It’s Snakewood launch day :)

City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer, has been labelled ‘avant-garde fantasy’.  It is.  The city is the star; Ambergris is a violent and gothic-romantic ecosystem, the inhabitants of which live in a fearful symbiosis with the deeply mysterious ‘Greycaps’.  These underground dwellers were initially displaced by the founders of Ambergris from the much older city that it grew…

So, I’ve popped my Haruki Murakami cherry, having heard from a number of different sources about this writer and his cult following and magical prose. Norwegian Wood is a story, set in Japan, of a teenage boy, Toru Watanabe, in love with a girl, Naoko, who we learn is schizophrenic and with whom he shares…

I do almost all my reading on the bus. Thus, my go-to indicator of a great read is how surprised I am that I’ve reached my destination. With Senlin Ascends, by Josiah Bancroft, I’ve been oblivious to my journey altogether. Our protagonist, Thomas Senlin, is a newly-wed on his honeymoon to a fictional Tower of…

If the awards and critical acclaim have not steered you towards the fractious company of the two foremost English magicians of the nineteenth century, then it is unlikely my meagre addition to the chorus will tip the balance. Nevertheless, I exhort you to go get this enchanting novel. And I was enchanted.

Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer is hard sci-fi. There’s no space opera grandeur here, it’s far more profound. It offers a tender and bleak vision of how humanity changes and fails.

My second novel is called The Winter Road and it’s out in November. It’s been a journey. I’ll shortly create a page on this site with more cool stuff relating to it, but here’s the cover reveal and blurb over on the marvellous ‘The Fantasy Hive’. The cover, a part of which is this post’s…