Gothic sci-fi horror, steampunk action and some good old detective fiction all rolled into one makes Chasm City a page turner. Tanner Mirabel, the protagonist, who is a security expert, and a hired assassin, has your attention from page one. The novel moves in flashbacks & we learn a lot more about why Tanner worked at Sky’s Edge, and why he was one day on the way to Chasm City. The mystery sustaining the pace…
Book Reviews
It’s that season of the year. Snowy evenings, foggy mornings, and early sunsets. Shadows on the streets. The quiet in the house with the radiator buzzing in the background. The quiet outside as everyone stays in avoiding the cold. The quiet everywhere. Winter is the time for ghosts to come calling. I know Halloween month is for spooky stories, but where is the fear in silly costumes and golden autumn light. No, it is the…
“Sooner or later…one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.” ― Graham Greene, The Quiet American Brighton Rock was my first exposure to Graham Greene, and it wasn’t pleasant. I found it quite morbid, but the writing appealed to me. I chanced upon ‘The Quiet American’ while staying at a friend’s place and picked it up because it was a slim book and I could get through it in a few days.…
As a reader, I stay away from the most recent bestsellers cause I am not always the biggest fan of modern prose. Once in a while, though, a book calls out to me, as did Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. I saw it recommended on all my online reading apps, propped up on the local library shelves, and finally on my Netflix feed. I don’t know if this was a cross-platform marketing conspiracy,…
Shannon Chakraborty, the Hugo-nominated author of The Daevabad Trilogy, returns with a new fantasy series set in the pirate-infested waters of the 12th-century Arabian Sea. When the novel opens, Amina, a middle-aged woman, a sea captain in retirement (or hiding, if you prefer)is attempting a quiet staid life with her aged mother and young daughter. However, she can’t escape her fearsome reputation and adventure comes knocking on her door in the form of a rich,…
Having found the first season of The Witcher forgettable and generic fantasy fare (yes, even with Henry Cavill, I wasn’t planning to read the series. However, Season 2 came around and I was totally drawn into the lives of Geralt, Ciri & Yennefer. I felt invested in the myths, the relationships and this weird, monstrous world and wanted to know more. I started my Witcher journey with The Last Wish, the first novel of this…
Shannon Chakraborty returns to the world of Daevabad with The River of Silver, an anthology of about 15 stories, which continue to add layers and meaning to this political-magical-fantasy series. This is really for the fans of the trilogy, which I highly recommend. With these extra scenes, Shannon gives voice to characters which did not have their own POV in the main series. My personal favorites are the POVs for the Qahtani siblings, Muntadhir and…
Of all the gory stories that swirl around Tower of London, none has quite the intrigue as that of Princes of Towers, pre-teen boys of King Edward V who were allegedly killed by their uncle Richard III. The White Queen is not about them. It’s a novel about their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and the long journey that she makes from an aristocratic nobody to a queen in hiding who never sees her children again. The…
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