More than Human

First published in 1953, this most celebrated of Theodore Sturgeon’s works won the International Fantasy Award, and rightly so. It’s a true masterpiece of provocative storytelling. A group of remarkable social outcasts band together for survival and discover their combined powers renders them superhuman. The novel opens with a self-described and self-acknowledged idiot living the [...]

A Guide to the Discworld Series and Terry Pratchett’s Writing

You might have seen this lens before. Unlikely, as it is rarely visited, but it’s possible. If you did, you probably back-pedaled out of it as fast as you could, before the endlessly loading modules finished devouring your browser and moved on to your music collection. Fear no more. For I have tamed it with [...]

Jane Austen Follow On

How could I have missed this book before? A long lost journal belonging to Jane Austen turns up in the basement of an old house. Remarkable in itself, but even more remarkable when, on reading, we discover that Jane has solved a particularly nasty murder in Hertfordshire. Stephanie Barron has done a wonderful job with [...]

Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff has always been a favourite of mine. I had a steady diet of her historical novels from the time I was 12 to when I was 15. Although many of her books were written for the younger reader I still enjoy them now. Her finest work is Sword at Sunset and that’s definitely [...]

Ancient Roman Whodunnits

I enjoy detective novels and some of favourite detectives do their sleuthing in togas. In this lens I’ve focused on four fictional detectives. Whodunnits in Ancient Rome

The Trojan War

There’s a huge range of novels about the Trojan War, the events leading up to it, and the men and women whose lives were affected by it, so it’s difficult to find a book that doesn’t feel stale and predictable. These are the books that are still on my bookshelf, close and handy to be [...]