I very much enjoyed the first book in the cosy fantasy series that has took the bookish community by storm—you can read my review of Legends & Lattes here—and so I was very excited when I saw that another entry was in the works. As with all things on the endless TBR, it’s taken me a while to get to Bookshops & Bonedust but it certainly provided me with some lovely, warm respite this winter...

I picked up How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino precisely for the reason you might think: It was touted as the inspiration behind Hayao Miyazaki’s latest Studio Ghibli movie, The Boy and the Heron. And I think I may have misunderstood what that meant at first. But after correcting my impressions, I still wanted to give it a read. It’s my first real foray into literary fiction and while there...

The covers for the Weight of the World trilogy are all so good it’s almost unfair. They look absolutely fantastic. So, Recall Order is my first indie of 2025! I’ve been really enjoying this trilogy so far, and I do highly recommend picking them up if you like military sci-fi, space opera, mechs and alien invasion stories. But with this second instalment we can add terrorism thrillers and espion...

If you had told me when I was a teenager struggling to get through The Lord of the Rings and bouncing off the Entmoot that I would one day not only gleefully smash through the whole trilogy but then follow it up by reading The Silmarillion in just one week, I’d have laughed in your face. But inexplicably, here we are. And as personal reading achievements go, this one is something of which I am...

I liked doing this reading wrap-up thing last year. It gave me an opportunity to showcase once again all the books I read and reviewed this year. Review posts are often ephemeral—even though they’re on the internet forever, once they’ve been posted on the socials, they’re quickly forgotten and buried. So this is a great chance to bring some more well-deserved attention to the books...

Dragonmeat is another of the books from the first SFINCS competition that I have been meaning to read for a long time. Initially I thought it was going to be a bit longer than the previous two I’ve read, but the book ended while I was still at 75% on the Kindle, and this is because the first chapter of Fortune’s Fool, the first novel in the Eterean Empire series, is included at the back as a...

Continuing on with my decision to read some of the novellas from last year’s Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championships, here we have contest winner A Sorrow Named Joy by Sarah Chorn. The cover art on this book is wonderful, and after reading, it really captures a lot of the heart of the character of Joy. Although I will freely admit that I’m a bit of an idiot. Before I realised what this...

The second annual Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championships (SFINCS) is well underway and almost into its second round, and it’s an exciting time for all of this year’s entrants. It’s well worth keeping an eye on for some incredible novellas to add to your burgeoning TBRs. So I decided that it was high time I actually read some of the books from my fellow entrants from last year’s...

Here we are at last. It’s been a long time coming—years in the trying—but I have finally finished a full read-through of The Lord of the Rings. After the surprising ease of reading The Two Towers, The Return of the King was a step into totally uncharted waters. And what a remarkable ending this was for the trilogy. I’ve stopped my read at the end of the narrative chapters, short of the...

I mentioned in my review of The Fellowship of the Ring that when I tried to read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager, I only ever managed to get about halfway through before dropping it. In truth I don’t recall how many times I tried, but it was certainly more than once, and certainly at least once at university. The sticking point was always The Two Towers. Specifically the Entmoot, which is...

It’s been a very long time since I last attempted to read The Lord of the Rings. I was a young teenager when I first picked up a ratty old combined edition paperback that was the size of a brick, and this was naturally off the back of the Peter Jackson movie trilogy. Back then I got as far as about halfway through The Two Towers when I crashed out, finding the Entmoot mind-numbingly boring...

It’s been a long time coming, but with the reading of The Other Wind, this brings all the main books of Earthsea to an end. I also followed up the book with the short story, Firelight, which wraps everything up, and reader, I am bereft. Journeying through Earthsea has been an absolute joy, and this combined illustrated edition, by which I read the last three books and the short stories...

Earthsea is one of my favourite series. As I’ve spent the years gradually going through all the books, each one has been utterly remarkable and special. Nobody writes like Ursula K. Le Guin. Tales From Earthsea is no different. It’s a bit of an oddity amongst the rest of the books, being a collection of shorter tales rather than one long narrative, but it’s no less impactful...

Honestly I thought I’d hit the peak weird of the Dune Saga with God Emperor of Dune and that the final two books would be dealing with the fallout while coming back down the mountain. But like a car salesman slapping the roof of an old jalopy, Heretics of Dune is where Frank Herbert confidently declares that there’s plenty of weird in this baby yet. Only, this time the series pivots...

I have really enjoyed J.D. Sanderson’s work in the past. If you haven’t already, you can check out my review for his twilight-zone inspired short story collection Around the Dark Dial here. I like it when sci-fi books teach me something new about science or astronomy (it’s not a requirement for me, but it’s nice when it happens) but I’ve never had that happen right on the title page before...

A dark, corporate dystopian sci-fi novella full of action and intrigue from Rohan O’Duill. I’d like to take a moment to praise the cover art for Cold Rising. It’s really well composed, and I love the use of Mars to replace the O in ‘Cold’. The cover is initially what attracted me to this, and as with all the ebooks on my Kindle, it’s been there a while and I definitely wish I had gotten to it...

I very much enjoyed J. Dianne Dotson’s space opera quadrilogy, The Questrison Saga, and so I’m at the point now where anything from this author is bound to pique my interest. The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern is a whimsical young adult lunarpunk adventure—a genre I have never read before, but I really dig the vibes. Think a civilisation that lives in dark forests or at night with plenty of...

By now you all know how much I enjoyed Witch in the Lighthouse, and so I jumped at the chance when author Azalea Forrest put out a call for ARC readers for its sequel, A Witch in Isenshire, a book which I had the privilege of helping to reveal the cover for recently. I’ve really come to enjoy cosy fantasy as a genre, and if you had told me this would be the case a few years ago...

Howl’s Moving Castle is one of my favourite Studio Ghibli movies (that’s not really saying a lot, because most of the movies in Studio Ghibli’s catalogue are my favourite movies lol!) But I was intrigued to read the original children’s fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones, and I was surprised to learn it’s only the first book in a whole trilogy. Let me just take a moment to praise the cover art…

There’s not enough mechs taking centre-stage in sci-fi books, and that’s a real shame because they’re awesome. I’ve gained a new appreciation for them since playing Armored Core VI last year, and I even watched some Gundam for the first time since then. Reality Check is all about mechs. A hotshot young Cyber Cycle racer turned mech pilot defending Earth against a hostile alien invasion. Great premise.