A somewhat tongue-in-cheek look at art and nature, this witty dialogue serves to challenge common views on two seemingly straight forward topics. If there is one thing that constantly strikes me about Oscar Wilde, it’s his sense of humour. There’s a sort of dry sarcasm within this dialogue that I couldn’t help but to chuckle [...]

Set in the contemporary Ukraine, Everything is Illuiminated tells the story of Alex, his Grandfather, and his Grandfather’s ‘Seeing-Eye Bitch’, Sammy Davies Jr Jr. Alex is a translator, and his father runs a company called Heritage Tours. This company allows Jewish Americans to come to Eastern Europe and unearth the stories of their families. This [...]

This book is on the New York Times’ best sellers list and is the first book of The Riftwar Cycle, a series currently 29 volumes long (and growing!). —– The name ‘Magician’ elicits some of the best literary memories I have. It is the start of a series by Raymond E. Feist so good I [...]

I read this book because I have spent three years reading things from ‘the canon’, and felt that I should have got through this one by now. And I’m glad I did, because it’s great! I was actually pleasantly surprised because I had it down as a slushy love story, but at no point did [...]

Bill Masen wakes up after a week of being blindfolded in hospital, only to find that seemingly the whole of London has been blinded by a meteor shower. As he sets off to look for others who have retained their sight, Bill encounters Triffids. These are genetically-modified stinging plants, originally developed for the nutritional value [...]

I bought this because I have seen and liked the Danny Boyle film version (2000), and because it was on 3-for-2 at Waterstones. I was expecting a light little holiday read to dip into now and again when it took my fancy. The Beach is NOT a light holiday read! I finished it in about [...]

Love is a powerful weapon, and when it becomes twisted by jealousy, hatred, and suspicions, it can also do evil. England at the time of Henry VIII’s reign. King Henry is worried, since his wife, Queen Catherine, has not been able to give him a heir, a son; only a girl-child and dead-born sons. When [...]

Ironically, it’s not the ghost stories, monsters or undead that will scare you…it goes much deeper than that. Although historically, horror has provided popular, imaginative stories from Frankenstein to Carrie, i’ts hard to deny that in recent times the critical opinion of the genre has slipped. I mean if the literary world was a classroom, [...]

This novel takes place at the time of the early 1980s, against the context of the troubled relations between Northern and Southern Ireland; the aftermath of the death of IRA member Bobby Sands; as well as a further period of IRA terrorist attacks. What makes this novel crucially different from other works of fiction is [...]

[Buy HERE] Hard science fiction can be a tough sell. I once heard an English professor mock the work of Isaac Asimov as being nothing but stories where scientists in the future sit around and talk about how some particular piece of technology works/worked. A story or novel that relies too heavily on explaining in [...]