When I first stumbled across The Story of Fester Cat, on Amazon I think, I was equal parts interested and dubious. I'm very fond of cats; I have mixed feelings about Pauls Magrs' work; and I was concerned about the twee potential of a memoir written from a cat's point of view. The book opens with a critique of another cat memoir in which the ( Read more... )

I've always struggled a bit with Paul Magrs' Doctor Who novels, though I liked the one original novel of his that I read. Magrs has always been something of a champion of the "silly" in Doctor Who and, while I don't like my Doctor Who particularly grim and serious, I've always had a feeling that the silliness I like about it is rather different ( Read more... )

One the whole I would rate The Eyeless as an above average NuWho novel, but it makes quite a strange read, particularly since I recall the author discussing it on Doctor Who book mailing lists as he was writing. If I remember correctly, Parkin deliberately set out to show that the NuWho tie-in novels could tackle the same kind of material that the ( Read more... )

Believe it or not, I purchased The Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin because of a crossover Sherlock fanfic that I liked but which seems to have vanished from AO3.

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Conservation of Shadows is a short story collection with a mix of SF, Fantasy and blurred-somewhere-in-the-middle tales. There are consistent themes running through the stories, most notably an idea that art has a physical effect on the world, but a lot are also about war: invasion, occupation and battle. Depending on where on the genre spectrum ( Read more... )

The Story of Martha purports to tell the story of the year Martha spent walking the Earth at the end of Season 3 of NuWho and spreading word of the Doctor's plan to defeat the Master. I thought that sounded like a promising premise for a Doctor Who book and so picked this up. I was also interested to read something by Dan Abnett since his ( Read more... )

Windscale, 1957 is yet another book liberated from my father's shelves. It is an account both of the events that lead up to the Windscale fire in 1957 and the subsequent inquires which attempted to ascertain the cause and apportion blame ( Read more... )

Mary Robinette Kowal's Jane Austen-esque fantasy stories get quite widely referenced (at least in the online places I tend to hang out). I've nothing against the concept of Regency-based fantasy - in fact I'm a fan in general of non-medieval fantasy. However, I'll admit I entered this with a certain scepticism about Jane Austen-esque fantasy. ( Read more... )

The Idylls of the Queen is one of my favourite Arthurian novels, so I was interested to learn that its author, Phyllis Ann Kerr, had written a fantasy sequence (or at least duology) with rather pretty titles (do not underestimate a the power of a pretty title). I obviously wasn't paying enough attention however and so ended up with Frostflower and ( Read more... )

Someone must have recommended the novels (of which this is the first) to me at some point because I can't imagine I'd have picked them up on spec anywhere. I've no idea who or why, though whoever it was has my thanks. I really enjoyed this ( Read more... )