Kim Miller
What an extraordinary piece of literature this is. Flanagan has written a line of history that starts back with H.G.Wells and The War of the Worlds, through to the initial thinking and development of the atom bomb, through his father's experience of being a POW in Japan working in brutal conditions until Hiroshima, and reaching back through his family history to the genocidal war against the original people of his homeland Tasmania.
His prose becomes arresting and in places I was in tears. The novel has time jumps between the things I mentioned earlier as he weaves a family history through some of the most momentous elements of the last hundred years and beyond. The consequent blending of the lives of so many people forms a mesh of humanity in which he feels uncomfortably at home.
What an extraordinary piece of literature this is. Flanagan has written a line of history that starts back with H.G.Wells and The War of the Worlds, through to the initial thinking and development of the atom bomb, through his father's experience of being a POW in Japan working in brutal conditions until Hiroshima, and reaching back through his family history to the genocidal war against the original people of his homeland Tasmania.
His prose becomes arresting and in places I was in tears. The novel has time jumps between the things I mentioned earlier as he weaves a family history through some of the most momentous elements of the last hundred years and beyond. The consequent blending of the lives of so many people forms a mesh of humanity in which he feels uncomfortably at home.
Mix Oliver Twist and Fagin in with an adolescent crew from Ocean's Eleven and put them into a canal city like pre-medieval Venice and have them set up a series of sophisticated heists. Pepper the story with the most imaginative swearing and cursing, black humour as they wound and main their enemies, and hide it all under the guise of a temple priest with his altar boys taking donations with which to help the poor and needy.
I've only recently heard of this twenty year old novel. It's a hoot and so well told that the author took me into places in my head that meant there were days I needed recovery time.
Locke starts out as a five year old waif in a den of child thieves. Two years later he's so good at planning heists that his master has to sell him on as he can't keep him under control. With his new master he learns to be a 'Gentleman Bastard', a surprisingly well educated con artist, and alongside his three companions they take aim at relieving the gentry of their wealth. But a new name is heard in the city as a powerful adversary slowly emerges from secrecy and many crime families fall to his will.
Locke and his friends are faced with impossible choices as disaster falls upon their shared lives. The new enemy rises and old alliances fall, but it's not until Locke finds out what this enemy has planned that he realises the danger he is in.
Mix Oliver Twist and Fagin in with an adolescent crew from Ocean's Eleven and put them into a canal city like pre-medieval Venice and have them set up a series of sophisticated heists. Pepper the story with the most imaginative swearing and cursing, black humour as they wound and main their enemies, and hide it all under the guise of a temple priest with his altar boys taking donations with which to help the poor and needy.
I've only recently heard of this twenty year old novel. It's a hoot and so well told that the author took me into places in my head that meant there were days I needed recovery time.
Locke starts out as a five year old waif in a den of child thieves. Two years later he's so good at planning heists that his master has to sell him on as he can't keep him under control. With his new master he learns to be a 'Gentleman Bastard', a surprisingly well educated con artist, and alongside his three companions they take aim at relieving the gentry of their wealth. But a new name is heard in the city as a powerful adversary slowly emerges from secrecy and many crime families fall to his will.
Locke and his friends are faced with impossible choices as disaster falls upon their shared lives. The new enemy rises and old alliances fall, but it's not until Locke finds out what this enemy has planned that he realises the danger he is in.
A fast paced comedy that lives up to it's wacky title. Albert has a remote island off the south west tip of England but one day a Russian ship crashes itself on one side. The ship can't be removed and it's full of top secret stuff so Russia buys one half of the island. This creates an international diplomatic crisis so America buys the other half. Two military bases bristling at each other.
It's not long before the troops on both sides realise that their biggest shared problem is that they ran out of booze yesterday. In the traditions of McHale's Navy and MASH they pool resources and make their own.
The story is peppered with attempts to drop supplies by parachute, a visit from a US senator up the re-election, a voluptuous entertainer, the Russian tradition of throwing the shot glass into the fireplace after a toast until none remain, and it all builds to the equally crazy ending.
A fast paced comedy that lives up to it's wacky title. Albert has a remote island off the south west tip of England but one day a Russian ship crashes itself on one side. The ship can't be removed and it's full of top secret stuff so Russia buys one half of the island. This creates an international diplomatic crisis so America buys the other half. Two military bases bristling at each other.
It's not long before the troops on both sides realise that their biggest shared problem is that they ran out of booze yesterday. In the traditions of McHale's Navy and MASH they pool resources and make their own.
The story is peppered with attempts to drop supplies by parachute, a visit from a US senator up the re-election, a voluptuous entertainer, the Russian tradition of throwing the shot glass into the fireplace after a toast until none remain, and it all builds to the equally crazy ending.
A madcap race through 1990s Boston as two private detectives get sucked into a political scandal that breeds a gang war, and all the while trying to stay alive. Lehane's debut novel and a racy easy to read action story.
Two politicians hire Patrick Kenzie to find a cleaning woman who has taken documents from their office and disappeared. They want the woman found and they want the documents back. By the end of the novel there must be fifty dead bodies (we lose count) in the city morgue and gallons of blood draining into the street.
The dialogue is the black humour of noir detective stories of the era, the sort where the detective looks out through the venetian blinds in high contrast black and white TV shows. There's a Porsche, a psycho guy who, luckily, is on their side, and a cast of coppers doing copper type things. All in all a fun read for a long wet afternoon.
A madcap race through 1990s Boston as two private detectives get sucked into a political scandal that breeds a gang war, and all the while trying to stay alive. Lehane's debut novel and a racy easy to read action story.
Two politicians hire Patrick Kenzie to find a cleaning woman who has taken documents from their office and disappeared. They want the woman found and they want the documents back. By the end of the novel there must be fifty dead bodies (we lose count) in the city morgue and gallons of blood draining into the street.
The dialogue is the black humour of noir detective stories of the era, the sort where the detective looks out through the venetian blinds in high contrast black and white TV shows. There's a Porsche, a psycho guy who, luckily, is on their side, and a cast of coppers doing copper type things. All in all a fun read for a long wet afternoon.
Put a bunch of people together under a weird pretext and it won't be long before they start killing each other. This book gets likened to Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None', but it's more than a murder mystery. PKD leads us down one blind alley after another, scattering a few bodies along the way, and all the while he's laughing at us for following the wrong clues.
Fourteen members of an interplanetary mission set up a base station and find themselves isolated. They come from disparate areas of life, almost as if PKD wanted to put one of each of several tropes together - the economist, the doctor, the psychologist, the scientist and his angry wife, the seductive blond, the youthful thug, just the normal bunch of circus clowns who would soon be at each other's throats.
But then he mixes in a weird religion made for space travel where prayers are sent by radio to planets with a god-consciousness. And strange things are found on this isolated planet that don't make sense, including a building that each person sees the identifying sign on the door as something different.
The danger increases, the bodies pile up, some people disappear, and as things get more and more frantic it looks like we can see what is lying underneath the whole thing. But then he pulls another PKD trick on us, and then another one, before we realise how well we've been hoodwinked.
Put a bunch of people together under a weird pretext and it won't be long before they start killing each other. This book gets likened to Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None', but it's more than a murder mystery. PKD leads us down one blind alley after another, scattering a few bodies along the way, and all the while he's laughing at us for following the wrong clues.
Fourteen members of an interplanetary mission set up a base station and find themselves isolated. They come from disparate areas of life, almost as if PKD wanted to put one of each of several tropes together - the economist, the doctor, the psychologist, the scientist and his angry wife, the seductive blond, the youthful thug, just the normal bunch of circus clowns who would soon be at each other's throats.
But then he mixes in a weird religion made for space travel where prayers are sent by radio to planets with a god-consciousness. And strange things are found on this isolated planet that don't make sense, including a building that each person sees the identifying sign on the door as something different.
The danger increases, the bodies pile up, some people disappear, and as things get more and more frantic it looks like we can see what is lying underneath the whole thing. But then he pulls another PKD trick on us, and then another one, before we realise how well we've been hoodwinked.