Following on from the my previous post on the merits of Dave Duncan’s The Seventh Sword, here’s a look at a couple more of his collections, although it’s really one series in two parts. A Man of His Word/A Handful of Men Pandemia is a world populated by all the major fantasy races, Elves, Dwarves,…
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Ah the Eighties, what a decade. There’s no ironic nostalgia here, I was lucky to be born in 1978 and spent my childhood blissfully enjoying the wealth of cultural phenomena, actual queues at the cinema for great films (Star Wars, E.T. Ghostbusters, The Goonies, Back to the Future, Labyrinth, Big), a top 40 which wasn’t…
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The first ‘chosen one’ books I read were the Chronicles of Prydain (fantastic books that I’d highly recommend by the way) way back in my youth, I loved following the trials and tribulations of Taran as he gradually matured from a callow youth, with aspirations of heroism but little idea of the hardships that would…
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What better way to commence a period of enforced isolation, than reading a book set in a pandemic induced post-apocalyptic future. That was the thought running through my head in March when I alighted at Station Eleven. Judging by the rush to watch films like Contagion and Outbreak, I wasn’t alone in my Coronavirus navel…
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His Dark Materials is one of those series which feels like it’s been around forever, so it’s always something of a surprise that Northern Lights wasn’t actually published until 1995. Perhaps it is a measure of the series’ success that it feels older than that, or maybe like Mortal Engines, it just feels older. I…
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I read this book during the early part of last summer. According to the blurb ‘From “one of the most significant figures of the last generation of fantasy”, comes Francesco Dimitri’s debut novel in English, an enthralling and seductive fantasy following four old friends and the secrets they keep’ (just to clarify, the quotation marks…
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Hello from the other side, not Tomeopathy’s words, but the words of Adele. Tomeopathy is however going to borrow them at this time, as they prove to be quite apt. That’s right, Tomeopathy is back from a self-imposed exile and ready to make up for missing time. Where has Tomeopathy been for the last year?…
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Hero Born was a book I selected on the strength of the cover (more on which below), it’s the first instalment in The Seeds of Destiny series by Andy Livingstone. The series follows Brann, the son of a miller from a small village in the back of beyond. Anyone with a passing interest in fantasy…
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It’s been a little while now since I finished reading the Broken Empire trilogy, frequently the passage of time and the reading of subsequent books can diminish the esteem felt for a book or series immediately after finishing, not in the case of The Broken Empire trilogy. Over the course of this series we follow…
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Over the last couple of months I have been very neglectful of this blog, I’m blaming it on a combination of a new job, school holidays and actual holidays. Oh, and the flipping lawn doesn’t mow itself either, which seems to be a task equal to the painting of the Forth Bridge, at least in…
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