Dan

A frustrating read, this one. Captivating in parts, slow and dragging in others. It's ostensibly the story of a group of avant-garde puppeteers who tour war zones, but it is also furnished with a terrific amount of backstory. There's a theme of duality and the problems of observation as expressed in quantum physics (think Schrodingers Cat) running throughout the book, but it wanders into view for a couple of paragraphs and then submerges for dozens of pages, as if the author has suddenly remembered to drop it back in. It's not a terrible book by any means, but it also holds the seeds of a much better one that hasn't quite come off.

An extremely far future world, a mysterious lead with a remarkable sword....for the first dozen or so pages all I could think of was The Book Of The New Sun. Its not that book, of course, or even really an attempt at it. It turns out to be a proficient science fantasy, notable for some imaginative and well drawn bad guys. I had two biggish quibbles with it, namely that the prose style is unnecessarily opaque (again, not unlike Gene Wolfe, but without the sense I get from his books on first read that there is something there, I'm just missing it), and also that somehow, the balance of my enjoyment was off - I found much more to like in the quiet downtime moments than I did in the parts that advanced the plot or the set piece action scenes. Nevertheless, it's an encouraging debut, and I will read the author's next book.

There are some decent pieces here, but a good chunk of uninvolving filler and King by numbers as well. He seems very concerned here to establish his literary credentials, with the introductions referring to Raymond Carver and the like. As a writer towards the end of his career with an eye on his legacy, he's perfectly entitled to do so, of course, but I liked the delirious love of genre that spilled out of Night Shift and Skeleton Crew a whole lot more.

That's that, then. I'll never again read a Terry Pratchett book I haven't read before. This isn't a bad way to go out. The witches have always been one of my favourite Discworld strands, and this one is positively full of them. It's a long way from his best, and sometimes it's all too obvious that it was at least one draft away from being quite finished, but it's also nowhere near the worst. Pratchett's virtues of compassion and a kind of exasperated love for the common man shine through here. It's a capstone to a fine career, and he'll be missed.

A talking animal story that is anything but cute, this miniature tale of revenge, betrayal and destruction reads like Sam Peckinpah directing The Wind In The Willows. Very fast paced, very violent, very good.

Takes an interesting subject and makes it dull

slight but enjoyable

A series of vignettes of Pacific life and events since 1950. Individually interesting, but there is no through line and it doesn't cohere as a book

Paul Murray's books don't come along very often, but they are worth the wait. I laughed out loud a dozen times at this one.

Lovely art, but a so so story. Good enough to to lure me back for volume 2, but I wasn't blown away.

A distaff version of Boyd's earlier Any Human Heart, but this book is not half as good. The lead character, Amory, is frustratingly passive and many supporting characters and places are left undeveloped. It reads like a sketch for a longer novel, and that's the one I'd rather have read.

The single star is not for the story, which is okay but far from classic Murakami, but for a publishing industry that thinks packaging a slight short story with a few illustrations and library stamps and then charging thirteen quid for it is a decent and reasonable way to treat its customers, not to mention shrink wrapping the cover so you can't see what's really going on when browsing in a bookshop. There is fifteen minutes of reading here, if you're lucky. One to get out from - badoom, tish - the library.

of all the crop of “grimdark” fantasy around in the last ten years or so, these books are by far my favourites. They are indeed grim and dark, but also have engaging characters, a well realised fantasy world (OR IS IT?) and a pleasing strain of black humour. Very good indeed.

Hmmmm. Similar feelings about this to North's last book. It's well done, engaging and kept me reading. But it's just not original. Just as ....Harry August had the same basic idea as Ken Grimwood's Replay, the device at the core of this one is lifted from the movie Fallen. I'm not throwing around accusations of plagiarism - both novels go in very different directions from the works I've mentioned - but the shadow of those earlier works hangs over both books. It's impossible for me to read them without harking back to the other. I'd love to see what Claire North could do with an idea that hadn't been done before.

I really enjoyed Percy's werewolf book, Red Moon, so I was keen to get into this one as soon as I could. Sadly, it turned out to be not as good as that book. There is some great vivid writing, very atmospheric and evocative, but two flaws pull it down. Firstly, the bad guys are just too bad - cartoon villains with no depth or believability. Percy also adopts a deliberately fragmented style, with key events happening between chapters or even sentences, leading me to repeatedly go back over what I'd just read to see if I'd missed something, which I normally hadn't. I suppose it's a device to reinforce the idea of a broken world, but it quickly became distracting. Overall, an enjoyable read, but could have been much better.

This book is many things. There's a lot of JG Ballard in the isolation of the expat compound and the stunning artifice of the luxury hotel. It's a homage to Ira Levin, especially The Stepford Wives and Rosemary's Baby, it's an impassioned rant against the treatment of migrant workers in Dubai, and it's an ecological metaphor, where the theme of children disappearing around the hotel can be read as a commentary on how short term profit seeking ignores the consequences for the future. The ending is maybe a bit too ambiguous for my tastes, but nevertheless it's fun getting there. Well worth a read.

There's some good stuff in here, but too much that is uneven, lightweight, or reads like a novel extract instead of standing on its own. I wish Mr Ahmed had waited till he had a few more stories under his belt and then cherry picked the very best.

I really enjoyed the first two thirds of this. The setting is excellent, the characters engaging and the plot intriguing. Unfortunately it fell away a bit at the end, as some of the balls that had been juggled nicely fell to the ground. Good read though, worth investigating .

Good evocation of wartime London, wrapped up in a serial killer mystery. I don't read a lot of crime fiction, but I've enjoyed every one of Cathi Unsworth's books.

This is proper B movie stuff, and I mean that most approvingly. Scientists meddling with things that Man Was Not Meant To Understand, small town America under threat from mysterious outside forces, a lone drifter who rolls into town to save the day...it's all great fun. Robert Jackson Bennett is fast becoming one of my favourite writers, and this only reinforces that

I can see why this is being compared to David Mitchell - it's a time-hopping multi-viewpoint (kind of) novel, but I'm afraid those comparisons don't do this book any favours. It doesn't have the range of vision or the variety of voice that make his novels so satisfying. That said, it's no sin to be not quite as good as my favourite living writer, and this is an entertaining book. If you're at all interested in contemporary China or her history you will find something to enjoy here. I just wish I'd come to it with slightly lower expectations.

An Asian-American take on American Psycho. It's a fast and fun read, but ultimately disposable. One to get from the library when you need to pass a few hour suit not a keeper

Not great by any means. It is about as niche as genres get, but I do enjoy a bit of lexigraphical horror. Sadly, this is about the worst example of it I've read (if you want some, try Max Barry's Lexicon, or Tony Burgess' Pontypool Changes Everything). The idea that words and language can be literally dangerous is a strong one, ripe for all kinds of use in allegories of ideologies or censorship, but Marcus seems more excited by the idea that children and teenagers' language could be alien to adults. Really. It's like The Blackboard Jungle all over again. God knows what he's going to think when someone tells him about Elvis on the Sullivan show.

Colton Whitehead proved with Zone One that a literary style could work with genre fiction, but this falls well short of that mark.

Bit disappointing this one. At heart it's a pretty average gangland crime novel, with a few pieces of science fictional window dressing. The ending does open things up enormously for further novels - should there be any, I'll dip in but I won't be queuing on publication day.

The story here is nothing special, a mediocre Buffy rehash, but the creative team have worked wonders with the setting. It's a great depiction of Tokyo, possibly the best I've ever seen in Western media. This is it alright, the city I fell in love with, the city I wish I'd never left.