Summary A post global-warming dystopian novel from the pen of Margaret Atwood, it focuses on Jimmy (aka Snowman), who believes himself to be the only human survivor of a deliberate viral destruction of the human race. This is the first part of the MaddAddam trilogy, so essentially is setting the scene for the next novels to come. Reading this in 2020, it is too eerily resonant of what is currently happening globally. Snowman lives in a tree, within sight of the ocean and the Craker camp. It is a blasted landscape. It is too dangerous to sleep on the ground, as genetically-altered animals like ..read more

Summary A historical romance novel, set at the time of the Albigensian crusade. For those who may not know, this was a crusade in the Languedoc region of France, by northern Catholics against the perceived heresies of the Cathars, lasting from 1209 to 1229, with another series of repressions in the late 1240’s. The plot is essentially the love story between Braida, a young Catholic girl of Carcassone, and Jourdan, a soldier-of-fortune, who is also Catholic, but is fighting against what they perceive as an invasion of the lands by the North. The narrator of the story wants to set out her own vi ..read more

Summary: The author gives us a deeply-researched view of Rome, from the founding myths of Romulus & Remus and the suckling she-wolf, to 212 CE, when every freeborn man in the Roman Empire was given citizenship. This was the culmination of 1000 years of Empire, yet the author argues it could be the beginning of the end, where one set of divisions disappeared, only to be replaced by deeper ones. Rome is a subject that has been treated by countless authors, from so many points of view, that the reader could be forgiven for rolling their eyes at yet another viewpoint. However, while the author ..read more

Summary: A fantasy novel about Kingdoms in decline, a powerful dark force on the rise and bent on revenge, and a mysterious sect of female sorceresses, working in secret to prevent the end of the world. The novel has political intrigue, legends, and dragons. Each Kingdom/Empire has its own narratives, culture and beliefs, and though the West is nominally allied, there are tensions and estrangements that could create calamitous faultlines in a war against the Nameless One, and his Draconian devotees. We begin with a young acolyte, Tane, who in the middle of her training discovers a young man, w ..read more

Summary: This is a historical fiction novel, about the Spanish military campaign that destroyed the world of the Aztecs The novel, first in a trilogy, features the historic personalities, as well as numerous fictional ones. Hernan Cortes is there, on his ship Santa Maria de la Conception, as well as Montezuma in his glittering palace. We meet lesser figures such as Father Aguilar, rescued from Indian slavery by Cortes and now serves him as translator, and Tezoc “The Cutter Of Men”, the military general who is ill-at-ease in the royal court. The two stories thread around each other as the novel ..read more

Summary: The story is essentially a time-travelling love story. Henry DeTamble has Chrono-Displacement – he periodically gets pulled out of linear time to moments in his past, present and future. All those he loves are in linear time, so they are older or younger, depending on when he is displaced to. Clare is the eponymous wife, who meets Henry when she is six – and he is thirty six. He meets her for the first time when he is twenty-eight., and she is twenty or so. Because of time travel, he arrives in the new time completely naked. His first objective is always to get clothed, and the young ..read more

  Etymology – the study of words and how their meaning has changed throughout history, and of the origins of a word. This is an interesting book. The author ranges across continents, languages, ancient and modern societies, and even different species, in what seems to be a free association of thoughts. I learnt that “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is the longest grammatically correct sentence in the English language, and the rest of the book is full of such weird and wonderful moments like that. The author clearly knows his stuff, and tries to bring it across ..read more

Summary: This is a historical murder mystery novel, set in the Oxford England of the middle 17th Century, just after the Restoration of Charles II to the throne. The mystery plays out from four different narrative viewpoints, each narrator having their own chapter. The genesis is the murder of an Oxford Don, Dr Grove, in highly suspicious circumstances. His servant Sarah Blundy becomes the focus of the inquiry, and in the re-tellings she becomes quite an unusual character. The narrators (all men, and each are deeply and genuinely religious) are from differing backgrounds, and nationalities. Th ..read more

Summary: This is a non-fiction journalistic investigation into the life of Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta was an average African-American woman, struggling to make ends meet in 1950’s America, raising a large family (five children) while living on the edge of poverty. What made her life exceptional was her death, or rather the reason for her death. Henrietta suffered a particularly aggressive form of cervical cancer, and a few months before she died some cells were cut from her cervix. She was being seen at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore. This was in racially-segregated America, and the autho ..read more

Summary: This is a dystopian near-future. Britain is essentially a wasteland, ruled by the Authority (a totalitarian type government), and everything is grey and bleak. Everything in people’s lives is controlled, right down to women being forced to fit contraceptive devices. The hometown of our narrator, Penrith, is over-crowded, filled with despairing people doing meaningless work, in return for an ordered life and steady food rations. Our narrator, Sister, finds a way to break out of her oppressed town, and makes her way into the mountains, to find the semi-legendary community of Carhulla. T ..read more