Category: Books

Nature Girl is the latest Carl Hiaasen novel, and once again we have the usual set of misfits and ne’erdowells. The novel mainly takes place amongst Florida’s 10,000 Islands in the Everglades. The story is the usual complex affair of inter-twined happenings that, unlikely though it may be, all manage to be in the same…

This is something a bit different from Henning Mankell. I know him mainly… well exclusively really… for his Kurt Wallander novels. Or perhaps those of Wallander’s daughter, who’s lately become a police officer herself in the series. But Mankell has spent and still spends a lot of time in Africa. And that’s where this novel…

I’m really not at all sure how I’ve managed this, but I’d not previously a Neil Gaiman novel. This is a terrible oversight, since I own more than one, and I’ve been reading Gaiman’s blog pretty assiduously for the last two or three years (it’s really good). I did see the TV series of Neverwhere…

You can’t fail to want to read a book called The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril can you? And just look at that cover! This is pulp book set in a pulp era. I should explain a bit more. The novel has two protagonists, Walter Gibson who used to write The Shadow, and Lester Dent who…

The success of Freakonomics was almost certainly the reason that this book got the green light from the publishers. That’s not to say that it’s bad, because it’s not. Seemingly based on a column from the Financial Times, the author attempts to use economic theory to explain day to day things that we experience. For…

Ah. The new evil empire. This book probably isn’t available for £3.73 in your local branch of Tesco (and what is it about that .73 price point?), but you should seek it out in your local bookshop – assuming you still have one. We’ve all heard many of the stories about Tesco, and I’m not…

This is the book that the British Government really didn’t like being published. Indeed I’ve even heard stories of people being stopped from taking it on the plane with them! Nobody stopped me at Stansted with it when I went away with it recently. Murray was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan where he was something…

I didn’t actually know that Z for Zachariah was actually a book. I remember it as a Play For Today back in the eighties (1984 to be precise – ah the power of the internet). I remember it starring Anthony Andrews (late of Brideshead) and not a great deal else. Anyway, my interest was piqued…

Nick Griffiths is a writer on the Radio Times amongst other places, and this is a memoir interspersed with Doctor Who. That sounds a bit strange but it all makes sense. Sort of. He begins with Jon Pertwee and takes us through his early years and Tom Baker. He misses out ther rest, largely, which…

Anyone would have thought I’d stopped reading, given that it’s ages since I’ve written up a book review. Rest assured that’s not true. I’m just a little behind. Look to a flood of reviews over the next few days. You’ve probably seen Mark Thomas on Channel 4. Well not latterly, since his brand of political…

The Steep Approach to Garbadale is Iain Bank’s first non-SF novel in quite a few years – indeed Dead Air was published back in 2002. I’d say that the novel it’s most like is The Crow Road which is probably my favourite Banks novel to date. In place of The Crow Road’s Prentice, we have…