You can usually never go wrong with a Heinlein novel and this one is no exception. Inequality, whether real or perceived always seems to spawn the most dreadful atrocities and longevity is no exception. What if tomorrow you realized there were people who could routinely live to be five hundred years old? You get educated, [...]

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Just when you thought you’d read everything by Asimov, this book comes along. Forget the Three Laws of Robotics and all that, this book is much more direct in its dichotomy of good and evil. The good guys are the victors of WW2 and the bad guys are the Nazis, as usual. Not only do [...]

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Neil Gaiman weaves many small tales of note in this volume of short stories. I have long maintained that the short story as an art form is somewhat superior to the long novel, because the author has lesser time to concoct, elaborate and climax a germ of an idea. Gaiman, luckily for us, does not [...]

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Ken Follett picks up the story he’d finished in Pillars of the Earth in World Without End. The cathedral at Kingsbridge has been built, and life is fine, but there is fresh trouble brewing. There is always fresh trouble brewing in historical novels, like a pot of tepid coffee at a roadside diner. Follett reverses [...]

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Sea of Poppies shines a light on the opium trade between Britain, India and China in the 19th century. This is a strange book for its examination of this insidious mercantile endeavour is done in not just the Queen’s English, but a jumbled pidgin of English, Hindi, Persian and a little French. You really need [...]

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Margaret George‘s gorgeous book Helen of Troy retells the story of the Trojan war from the point of view of Helen. Who really was she? And was her face indeed that beautiful, so as to launch a thousand ships? George examines the case from Helen’s perspective and we are the richer for it. Growing up, [...]

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Once upon a time, Houdini set the gold standard for legerdemain and prestidigitation. Glen David Gold takes us back to that era with Carter Beats the Devil, a book about Charles Carter, a magician accused of the murder of President Harding. Harding was a willing participant in Carter’s show and especially its climactic finale, where [...]

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This one should give all you incorrigible romantics some hope. How long can one wait for unrequited love? A year? Ten? Try fifty. In Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez pens another masterpiece that showcases his skill at intuitively divining just what people think at those moments that define their lives. Fermina [...]

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What an extraordinarily good find this book was. H. F. Saint is a writer of some calibre who entertains us with this novel about an invisible man in the modern age. While the original story of an invisible man was given a thoroughly Victorian treatment of scandal and deception by the masterful Wells, this novel [...]

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If you’re a lifelong fan of Beatrix Potter, then The Tale of Oat Cake Crag will gladden your heart, laddie! Susan Wittig Albert weaves a tale about the charming bucolic idyll of England shattered by the rude introduction of mechanized progress, to wit, a noisy hydroplane. It is the era before WWII and the British [...]

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