The Poison Throne is the first in a new trilogy and good enough to hold its own as a standalone novel and make the reader exceptionally happy that at least two more have been promised.  The setting, an alternate, slightly fantastic, version of medieval Europe is evoked with exquisite detail, and Celine Kiernan has peopled it with characters that fit their world and fascinate the reader.

The focus of this novel  is Wynter Moorehawke. Her exploration of the changes in the kingdom allow the reader to learn along with her, and her passionate defence of those she loves make her a compelling and compassionate window into her world. Fifteen years old, an excellent carpenter, and, above all, an adolescent girl, Wynter is protective of her friends and family and assured in the knowledge that she can navigate the world of the court.   The reality is, of course, infinitely more complicated, but watching Wynter struggle and grow adds an everyday energy to a complex and original story.

Wynter and her father have returned to a kingdom rife with danger and despair.  The King’s heir, Alberon, has fled, supposedly to plot a coup, and Razi, Wynter’s childhood friend (and the King’s illegitimate son), is being held hostage as the new heir, with his friends’ lives forfeit if he fights against his father’s wishes. Aside from Wynter and her father, the only person Ravi can trust is Christopher Garron, a young man with a mysterious past, and someone Wynter is not sure it is safe to rely on.

The story draws you in from the first; it is so easy to understand why Wynter, and her father, and Ravi, would fight to save the kingdom because Kiernan makes the love they feel for the country, and the love they once held for its king, a real breathing element in the novel.  When Wynter first returns home, she rejoices:

She left the horses, happy in their dim stalls, and quickly crossed the wavering heat of the redbrick stable yards. Her footsteps rang back at her from the stable buildings. Little swallows sliced the sunshine around her, darting moments of shadow in the shimmering air, and the sound of contented horses and the sweet and dreamy smell of dung soothed her.
Home, home, home.  It all sang to her, You’re home.

The plot is complicated, the details evocative, the characters compelling and fully drawn, Kiernan has created a world that fascinates and written a novel well worth reading and then re-reading, in order to make the wait for its sequel seem a least a bit shorter.

As Head of the KGB Yuri Andropov closes in on the mysterious faction, he drives its leader to go on  the run and sets in motion a sequence of events that causes Peter Marlow to once more be of value to the British Secret Intelligence Service. At the end of The Private Sector, Marlow was framed as a KBG mole. Now, four years later, he is extricated from Durham prison and taken to London to be briefed: because he has a similar background and a passing resemblance to George Graham, a KBG sleeper now in British hands, he is going to be sent to the United Nations in New York to impersonate Graham and unmask a Soviet spy ring.

Needless to say, what sounds simple in theory rapidly becomes fiendishly complex in practice – not least when it turns out that the wife of his British control, Helen, is the woman with who George Graham conducted an affair years earlier in Africa. She could blow his cover straight away, but she doesn’t, perpetuating a bizarre triangle of deceit where all three characters know different secrets about the others, but not necessarily the same ones. The risks escalate when the KBG intervenes: by coercing Marlow and Helen, they hope to flush out the leader of the Sixth Directorate and obtain a lits of the names of all of its operatives. It’s a tense and exciting climax as the Russians and the British play a high-stakes game.

Peter Marlow is a likeable, intelligent character who is used and manipulated by all sides in the dirty war. With his references in the text to Le Carre and Len Deighton, Joseph Hone is a participant in the best tradition of the British spy novel, and this is a pretty good book, written in wondeful, atmospheric prose – it may drag in a couple of places where Marlow threatens to be overwhelmed by the complex relationship that he has with Helen, and by his own split nature as George Graham, but it finishes on a high, and leaves Marlow at liberty to once again be dragged in to the machinations of the spymasters. Recommended.

Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different – and rigidly enforced – level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains . . .

Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon’s world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint’s Celestial Levels – and with the dying body comes bad news.

If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint’s base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon’s own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality – and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability.

To win a copy, answer the following question correctly:

In which Welsh town was Alastair Reynolds born?

• Bangor
• Brecon
• Barry

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1. Closing date for entries: 27th March 2010.
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3. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
4. The winners will be selected at random from those correct entries received before the closing date.
5. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookgeeks. The webmaster’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
6. The winners names may be published on the Bookgeeks website after the closing date of the competition.
7. The competition is not open to Bookgeeks contributors and their families, or to Orion Book Group employees and their families.

You would think the years 1640-1660 would be a perma-fixture on school curriculums and pulse through the collective cultural consciousness. After all the story has everything – a despotic King, impassioned parliamentary debate, a truly uncivil Civil War, the world turned upside down, religious radicalism, regicide and power’s corruptive influence on a country sliding into dictatorship. Then from the ashes of said dictatorship, reinstatement of the monarchy and, if you run the film onto 1688, bloody revenge by a useless King leading to said useless King hopping it on a moonlight flit, while a foreign royal family swans in at the request of, well, everyone. Oh and a legacy of representative parliamentary democracy that has lasted 400 years.

Yet  for some reason the English Civil Wars do not hold this prominent place in the popular imagination. The only recent example I can think of is Peter Flannery’s ambitious but ultimately flawed The Devil’s Whore on Channel 4 a couple of years ago. Blair Worden’s excellent book explains why this might be. This is not, despite victory for the forces of “democracy”, a simple story of goodies and baddies. Baddies there are aplenty, but it becomes harder and harder to spot the goodies the longer it goes on. The austerity of the latter day Parliamentarians compared to the dash of the King’s cavaliers may be against English tastes, yet Blair Worden shows this too to be a mere cariacature. For this was a Civil War with unclear geographical lines, unclear class divisions and no clear roundhead v cavalier split.

This is a muddy, messy story of failure with an unclear legacy. Worden does a great job clearing a little of the mess revealing what is at times a thrilling chronology without trying to over personalise events.  So instead of Simon Schama we have a Brodie’s Notes version of history that is, like the lives of many of its subjects, nasty, brutal and short.

At the end of the last volume, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, things were brought to a sort of closure, with Adrian settling down with the mother of his third child, Daisy, in a coverted pigsty next door to his still-awful parents. The intention for it to be the concluding volume to the saga was fairy clear, but Townsend has exercised her prerogative to change her mind, and I for one am very glad she did. In this latest volume, Adrian is approaching middle age, yet the positives in his life seem destined to turn sour: Daisy is tiring of her nerdy husband, his mother is determined to go on the Jeremy Kyle show and address the issue of his sister’s paternity live on national television, his kind-hearted employer is ill and the business is going badly, and worst of all, Adrian is diagnosed with prostate cancer (or prostrate cancer, as various well-meaning but ill-informed characters call it).

This would not be an Adrian Mole book if Townsend did not reflect the zeitgesit, so investment banker half-brother Brett goes from superman to down-and-out when the credit crunch hits; eldest son Glenn Mole is serving in Afghanistan and repeatedly asking his dad to remind him why he’s there, and Pandora is still climbing the greasy pole of Labour politics, bending with the prevailing political winds. It’s funny stuff, combining with Adrian’s usual neuroses, pretensions and problems to evoke everything from wry smiles to sympathetic laughter.

Ultimately, though, this is, as it should be, Adrian’s story: he endures the effects of the cancer treatment with stoicism, despite being badly treated by his wife. Meanwhile the network of characters who have been touchstones throughout Adrian’s life – his parents, Nigel, and Pandora, showing here more humanity than I had hitherto suspected her to be capable of – pull him through. It’s really quite touching, and finishes on a hopeful note, though this time there is no suggestion of final closure. I suspect, in fact I sincerely hope, that Adrian Albert Mole will continue to proceed through life, always a few years ahead of me, for a good while to come, being a luckless yet likeable nerk so I don’t have to be. We can but hope.

The storyline is a clear continuation from Raven: Blood Eye – our hero, part of the band of Vikings known as the Wolfpack, starts the second book in pursuit of the English noble, Earldred, who cheated him and his comrades out of promised loot, and who brought about the death of his own son. Accompanying the Vikings are an English monk, Egfrith, and Cynethryth, Earldred’s daughter, out for revenge on her father. What breathes fresh wind in to the sails of this Viking adventure is the author’s decision to send his protagonists in to the land of the Franks. After capturing Earldred and securing the holy relic he tried to keep from them, they decide to sell it to the King of the Franks, Karolus, better known to history as Charlemagne, who by this point was ruler of much of Western Europe, protector of the Pope and committed to furthering the spread of Christianity as part of his foreign policy. In short, not someone likely to offer a warm welcome to two shiploads of pagan warriors.

Still, influenced by Raven’s suggestion, Sigurd, leader of the Wolfpack, takes his ships deep in to Frankish territory, rowing down the Seine to Paris and then further, eventually portaging the great longboats from the headwaters of the Seine to the river Mass on the way to Aix-la-Chapelle, site of Charlemagene’s favourite palace. The tension derived from having the Vikings journey inland, surrounded on all sides by Christians and having to suppress their essential nature to survive, lends a frisson of fear to the voyage, and when the Wolfpack arrive at their destination, it’s no great surprise that things don’t go according to plan, leading to a frantic and exciting dash for the sea.

There’s a life and an energy to Kristian’s writing, and some lovely deft touches of characterisation: the gradual evolution of the monk Egfrith as he learns to co-operate with and understand the Vikings, is a subtle pleasure, while Raven changes from an outsider to an integral part of the crew, in a group that becomes more diverse and less obviously Norse as the story progresses. As for Raven’s origins, the story of his blood eye, of those we learn little, but as the Wolfpack turns for their home country, and Raven anticipates his first visit to the lands of the Norse, we can only hope his story has much further to take us.

This story begins with a party thrown by Lord Henry Winthrop to celebrate his return, mummy in hand, from an expedition to Egypt.  Mann sets the scene well here with a description that perfectly captures both the possiblilty of scientific investigation and the spectacle that is the real point of the ”unwrapping”.

Glass cabinets had been erected at regular intervals all around the tiled floor, filled with the most wondrous gilded treasures from the tomb of the mummified king. People milled around these cabinets, cooing appreciatively, drinks in hand, courting one another with sidelong glances and averted gazes. Purefoy almost laughed out loud.  It was like every cliche he could have imagined, and more sumptuous and extravagant than even those.

George Purefoy, whose breathless entry to the party serves to underline its importance, is a newspaper reporter with excellent instincts and an eye for the unusual.  His chance meeting with Sir Maurice Newbury effectively draws the reader back into the series, and the novel soon leaves the bizarre unveiling of the mummy and spirals off to the offices of Newbury and Veronica Hobbes in the British Museum.  Here, though Newbury is currently working on tracking a missing agent, Hobbes has her eye on another set of disappearances, missing girls who have seemingly vanished without a trace and with what may well be a bit of magic.

Both of these mysteries throw the detectives into danger, and Newbury and Veronica’s determination to find and punish those responsible draws them ever closer to the darker side of this version of Victorian London. Mann does an excellent job keeping the action moving and, while the character of Newbury owes much to Sherlock Holmes, he also feels like his own man and a character that will continue to grow as the series progresses. Veronica, his Watson, shows a strong knack for investigation herself, and Newbury’s active encouragement and appreciation of her strengths makes them a formidable pair.

The world-building is exemplary.  Mann captures a world on the brink of technological revolution, where robots and steam are appearing and machines are integrating themselves into daily life (and, it must be said, the occasional human being). This mixture of hard scientific inquiry and gruesome spectacle permeates the book, and it is certainly a wild ride (I won’t spoil Newbury’s meeting with the Queen for you, but it is an image that is difficult to forget). These are not just any machines, neutral or ambivalent helpers for humanity, there is a certain aura of menace cloaking the world and the men who live in it. The Osiris Ritual may have begun with an ancient Egyptian mummy, but the true danger, danger that Hobbes and Newbury must risk their lives to defeat, exists in the heart of Victorian England.

Are you a bookgeek? (we alway ask that one!)

I am a bookgeek in every single way, except I guess I’m not a fine book collector – my books are in every imaginable kind of condition. I’m a story geek.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it?)

The best piece of advice has been given by lots of people, and it boils down to just sitting down and getting to work. In the long run the difference between a pro writer and most others is that we learn how to make the stuff even on the days we don’t want to.

Where do you write?

Almost always at my desk in our often messy, reasonably sunny office. I can watch the hill behind our house through the window, and make sure it’s not sneaking up on us. I also get to watch the periodic forays of dogs and children. At any given time, from where I sit there are literally dozens and dozens of ways to distract myself within arms’ reach. It is a miracle I ever finish a book.

Shadowrise was going to be the third and final book in the Shadowmarch Trilogy… and then it wasn’t! At what point did you realise that you were going to overshoot and go in to four volumes?

It was somewhere around page 1,400, with what was still at least a couple of hundred pages’ worth of characters and plot still to be jiggled out onto the page. Um… It’s not that I’m as stupid as I seem, although this does make the third-straight trilogy I have had to publish in four volumes (with Otherland I just planned it that way) — it’s just hard to foresee the tenacity with which your characters will cling to having their every deed chronicled.

In his reviews of the three Shadowmarch books we have had so far, Bookgeeks’ Simon Appleby has commented that the books are much more morally ambiguous than Memory, Sorrow and Thorn – it’s much less obvious who (if anyone) is on the side of right. Is that how you see it, and was that a conscious choice you made?

Part of it is probably that I’m a different person in some ways, but some of it may also simply be due to my trying not to repeat MS&T too closely. Also my artistic tastes may be less romantic than they were. It’s not like I’ve lost the taste for the big gesture – all my books go crash boom bang. This newest one, Shadowheart, I’m writing the last bit of it right now and it’s like supervising a shooting war – stuff is just blowing up right and left.

The Qar are developiing in to a deeply tragic race the more readers discover about them – when you were writing, was it your intention to draw any parallels with aboriginal peoples in our own history?

Absolutely. But also I was very strongly moved by Tolkien’s Elves, by the way their long and glorious lives were so tempered by loss. When something really affects me in that way, I tend to try to take part of it as a seed and then grow something that has some of the same feeling without merely being a copy.

Are you very conscious of wanting to avoid the cliches of high fantasy – orcs, dwarves, elves and dragons, etc.?

That’s one of the fun things about writing genre fiction – you have a well-established set of cliches to play with. It’s like choreographing a modern tango — yes, freeform dance is wonderful, but you can use the classic rhythms of the tango to give something a special texture. That’s what the familiar tropes of a genre will give you.

How do you think fantasy has changed since you first started writing?

I think it has become vastly more segmented. Like other genres, the energy of the market seems to have gone more and more into specializing for pocket constituencies. It’s kind of like what the last twenty years of rock’n'roll music has been if you take out the only important new influence, hip hop.

With the works of Terry Goodkind and George R.R. Martin making their way to the small screen, do you think we will ever see TV or movies based on your work? Is that something you would like?

I would quite enjoy it. I think I would be quite willing to see what would come and I’d be perfectly aware that it was someone else’s version of my idea. So far, I’ve been very pleased with other adaptations like the wonderful German radio series, and the upcoming Otherland MMOG from RealU. The good thing about the game and what I would hope for in a movie is that they didn’t slavishly follow everything but very much made their decisions about how to tell the stories in the spirit of my writing.

Can you give us a few hints about what’s going to happen in Shadowheart? And when do you think it will be released?

We’re shooting for this autumn/winter. The mythological and magical side of the story comes closer and closer and really dominates the last volume. Also I think it will be – I hope it will be – by far the most surprising volume.

Elena Deveraux is one of the best vampire hunters around. In a world where the existence of vampires and other supernatural beings is common knowledge amongst the human race, angels and Archangels rule as powerful presidential figures, feared by every living thing that claps eyes on them. Vampires are ‘made’ by these powerful creatures and, in much the same fashion as moody teenagers rebelling against their parents, they often run away. Elena’s job is to capture and return them to their rightful owners.

When we meet Elena, she has perfect control over her life. Her reputation is well earned and no job ever seems out of reach. Until now.

When the beautiful but dangerous Archangel Raphael hires her, Elena knows this is a life or death situation. Completing her given mission (finding an archangel gone bad) seems impossible but failure is not an option if she wants to hold on to her life. Raphael’s reputation for destroying any creature that crosses him leaves the hunter in constant fear yet, at the same time, she can’t help but notice the undeniable chemistry between them.

Determined to focus on what seems like an impossible assignment, Elena must get ready for the job of her life while also trying not to succumb to Raphael’s unrelenting seduction games.

Singh’s sexy and romantic story set amongst a New York backdrop run by angels is the perfect read for lovers of supernatural and fantasy romance. The idea of vampires as beings created by angels and used as ‘slaves’ of some sort is an interesting and fresh new take on the genre. Angels having this power over the creatures we’ve become obsessed with instantly gives them a strong command of the story as beings not to be reckoned with.

The descriptions of them as almost too beautiful to look at is quite reminiscent of those we’ve already heard of vampires but their control over humans and other supernatural beings immediately puts them at an advantage and gives them a thrilling new power we’ve never seen before. When characters are able to control the story in this way, the reader knows they’re on to something good.

Singh’s writing is steamy, passionate, and, at times, quite erotic. The undeniable chemistry between our two central characters is apparent from the start and, as more seemingly minor characters begin to involve themselves in the story and complicate things, we are always left on edge wondering whether they will finally give in to temptation. Elena stubbornly refuses to let an Archangel show that he has power over her – even though that could mean her death – while Raphael is struggling with his own problem: a growing conscience.

There is already a huge community of fans that love paranormal romance. These stories seem to have a Mills & Boon way of introducing a lonely character who finds raw passion that she’s afraid of at first. Elena’s quite a strong, independent character, refusing to let the ‘good-looking man in charge’ take whatever he wants as he’s used to. Though it’s clear she’s fighting a losing battle as her lust and temptation begin to prove too much.

Fans of supernatural and fantasy romance are going to love this book. It has everything you’d want when looking for a good bit of action-packed intimacy. Far from being too smutty, it has the right amount of sexiness, desire, and intensity needed with a good dose of eroticism thrown in to get your heart racing.

Angels’ Blood is the first in Nalini Singh’s exciting new Guild Hunter series which is sure to be a must-read and a breathtaking introduction to a soon-to-be popular fantasy figure.


The possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence is a topic which attracts more than its fair share of neurotic and credulous fantasists. It is therefore admirable to read a book-length study which retains a level-headed rationalism throughout, whilst never loosing sight of the excitement and wonder which should rightly attend the subject. Paul Davies deals thoroughly with every aspect: the statistical probability of ET, the forms it could take, the history of our search, the methods used, the contingency plans in place should a message be received. However, while this book is ostensibly about the electronic eyes and ears aimed at outer-space, it actually proves a remarkable prism through which to regard the human condition as it currently stands.

In teasing out the prospects for alien life, Davies must turn to the only example we have to base guesses on: the biodiversity of earth. The theories of its origin, and the amazing diversity which it exhibits, are the only evidence on which we can build conjecture for its appearance elsewhere. The lives of earth’s extremophiles and the hunt for a ‘shadow biosphere’ throw new light on the wonder of our planet. We should not need reminding of this, yet it is all too easy to become complacent. The work of futurologists who have predicted alien technology shows us a potential future for our own. The utterly hypothetical Matrioshka brain, for example, now ranks as the number one technology I would like to live long enough to see constructed. In contemplating the various reactions likely to be elicited in the realms of philosophy, religion and politics by discovering that something is ‘out there’, we are forced to re-examine human nature and our interactions with each other here on earth. All in all, this is a far deeper and more wide-ranging book than the subtitle might suggest.

So, what about the search itself? The release of The Eerie Silence coincides with the 50^th anniversary of SETI and is therefore an apt moment to look back on the project and consider its future. The history of the organisation as told by Paul Davies demonstrates once again the unfailing willingness with which committed individuals will work ceaselessly against the odds. While some may regard it as a fruitless exercise in wishful thinking it is impossible to read the description of how events would unfold immediately following a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence without experiencing a vicarious thrill and concluding that while chances of success may be slim, it is nevertheless an enthralling and worthwhile enterprise.