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Richard Swan
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2026 Thumbnail Review #1 Helm by Sarah Hall I liked the concept. It’s built around the Helm wind in Cumbria, Britain’s only named wind (cf Mistral etc). The author personifies the wind, making it an elemental force (cf Green Man, Max Porter’s Lanny). ...more |
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This, for me, fails Tolkien’s Secondary World test. The reader needs to believe in the world that the author creates for the duration of the novel. As soon as that belief is lost, the creation fails. In this case that happens as early as Chapter 2. We ...more |
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| Not so much a novel as a series of reflections and meditations. The vehicle (sic) for the narrative is the International Space Station, and a single day in the life of six resident astronauts, who orbit the Earth sixteen times in the course of the tw ...more | |
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| 80% of this is really good. We’re in Adam Adamant territory, with a Victorian character (Commander Graham Gore from the 1847 Erebus expedition) brought forward through a time portal to the 21st century. Much of the book is about the relationship betw ...more | |
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| Quirky, as you’d expect from a Japanese novel firmly aimed at the Japanese. It majors on two themes: food, and the place of women in Japanese society. You would think this doesn’t make it an automatic UK bestseller, but it’s everywhere; you can’t esc ...more | |
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| Take the legend of Tam Lin, fuse it with the tale of Beauty and the Beast. Then add some Buffy, a bit of Garth Nix, and a few other ingredients. Stir, and you have Sarah J. Maas. It’s OK, perfectly readable and reasonably entertaining. Just a bit clu ...more | |
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I last read this twenty years ago, when I found it a strange and confusing book. Now I’ve grown up I’ve reached a more enlightened and mature judgment: it’s a strange and confusing book. It's set over decades and is highly episodic, and all the charac ...more |
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The third of the ‘Malay’ novels, and technically a prequel to Almayer’s Folly, this is quintessential Conrad. Here we have all his major protagonists (compare Kurtz): ‘He was not mediocre. Whatever he might have been he was not mediocre. The glamour o ...more |
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| Almost a great novel. It starts really really well – the writing is taut and engaging, the subject (the power of trees) is developed with authority and conviction, the cast list of characters is carefully established. Each is introduced separately, w ...more | |
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Conrad’s second novel (1896), a ‘prequel’ to Almayer’s Folly (see Review #50). A quotation leads us into its significance: ‘The wan light of the clouded morning retired slowly from the courtyard, from the clearings, from the river, as if it had gone u ...more |
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