It’s a neat little ritual, thinking about the best books I’ve read over the last year. It’s also hard to whittle it down to a manageable list. It’s also hard to remember what I’ve read half the time. With that in mind, perhaps the list then writes itself – if I can remember it, then
First published in 1994, John Berendt’s account of the 1981 killing of 21-year-old Danny Hansford in the city of Savannah, Georgia by local antiques dealer Jim Williams, ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’ received massive success on its debut, remaining a New York Times best-seller for over two hundred weeks. What made William’s
In the introduction of The Folio Society’s edition of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood writes… ‘Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction – in the line of descent from Orwell’s 1984 – not a traditional science fiction in the line of H.G Wells’s War of the Worlds.’ Her reasoning is that
Philip K Dick is in my opinion and many others the master of science fiction. His works seems to drip off the tongue when one mentions said genre, such works as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly – the list
The circus is something that has been drawing people to it since 1782 when the first recorded circus performed at the Amphithéâtre Anglois in Paris. People seem to be drawn to the circus like puss from a boil, ensnared within its tendril like fingers that creep and crawl through neighbourhoods, latching on and enticing people
The Folio Society really do make beautiful books. From the binding to the paper choice, in the subtleties of the typeset and margins, to the artwork that they use to augment the stories. If they publish a favourite of yours then they are the place to go when you want to keep that book for
Our head of books has been rather busy this year and has had a remarkable turnover of reviews. Reading everything that has come his way, from the big publishers to many a independent press and so we feel he’s the guy to talk to you about his best books of 2018 – or the year
What is interesting about literature written in the past is the omnipotent manner with which one, from our saggy hi-tech sofas in the future, can now read it: the time capsule quality of it. A quality so much more heightened when reading someone’s version of the future as written in the past, often wildly off
It is both bizarre and resonant that, in the same year Donald Trump has declared he is going to create a Space Force for planet Earth, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, by many considered one of the all-father texts of military science fiction, should be reprinted. Originally published under the title ‘Starship Soldiers’ in The
Illustration © Charles van Sandwyk 2018 from The Folio Society edition of Charles van Sandwyk’s How To See Fairies The Folio Society edition of How To See Fairies is a very special book indeed – it is so magical that one can’t help but be drawn into the world that Charles van Sandwyk has deftly and
