PREMISE: Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter’s research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. The story follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world.
On Goodreads, some bellend called Henk writes a review of this book that says something like ‘Great ideas but lacking execution’. Well, fuck off Henk. Sorry, I must have missed your Booker Prize-winning novel. You judgemental twat. Anyway, this is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time with a heart and emotional punch that is pretty breathtaking. Absolutely loved it, which is reflected in the fact that it’s the 2024 Portland Award winner.
PREMISE: Audiologist Henry Latimer is sent to the home of industrialist Sir Edward Ashmore-Percy and tasked with curing the man’s young daughter, Philomel, of her deafness. But Henry, eager to escape a troubled past, quickly becomes obsessed with the fascinating nature of Sir Edward’s business: spinning silk with a rare and magical breed of spiders. The extraordinary silk shields sound, offering respite from bustling streets and noisy neighbors. The result is instant tranquility, as wearers experience a soothing calmness. Yet, those within earshot of the outward-facing silk are subjected to eerie murmurs that amplify with proximity. Bystanders suffer the consequences of this unnerving phenomenon, manifesting in physical and mental afflictions ranging from headaches and drowsiness to severe cases of madness.
As Henry becomes entangled in the allure of the silk and Sir Edward’s charm, he glimpses a more sinister family history. The closer he ventures into the inner circle of Carthmute House, the more he unravels the horrifying underbelly of the silk business.
One of the reasons I love reading is due to the relationship you can have with a book. Providing it’s a belter, it becomes something you love and get totally lost in while you’re reading it and something you miss when you’re not. Which is exactly what this book is. As are Bridget Collins’ other two books. Loved it.
PREMISE: Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.
You ever read a book and think “Shit, I wish I’d written that”, only to realise that you don’t have the talent, imagination or intelligence to do it? That’s me with this book. The 2nd-best book I read in 2023…
PREMISE: We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK’s presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination—in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C….
Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy…
Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man’s loyalty…
Where three renegade law-enforcement officers—a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents—are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history….
My all-time favourite book. Read it more times than I can remember and it’s an absolute fucking monstrous ride through America’s shittest period every time I read it. Follow it up with The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s A Rover and you have the finest body of non-fiction fiction ever written. Totally masterful and, for me, something everyone should read if you want to understand even a little more of the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and the utter corruption of the United States. This may be fiction, but it’s likely right on the money.
PREMISE: When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive in Money, Mississippi, to investigate a series of brutal murders, they find at each crime scene an unexpected second body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. After meeting resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist white townsfolk, the MBI detectives suspect these are killings of retribution. Then they discover eerily similar murders taking place in rapid succession all over the country.
Man, this was one funny, entertaining book. Dark and funny as hell and Percival Everett is clearly as mad as a box of frogs. And have I mentioned it’s funny? If I had Everett’s sense of humour I reckon I would have been better-liked at school. Brilliant, brilliant book.
PREMISE: Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.
My most recently read book (well, it was when I wrote this…one of the many downsides of ‘time’). Not that that has anything to do with anything. In fact, I’m not entirely sure why I said it and now I’m running out of (admittedly self-imposed) space to explain how fantastic this book is. It just is. Loved it. ESJM is such a beautiful writer.
PREMISE: Who is Yahya Bas? Revolutionary poet, notorious jihadist, misbegotten son, self-styled idiot-boy. When the enigmatic Yahya finds himself languishing in a detention center after fleeing the conflict in Syria, he has many questions to face.
What was he doing in the desert? Why did he betray his home country? What led him to write the incendiary verses that launched him into international infamy? Mister, his interrogator, wants answers. So Yahya resolves to tell his own story, in his own words, and on his own terms.
Wow. This fucker hits home and gets you thinking. The book, that is. Well, the author as well, I guess, as he wrote it but I wasn’t referring to him as a fucker. But fair to say that fucker has written another fantastic book.
PREMISE: Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena is a literary darling while June is a nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls?, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse, stealing Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I.
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.
But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
I’m back on Goodreads for this one as I knew this caused some debate and where there’s debate, there’s bellends. Some colossal twat called Clive Williamstein wrote this elloquent diatribe:
“There are no people in this book. There are only “white people” “Asian people” and “cis-het people”. Because you know how everyone fits neatly into those categories and it tells you everything you need to know about them? When referencing or thinking about another human being, their race is the only real important thing to consider.
I hate the protagonist, and not for the reasons I’m supposed to. We are supposed to accept that this person believes in actual literal ghosts and makes decisions accordingly. Fuck off.
I’ll save you some time… white people are all bad, successful people are all women, dumb people are all men, Asian people are all awesome and hard done by. Feeling slightly guilty about being a piece of shit makes people believe in ghosts and attempt murder. The end”
Now, I’m all for people having their own opinions. As I’ve said in other reviews, all books are either liked or disliked…that’s okay…that’s how it works. But Clive then signed off his review with this beauty:
“Fuck this book and everyone who gave it 2 stars or more”
Which, for me, lends a completely different slant to his review. Whereas he might have come across as being someone who was trying to make a point about race (and this book certainly encourages people to do that), with that last sentence he now just comes across as an old, white, grumpy, argumentative, racist prick.
As for the book itself, I really enjoyed it and absolutely flew through it. It’s an entertaining story and fantastically, addictively well-written and that’s all I’m after from a book.
PREMISE: In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.
From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future?
This is probably up there in my top 5 favourite books of all time. Scarily, eerily, worryingly-as-fuck accurate in terms of (a) what’s likely to happen with climate change and the planet and (b) what can happen when people as stupid and as stupidly dangerous as Trump continue to get into power. An absolute must-read.
PREMISE: A rollicking history of England’s earliest kings and queens, a story of narcissists, excessive beheadings, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars, and more, from award-winning British actor and comedian David Mitchell
Think you know the kings and queens of England? Think again.
In Unruly , David Mitchell explores how early England’s monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects’ destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky bastards who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear to us today in their portraits.
Either we let/make David Mitchell write every history book from now or we bring in a law that says that every author has to copy him. This is how history books should be written. Informative whilst being funny as fuck. Loved it.
Portable Wonderland 