Book reviews
This is no cosy campus novel. It aims to be a masterpiece of ecological and existential despair but for me I found it to be so restrained as lacking purpose. Its intentional flatness contributed to it being an undeniably alienating reading experience.
John Twelve Hawks caught my attention with the impressive Fourth Realm trilogy. Whilst Certainty does not reach those heights it offers a tight plot line giving a linear journey into a child’s eye world of the near future.
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (2025) by Karen Hao. Hao has written a deep dive into rise of Sam Altman and OpenAI. It tracks the transition from non-profit to profit.
Book Review: Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester. Will I remember it as a novel? Not really, but the cleverness of the writing stands out.
A data-driven treatise on football, with a slightly misleading title. In fact, they argue that England overperforms for its size.
Tibor Fischer has pedigree in writing with wit and cynicism going back to Under The Frog. It has been a long while since he penned a full novel so it was intriguing to see what had stimulated hiim to spin another yarn. And this time - “My Bags are Big” introduces- crypto currency.
A heavyweight champion of French provocation, Michel Houellebecq has written a doorstopper, Annihilation that is ultimately a treatise on mortality.
The Day of the Jackal, published in 1971, was the debut novel by Frederick Forsyth, which became famous for its "documentary" style, making it a landmark thriller.
"Quantum of Menace" by Vaseem Khan. Espionage retires to the home counties. A pleasant whodunnit with a big themed background that ultimately serves its purpose with a final twist in the tale.
In the eighth instalment of the Strike and Ellacott series, Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) delivers a narrative as intricate and heavy as the silver heirlooms that anchor its plot.
