Tag Archives: review

Justin Cronin’s ‘The Passage’

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the passageWhen the book opens, the US government is exploring new ways to create the ultimate fighting weapon. The discovery of a mysterious virus found in the deepest parts of a remote jungle, which seems to render its carriers impervious to disease and to give them extreme strength, seems like it may offer a solution. But experiments on test subjects straight from death row soon take a disastrous turn.

Skip forward a hundred years and the catastrophic consequences of these experiments become abundantly clear. Darkness brings death in the form of virals – infected humans that roam the country, moving like lightening and killing or turning every living thing in their path.

A small pocket of survivors live in the First Colony. Their entire survival relies on their ability to guard their high walls against the virals, and on the bright lights that protect against the night. The people living in the colony are several generations down from the original survivors, and the old world and the promise of a rescuing army have been changed into the stuff of myth and legend. Continue reading →

A detective story with a difference

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Rivers_of_LondonWhen PC Peter Grant stumbles across a key witness with a first-hand account of a violent crime, he sees it as an opportunity to save himself from the tedium of a career in paperwork. The only problem – his witness is a ghost.

As a result of this encounter with the supernatural, Peter is swiftly recruited into a special unit within the Met police – designed to help solve the cases where fact and reason have failed. He soon discovers a whole new side of London policing, complete with rivers that walk on two feet and ghosts that steal people’s faces.

Ben Aaronovitch’s creation has all the lure of the paranormal combined with the mystery, suspense and action of the crime novel. Continue reading →

Classic dystopian fiction

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In a not so distant future, the world has died. Nothing grows. The supply of tinned or preserved food is almost gone. Most of the people are dead. The ones that have survived are often more dangerous that the hazardous world they live in, and armies of ruthless cannibalistic murders roam the grey and lifeless land.

The RoadIn this world, one man and his son are walking the road. Scratching for every scrap of food and often near death, they make their way towards the coast, hoping to find the survivors. The man knows they won’t survive much longer in the open, and they live in constant fear of people taking their meagre supplies in a place where a dry blanket could makethe difference between life and death.

The man’s whole reason for being lies in keeping his son, the one speck of light left in his world, alive to see another day.

We never find out the names of the man and his son. However, the fact that the book is confined to just their small sliver of the world and their experiences of the long grey road means that we get to know them intimately. It’s intense and sometimes it’s quite claustrophobic, but it’s also incredibly gripping. Continue reading →

Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Sisterland’

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SisterlandIdentical twins Violet and Kate have grown up as two halves of a whole. With an often absent father and a mother suffering from some sort of implied depression, they are left to find their way through their adolescence together. But Violet and Kate also have a physic gift, with an uncanny ability to see what isn’t there and to predict what’s coming. As children, this gift binds them together, but it also drives others away.

As the twins grow up, their lives take very different directions. Kate changes her name and does everything she can to blend in and conform. She aims to be the model friend, mother and wife. She sees her psychic abilities as the root cause of everything bad that has happened in her past, and she does all she can to supress them. On the other hand, Violet embraces her differences. Exuberant and eccentric, she makes a living as a psychic and has no inhibitions when it comes to embracing life and exploring her sexuality.

Their wildly different choices have been the cause of strained relationships between the sisters their whole lives, but they are still linked by the unbreakable bond of sisterhood. When Violet predicts a catastrophic earthquake and is catapulted into the public eye, Kate is drawn back into the world that she hoped to have left behind. As the date of the event draws near, tensions rise. For Kate, the cracks in the life she has built will be revealed. For Violet, her life is about to be put under a microscope by the media. Continue reading →

Hannah Kent’s ‘Burial Rites’

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Burial RitesSet in rural Iceland in the late 1820’s, ‘Burial Rites’ is based on a real life double murder case. In the absence of places to detain criminals for any length of time, the convicted murderers are each sent to stay with different families across the area.

One of these prisoners is Agnes. The family she is assigned to rails against her presence, refusing to call her by name, and the youngest daughter in particular is shamed to have her living under their roof. In the months leading up to her execution, Agnes internally rages against her conviction. Gradually, through Agnes’ stories to her priest, and eventually to the family themselves, the truth behind the death of her two alleged victims is uncovered.

As Agnes tells her story, the family also get to know her and start to accept her presence, forcing them to question their prejudices. This asks the larger question of whether the legal system can be trusted to make the right decision Continue reading →

A vibrant assault on the senses

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Frog Music‘Frog Music’, from Emma Donoghue, takes us back to the brothels and backstreets of San Francisco, and to the sweltering heatwave and smallpox epidemic that characterised the summer of 1876. The novel opens with the murder of Jenny Bonnet. The only other person present at the scene of the crime is her friend Blanche, one of the star performers at the infamous House of Mirrors bordel.

The rest of the novel flits back and forward in time. In one narrative stream, we learn how Blanche and Jenny first met, and how their chance meeting and friendship may have led to the shooting. In the other strand, we follow Blanche’s wild search for the guilty party after Jenny’s death.

Famous for her ability to capture the hearts, minds and bodies of men, Blanche lives with Arthur – her ‘maque’, her man or her pimp depending on how you look at it – in a Chinatown apartment, performing twice a week in a titillating dance show of risqué burlesque. We quickly learn that Blanche’s baby son is being raised out of town, and is seen by his parents only rarely, allowing them to carry on with their own lifestyles without worrying about his upbringing.

But when Blanche happens to run right into the infamous Jenny Bonnet, it’s the catalyst that will change everything. Continue reading →