listened to this: “World War Zee by Max Brooks!” intoned the narrator. “Zee”? “Zee“?! No!! World War Zed! Despite that, this was a brilliant book to...
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The Girl With Glass Feet, Ali Shaw
There are some books that revel in plot, action and events. Other books – perhaps quieter books – are content to develop narrative: characters and settings, relationships and language. This book by...
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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce
This book has been lurking on my to-read list for a while but has been eclipsed by work, work and work and applying for my own job again and other books and has just slid… Then I lent it to a friend...
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The Bloody Red Baron, Kim Newman
After reading a couple of extremely well-written, moving but rather serious books, picking up The Bloody Red Baron was intended to be a welcome piece of light relief: a bit of fun vampiric horror. Kim...
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Skulduggery Pleasant, Derek Landy
I read Landy’s The Faceless Ones – the third in the Skulduggery Pleasant series – and, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it: a smart and sassy heroine; an enigmatic and intriguing (possibly anti-)...
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Playing With Fire, Derek Landy
Reading this immediately after the first in the series, Skulduggery Pleasant, is interesting: it highlights both some flaws and some developments. In terms of plot, there’s a sense of déjà vu from the...
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Midwinterblood, Marcus Sedgwick
This is my second foray into Marcus Sedgwick’s writing: White Crow, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal a couple of years ago was the other. And this is by far superior, more beautiful, more powerful,...
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Weight of Water, Sarah Crossan
This is an odd little gem of a book. It is a debut novel by Sarah Crossan written in verse – free verse – rather than prose; but deals with the realities of a very credible modern situation. As such,...
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In Darkness, Nick Lake
In Darkness is Nick Lake’s debut novel and an extraordinarily powerful one at that. Set in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, the novel is literally set in darkness: our narrator, Shorty, is...
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A Greyhound Of A Girl, Roddy Doyle
Roddy Doyle is a great writer. He wrote The Commitments which is a fabulous book and one of my favourite films of all time! He wrote Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha which is a fantastic evocation of a ten year...
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