The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro begins as a tiny tale set in a drab village that amounts to little more than huts huddled around a rabbit’s warren of cave dwellings but grows into an epic tale set in the ashes of King Arthur’s reign. The land is quiet now after the decades of battle between the Saxons and the Britons but, while the peace is a welcome one, it ... Read More...
Broken Monsters
Lauren Beukes covered creepy in her debut The Shining Girls but it doesn't compare to just how mess-with-your-mind she gets in her latest, Broken Monsters. As if Detroit hasn't taken enough hits in the last decade it is now the setting for this scary tale of an amorphous monster creating gruesome art out of mixed human and animal body parts...taken from living subjects. ... Read More...
The Bone Clocks
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks begins in 1984 with sixteen-year-old Holly Sykes running away from home in a fit of rage over her mother’s refusal to let her move in with a man she loves and then finding that man in bed with her best friend. While on the road Holly meets a very old woman who asks her if she will give her refuge if she needs it. She says yes and unknowingly ... Read More...
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, ... Read More...
The Book of Life
Deborah Harkness returns with the final novel in the All Souls Trilogy. The Book of Life begins with Diana and Matthew's return to Sept-Tours, Matthew's ancestral home. Harkness wastes no time in assembling the almost dizzying and incomprehensible cast of Matthew's family- both those related by birth and those created by blood. Thankfully, her skill at weaving the family's ... Read More...
Dominion: A Novel
What-if books can go terribly wrong. They require a great deal of thought, generally because they are written about a time when a change in events would bring a massive change to history. In the novel Dominion, C.J. Sansom writes about Great Britain in the 1950s if it had not declared war on Germany but had held to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s desire for appeasement. The novel ... Read More...
