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The Beached Ones is a ghost story that breaks a lot of rules, plays with your expectations and keeps surprising you. Three intertwining love stories weave through the whole book – Daniel’s love for his decade-younger brother, his love for a fragile, troubled girl, and his love of motorcycles. He would die for any of them. And he does.

It’s a book that tosses the reader from one emotion to another. Outrage and sadness at Daniel’s troubled upbringing, unravelling via flashbacks throughout the book. Bewilderment as we see a world between worlds through his eyes. Grief and sadness at some of the decisions that the characters have to take, frustration, curiosity, fear…. It’s also a book that made me ask existential questions - about what it is to be alive or dead, to have agency, to be visible, to be known. I found myself thinking about other invisibilities – of age and class and social position – and of the liminal worlds inhabited by people who are discounted. I found myself thinking about what it is to love someone, when you can’t see them, touch them, be with them. And about what a small thing life is, what a wafer thin boundary there is between existence and non-existence.

Issues of suicide figure at various points in this story, and this isn't a book to read if you are battling those issues in your own life or in relation to someone you love. But all the same, it made me think about the power involved in an act of self-extinction, the terrifying energy unleashed by even the loneliest of suicides.

The book is exquisitely plotted. There are twists throughout, and I didn’t see them coming. Events and relationships cross in unexpected ways that always make absolute sense as one reaches their conjunction. Nothing feels forced in this story, despite the labyrinthine contortions that it actually accomplishes.

This is a truly beautiful book.

This unexpected mashup takes our hero on a journey from cattle-rustling to alien-whispering, via a shedload of military and political conspiracy. Oh yes, I know, it’s a presposterous confection - but I don't care. The clever scene setting, the witty nods to 1940s detective stories, the meticulous historical detail and the shameless co-option of actual people and events makes the willing suspension of disbelief quite delicious. A unique little book – like nothing I’ve read before. I read it in a day; it never displeased me, and it made me laugh. And on top of everything else, it answers a question that has always puzzled me: "Las Vegas? Why?"

An extra star for that.

A beautifully crafted though massively complicated debut to what looks like a rolling series. I worry when I write something like this, because if the author has thrown so much complication at the first book in a series, one wonders A) Is there anything left for the next one? B) to top the first one, is the next one simply going to get labyrinthine to the point of lax and undisciplined (like the later Harry Potter volumes did, I would suggest …)

But that’s just speculation nagging me. And even if the jury is out for me about the rest of the series, there is a huge amount to praise in this first volume. It is certainly well done – well written, well plotted, a world well-fleshed out. It’s a genre novel in pure culture – all the familiar components, shaken up and reassembled – but genre novels have huge appeal, and there was enough that was original in this one that I wasn't left feeling I had read the book before.
I quickly believed in the world that Hilliard has created. It felt solid, as if I could look round a corner and there would be more of it, not just the cardboard back of a stage set. That’s a huge achievement for a genre fantasy book.


The cast of characters was compelling. Four of them were really structural for this book and there were several more whom I cared about and would be happy to meet again, perhaps in a more major role in a future volume.

I liked the shades of grey – I have always been interested in the liminal space between good and evil, and this was well charted in some of the characters.

I liked the variant take on various old tropes (oh how I loved those interesting black unicorns – anyone who has been anywhere near a western girl-child in the last few years will have been fed to gagging with fluffy saccharin pastel-coloured ones, so this was a bold innovation, but well achieved.)

I liked the exploration of class and status and race and discrimination – modern issues I haven’t seen explored in this way through this genre before. Done with a lightness of touch that I admired, but still there for the taking.

All in all, a fine debut. Well done Mr Hilliard. I’ll risk the next one and eat humble pie if my opening misgivings are proven wrong.

I think I may be the target audience for this book - raised on Monty Python, Spike Milligan and the Goons, with a fair bit of Salvadore Dali thrown in; interested in the British establishment and its foibles; left leaning to the point of frequently falling over. The story, masquerading as some kind of crime thriller, revels in its own silliness, and throws in daft names, crazy conceits, absurd situations, almost as if the tradition of the sixth form review or the boyscout jamboree were going out of fashion... If your background is different you may be a bit baffled by this book, but read on, let yourself float on the sea of Pete Adams' surreal imagination. Beneath all the knockabout madness there are lots of political, artistic, literary references you can pick up like bits of a crossword puzzle. And there is, almost, a bit of a message. Anyway, just read and enjoy. You'll come out of it not knowing quite where you've been, but possibly feeling quite refreshed.

A slow brooding read that builds up the pressure step by step in an atmosphere of almost intolderable claustrophobia, as the dirty secrets of a nowhere town gradually float to the surface. Beautifully composed and written, with an unusual structure: two very different points of view, and one set of acutely strange, disturbing diary entries. What happens? In some ways very little. But in the awkward and anxious silences seismic changes are taking place in the dynamics of this community, and the reader is holding their breath for the outcome.

Jason Offutt’s unsettling novel shapeshifts between horror and fantasy and psychological thriller. It opens beguilingly with an encounter between a little boy and an apparent fairy – an encounter brushed off in the normal way by the boy’s reassuringly ordinary parents. But this little interloper, who crosses the boy’s path a number of times before her role in his life becomes clearer, is no cute Tinkerbell. She has an agenda. She has a mouthful of needle sharp teeth, a troubling smile and a readiness to ensnare a human child – or adult even – with fairy food made of poop. And it is an image of that smile that later adorns a number of hideous crime scenes, painted with childish fingers and human blood. But she is also, perhaps, the redeeming heroine of the story. Nothing here is quite as it seems.

I love the grand sweep of this novel as it traces Thomas Cavanaugh’s life from that first encounter in the cornfield through an adolescence tainted by mental illness into an uneasy adulthood. I love the way that that his life is interwoven with other lives, major or minor to the plot, but all of them full of depth and solidity uncompromised by the fantasy components of the story. The grounded reality of setting and characters is the perfect foil for the strange, disturbing fluidity of the plot and its troubling moral compass that lacks a true north.

There were aspects of this novel – its breadth and the enduring complicated relationship of its protagonists – that reminded me of Phillip Pullman. Something in its dangerous dabbling with Faery reminded me of Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market – another work that toys with childish imagery for adult purposes. But this dazzling eerie novel has no obvious parentage. It is a battle of good versus evil of course – which is the oldest story, surely, and the most fully-mapped in literature. That much at least makes the road familiar to the reader – but it doesn’t lead them back to any familiar hearth.

Another gripping, politically aware thriller from this author who has pleased me several times before. This time his story is set largely in Laos, a country still nursing the wounds from an unpublicized US massacre of the civilian population by a bombing campaign from the fifities to the seventies, an adjunct to the Vietnam War. (No folks, that’s not fiction, that’s history).

Memories are long. The war finished but the aftermath hasn’t gone away. Betrayals aren’t forgotten. The old airbase with its cache of secrets is mouldering in the jungle. The relatives of those who lost their lives haven’t forgiven. The country is still devastated, economically, culturally, morally. And there are still soldiers in the jungle.

Winding through this story are characters with a connection to that time, on one side or another. And Maier – a complicated, not particularly heroic hero – muddling more than marching through the complicated spiderweb of a plot he can't quite grasp. What’s he really looking for? His client’s father whose murder he has been paid to investigate? Gold? A chance for the big time? His client? A new girlfriend? An old one? Himself?

Well written, intelligent fiction, with a fascinating historical background, atmospheric scenery and sophistacted plotting. What’s not to like?

This is a fascinating book with a terrific and timely premise. Chapman writes with confidence and conviction and his cops are real people, real cops, and it's a world where things don't always go right and the good guys don't always win. There is a real sense of this throughout the intricate narration of the investigation - there are false leads, lost chances, mistakes, moments of despair, and some potentially avoidable deaths. I loved the rhythm of the book, with its chilling monthly killings, and the counterpoint rhythm of leads urgently followed, followed up, and lost.
The mind of the serial killer is expertly conveyed through his blog entries. Chilling in their absolute self belief and sense of entitlement. I liked the ambivalence about the victims: should we care if seriously bad guys get killed?
And the twist at the end??? Oh how I loved that. Thank you Mr Chapman.

This elegant historical novel has all the trademarks that I associate with Malve von Hassell - the gentle, measured storytellling, the subtle and unique characterisation, the meticulous historical detail, the beautiful writing which allows her to convey difficult truths without either sensationalising or compromising.

This is a coming of age story for three young people, each precisely located in a unique time and place and context, beautifully researched but not part of the usual cannon of historical fiction. And in the course of the book, each of the characters traverses a superb arc of character development. Peter, the main character, is an apprentice amber craftsman living towards the end of the thirty years war in 1644, who starts as a selfish irresponsible adolescent, who makes bad choices throughout the book, and yet grows through his experiences into a more thoughtful, responsible young man. Effie is his sister, a strange, mute girl whose story and talents are disclosed only in the silences and the unsaid of her life, as other lives move around her - and yet she too is able to grow. Lioba is a German girl, surviving on her own, with only a stray dog as a companion, fleeing from the Russians in World War II, 300 years later. Their dreamlike meetings, precipitated in some way by the contraband amber that Peter is harboring, are hauntingly and ambiguously depicted. The time-travel components of the story are conveyed with a lightness of touch that renders them simultaneously plausible and mystical. The day to day details of each of the characters' lives are crisp and crystaline. The matter of fact reality of living through war are conveyed with clear eyes.

This is a book that in different ways calls to mind many books that I have loved in my long life - Tom's Midnight Garden, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Time Travellers Wife, even Slaughterhouse Five... all books in which lonely people meet across impossible barriers and find themselves more fully alive in worlds where they cannot be, with friends that they cannot have.

In this mesmerising novella, set in the Battle of Britain in World War II, Miles Watson confronts head-on the human cost of war.

It’s not a book for everyone. To value this book, the reader has to be open to a little history. Don’t read this book if what you want is an episode of Dad’s Army, or a gung-ho adventure with cartoon heroes in a frenzy of derring-do. Don’t read this book if you want war sugar-coated, with the lie of a happy ending for the characters who matter and any intervening deaths being rare, sanitised, and either well-deserved or glorious.

The Battle of Britain wasn’t like that. War isn’t like that. And this is a serious book, albeit written in light, clever, occasionally amusing prose, skipping through the weeks of one pilot’s history with a brevity that carries you along, almost intoxicated.
It’s still serious.

Take stock.
The Battle of Britain, fought by Britain and its allies after Hitler's defeat of mainland Europe, was a defensive military campaign waged entirely by air forces, to defend the mainland of Britain from invasion. The human cost of this air defence was vast. The average life expectancy of a spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain was just four weeks. Most fighter pilots were boys in their early twenties. Many hundreds were killed, brutally, painfully, generally without achieving anything at all.

(Yes. These facts are gruelling. Like most facts about war, you may find them ‘depressing’. If you can’t take this, you really don’t need to start this book: it’s not going to get any better. Go elsewhere for your war stories. Plenty of comics are available.)

Against the real background of the Battle of Britain (Watson’s research is as always meticulous) his fictional hero is an ordinary man, in civilian life a mathematics teacher, who is deployed as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot. Mission after mission he sees his friends and companions head out and not return, and with punctilious care he calculates the odds of his own survival for each mission that he flies. They aren’t good. They only get worse.

The calculation of probability becomes an obsession. Somewhere in his nightmare journey from mission to mission, through the orgy of military and personal loss that occurs around all him, the obsession spirals from reason to unreason. The numbers take over. They assume an almost magical significance, imbued with a devastating drive which spills over into intentionality. The numbers are out to get him. He has nothing to hold onto except the inexorable certainty of his calculations – to the extent that he would perhaps prefer to be dead than disproved.

The characterisation is extraordinary, extreme, and yet impeccably believable. American though he is, Watson captures a British voice and sensibility that is utterly compelling. And beneath the unique, the personal, the fanatical preoccupation of his hero, there are more universal questions being asked. Watson isn’t an author who spoonfeeds his reader. If you’ve got this far, go read the novella. It’s only 40 pages, though you could give yourself a few months to think about it. 8 months perhaps - enough time for the Battle of Britain to run its course. Then answer the questions for yourself.

This is a beautifully crafted and entertaining whodunnit, with the ghost of the victim as the frustrated detective - much compromised by being dead, spectrally tethered to the lift where she was killed, generally invisible and quite unable to communicate with the living. Her investigation is also encumbered by the plethora of suspects, living and dead, who inhabit the tiny confines that remain to her. Like an Agatha Christie house-party, it appears that this apartment block shelters all too many potential killers, each with dark and possibly fatal secrets.
She is not without assistance, however. She has a living breathing friend in the police, an in-law looking to avenge her, and one of her neighbours is a celebrity psychic with a ouija board. But what use are side-kicks when they neither see nor hear you and seem determined to follow the wrong leads?
The characters here are delicious, the premise inventive. For a book about a dead woman, with more than a few tragedies lurking in the shadows, it's surprisingly life affirming. In fact, this is a glorious novel. You’d have to be dead not to enjoy it.

Miles Watson may be just about the only writer who can get away with a story set in the polish ghetto, told from the perspective of German soldiers sent in to round up or otherwise “deal with” Jews, without either turning the Germans into monsters or undermining the awfulness of what was done there. With a surgical precision, he depicts the world view of the German Reich, instilled in soldiers’ thinking, whilst also allowing the readers to see that in the grip of a war that they neither control nor understand, these individual men are really no different from American soldiers or British soldiers. Actually – no matter the hideous truth behind what the German soldiers are required to do – at that moment of battle, kill or be killed, they are not even much different from the jewish resistance fighters whom they confront. War. They’re all of them doing what they’ve got to do, at risk of death any moment, the most delicate of them dehumanised. This is brave writing. Seriously.

Black Rose: A Midsummer Night’s Chutzpah, is a glorious mix of gritty realism, surreal humour, historical social commentary, and much else beside. Read it as a thriller – it’s fun, it’s racy, it’s full of action. Read it as study in gang warfare, beautifully observed from the inside, complete with the local slang that can often mystify (google "cockney rhyming slang" before you start!) Read it – no, REREAD it (you will want to) - as an unexpected study in what loneliness and brutality can do to a human mind, what strange paths the human mind can go down. It’s a story in multiple layers. The echoes in its subtitle are not accidental, and the book is not what you think at the beginning. At the end it made me think long about Ronnie Kray – a child of exactly the period and location – who died in Broadmoor, a high security psychiatric institution. A paranoid schizophrenic, yes. Violent, yes - just as violent as his saner twin brother, Reggie. But always a natty dresser, a mischievous, wicked humorist, and never short of chutzpah.

This is a somewhat delayed review – I read this book a month back, and what I see looking back is something different from what I felt at the time.

Obviously, it’s a ripping good yarn – strong characters with plausible backstories, some nice twists, plenty of suspense, a slow beginning to seduce the nervous, then some race and pace and gore for the more adventurous – altogether an intelligent read without being too demanding. I read it over a couple of rainy days and it did what I wanted – passed the time, took me out of myself, left me going back for more. Benjamin Cross is a talented writer and does this genre well.

But looking back, what I remember more than the story is the location – the ice, the fog, the emptiness, the coldness of the water, the whales, the endless arctic bleakness. I found myself thinking about going there. I could take the book with me and read it all again! Of course! This book would make a great holiday read - like those lovely Canary Island mysteries by Isobel Blackthorn that get snapped up by holidaymakers on their way to Fuerteventura or Lanzarotte…. Something to while away the time on days when fog makes the view a little claustrophobic, but you still want to feel you are taking in the experience...

Then I got a grip. Even with Covid closing down all the normal destinations (and I dare say the Russian Arctic isn’t overly troubled with the virus so it may still be safe to go there) tourism to the frozen poles may not hit the mass market. This book is a best seller and that hasn’t depended on Arctic cruises….

Yet still, remembering this read, I kept thinking of the landscapes, and it dawned on me that what Cross has brought to this landscape, that gives it so much more depth, is a sense of time passing… The terrifying moment by moment time of individuals trying to survive this landscape – icy water that would kill you in minutes, never mind the more fanciful threats that he introduces – but also the vast stretches of time since a neolithic hunter came to grief in the ice, and back further, to when the dinosaurs roamed the whole planet, and further, further, further to the shaping of the Antarctic continent, the infinite days of ice forming… and then, snapping back into human time, the tiny number of decades before our activity may destroy what millenia have created.

Yes. Cross is an archaeologist. He deals in time. If he’d been an economist or a civil engineer or a politician, he’d still have all those great talents at writing, and he’d still write ripping yarns that pass the time and pull in the readers. But maybe those books wouldn’t linger so in the mind. Thank you for the depth of time, Mr Cross, as well as the ripping yarn and the shattering landscapes.

Alina is one of those books that winds like silk through your mind, long after you’ve finished reading. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, it tells the story of a young woman on the verge of adulthood making the long pilgrimage from France to Jerusalem in the 12th century. She has personal rather than religious reasons for the journey – reasons that will resonate with women and girls of today – and the characters are sharp and live and credible to modern sensibilities, without ever ceasing to be people of their time.

This is characteristic of the work of Malve von Hassell – I’ve never read anything of hers which I have not profoundly admired. In her historical fiction, she has the gift of making you stand there, in the long-gone world that she recaptures, breathing that air, hearing that music, feeling those anxieties. There were moments in the narrative when I thought “no – this is far fetched! A young girl with nothing, adopted into a royal court?” Yet when I struggled back through what I know of this time, I realised that there is nothing implausible here. The world was less crowded then: the estimated population of the whole of Europe was around the same as the UK today, and although Alina is poor, she is the daughter of a landowner and as such a member of the second estate, and a “lady”. Hierarchies were rigid, but aristocratic and more humble members of noble households lived in much closer physical proximity than one would expect today: the great halls which served as the centrepiece of a mediaeval castle, where kings and lords would hold court, were also places where the less distinguished castle residents would eat and sleep. All of the characters and events in this intense and engaging tale stand scrutiny of this kind: Malve von Hassell does not cut corners. This makes the modern echoes even more intriguing – issues of religious intolerance and anti-semitism, the restriction of women’s lives, the jostling for political power.

This is billed as a novel for young adults and there are certainly young people who will be captivated by it, though it is a quiet, reflective book without the sensational shocks and fireworks of so much young adult fiction. I would have loved this book in my teens, but decades later I love it as an adult, and unless “adult” means “full of sex and swearing” it works perfectly well as an adult novel now.

I met this book first as an audio book, and I must say a word for the exquisite narration by Penny Scott-Andrews (@Penandrews). I cannot guess how long it must have taken the publisher to find a voice so perfect for the time and the person, so entirely sensitive to the story, so timeless. Thank you Penny Scott-Andrews for bringing the story so compellingly to life. I read the book later, but heard your beautiful voice throughout it, and for me you simply are Alina.

All round, Alina is a beautiful book. I’ve said this before about the work of Malve von Hassell: buy it as a gift for someone you really like.