Category Archives: Books

The Girl With All The Gifts

The Girl With All The Gifts – M. R Carey

The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey is the kind of book that benefits from the reader knowing as little as possible beforehand; the blurb on the cover gives almost nothing away, save to hint at the protagonist’s plight and begin to build the reader’s sympathies. For those who don’t want anything that might spoil the story, suffice to say this is a tightly-plotted, compulsive read that’s at once a bleak look at how mankind might react under terrible circumstances and a compassionate tale of what makes us human. If you are a fan of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson or more modern writers like Justin Cronin (author of The Passage) then look no further; this should appeal. If you want to know a little more, without any actual spoilers, then read on.

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Blood and Fire

Blood and Fire – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Helsreach, Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s novel set during the Third War for Armageddon, was the second ever Space Marine Battles book. A couple of years after its release it was repackaged in a new edition entitled Armageddon along with a companion novella, Blood and Fire. That novella is now available as a standalone volume for those who already have Helsreach, and it picks up just days after the events that concluded the previous story. Reclusiarch Grimaldus is once again front and centre, this time investigating claims by the Celestial Lions, a fellow successor chapter of the Imperial Fists, that the Inquisition is deliberately driving them to destruction. Only a handful of the chapter remain, and Grimaldus is faced with the difficult decision of whether to support them in a last, glorious charge or find a way to help them rebuild their shattered forces.

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Honour of the Space Marines

Honour of the Space Marines – Black Library Anthology

Black Library tend to release a short story anthology to coincide with each of their events. The 2014 Weekender was no different, with Honour of the Space Marines available, a six-story anthology featuring everyone’s favourite 41st-millennium super soldiers. As with the other ‘…of the Space Marines’ collections (except perhaps ‘Treacheries of…’) the title is a bit misleading, as this only loosely a themed anthology. It’s more about showing the next steps in story arcs that the authors are already known for, from long-established characters to newer, less familiar faces.

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Sabbat Crusade – edited by Dan Abnett

From humble beginnings back in the 1990s, there are now eighteen books set within the Sabbat Worlds, a region of space originally invented by Dan Abnett to provide a suitable setting for a story about a Commissar who was also a Colonel, and the ragtag bunch of soldiers he commanded. Look how it’s grown! With anticipation as high as ever for Warmaster, the long-awaited next novel in the Gaunt’s Ghosts series, Black Library are whetting our appetite with Sabbat Crusade, the second anthology of stories set within the wider crusade. Edited once again by Abnett and including stories from eight authors (Abnett included) along with previously out of print background on the crusade, it covers both sides of the story, not only the Ghosts and their Imperial allies but also the forces of the Archenemy at play in the region.

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Foxglove Summer

Foxglove Summer – Ben Aaronovitch

Ben Aaronovitch, author of the Peter Grant series that started with Rivers of London and is now up to its fifth book, is a cruel man. First he ends his last book, Broken Homes, with an earth-shattering twist that nobody can have seen coming, then he makes us wait extra long for the next book to be released. Now it’s finally here, in the shape of Foxglove Summer, he’s teasing us, withholding the information we really want in favour of having Peter dragged off to the middle of nowhere to help look for missing children, 150 miles away from London, Nightingale and the Met. All the while he’s feeding us little titbits regarding the events at the end of Broken Homes; clearly he has big plans for the next instalments in the series.

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Broken Homes

Broken Homes – Ben Aaronovitch

The fourth in Ben Aaronovitch’s popular Peter Grant series, Broken Homes continues the story that started in 2011 with Rivers of London, followed by Moon Over Soho (also 2011) and Whispers Under Ground (2012). Part police procedural, part supernatural detective thriller, each book follows Grant around different parts of London as he tackles the kind of crimes that most coppers just don’t like having to deal with. Along the way he’s encountered argumentative river deities, jazz vampires, various ghosts and plenty of unhappy senior officers, seen his best friend possessed by the violent spirit of Mr Punch, and been buried underneath one of the platforms at Oxford Circus.

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Legacies of Betrayal – Black Library anthology

2014 was a bumper year for the Horus Heresy. We saw the 29th and 30th books in the series released, Vengeful Spirit and Damnation of Pythos respectively, as well as a goodly number of novellas, anthologies, audio dramas and short stories. Now, on the one hand many Black Library fans are the kind of people who in the interests of completion will buy any new story as soon as it’s made available, while on the other hand many fans are unwilling or unable to fork out vast sums of money for limited edition releases, or just can’t get their head around audio dramas. If you’re Black Library, what do you do? How do you cater to both sets of fans? Well, with Legacies of Betrayal sneaking in just before the end of the year to make it 31 in the series, it looks like you release as much as you can in as many different formats as you can, then bring out an anthology that collects a bunch of those stories together in one place.

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Brotherhood of the Storm

Brotherhood of the Storm – Chris Wraight

Chris Wraight’s Brotherhood of the Storm is a Horus Heresy novella which gave us our first proper look at the Heresy-era White Scars. It was originally released as a standalone novella, first a posh limited edition version but now available on the Black Library website in print, ebook and audio formats, but it also comprises the first story within Legacies of Betrayal, the 31st full book in the Horus Heresy series. That does mean that completists may well end up owning it twice, but it also means that fans who don’t want to fork out for the hardback novellas can now get their hands on it in a more palatable format.

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The Seventh Serpent – Graham McNeill

The Horus Heresy series grinds ever onwards with the release of the eleventh (!) limited-edition novella, The Seventh Serpent, the first such novella from Graham McNeill. Black Library kept this one nice and quiet and sprung it as a surprise for those attending the Black Library Weekender III event (2014), prior to its general release. The typically brilliant Neil Roberts cover art appears to show Alpha Legion fighting each other, with a handful of Iron Hands thrown in for good measure, though as ever with the XXth Legion things are possibly not quite what they seem. Underneath the dust jacket the book’s cover shows an Iron Hands legion symbol, cracked and shattered, while the back cover sees a scrawled message of ‘For the Emperor’.

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The Whitechapel Demon

The Whitechapel Demon – Josh Reynolds

There’s a saying that if you want something doing you should ask a busy person to do it; well Josh Reynolds should be considered at the top of any shortlist of candidates. His published output so far in 2014 comes to 12 short stories, 3 novellas, 5 novels and 1 audio drama, with a further 18 pieces of work listed on his website with publication dates still to come. His work spans many publishers, and characters both well-known and less so, including his own Adventures of the Royal Occultist series, the first novel of which is 2013’s The Whitechapel Demon. Set in 1920s London this follows the adventures of Charles St. Cyprian and Ebe Gallowglass as they tackle the kind of jobs that the police aren’t qualified for, such as dealing with a blood-hungry mummy and trying to stop the reincarnated Jack the Ripper from continuing on his bloody rampage through the East End of London.

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