The Vagrant

Peter Newman, 2015

(August 2017)

I remember this book generating a fair bit of buzz a couple of years back, but it doesn’t really live up to it (or, to be fairer and more accurate, to my memory of it). There are a lot of interesting parts here, but somehow it never quite adds up to more than the sum of them.

City of Blades

Robert Jackson Bennett, 2016

(February 2017)

Excellent storytelling; just one more chapter and suddenly it’s 3 A.M. stuff. It's also dedicated to "Sir Terry", which pretty much guarantees that I'm going to look on it favourably.

The Dark Defiles

Richard Morgan, 2014

(January 2016)

  

And so as winter sets in and the cold (theoretically) descends, I find myself yearning for the muscular embrace of a hefty slab of epic fantasy. Thus I finally get round to finishing Morgan’s A Land Fit for Heroes trilogy, which is clearly an explicit deconstruction of the genre so is all ever-so-slightly clever-clever, but also swords! and dragons! and blood oaths!