Steve Jones is a British TV presenter. I’ve never seen him, but apparently he’s good natured. Call Time starts slow then charges towards several genre cliches, so I was looking for reasons to to file it under DNF. Unfortunately, that good nature comes across in his writing, giving it just enough momentum to keep you…

This is about as unique as you can get! Cara lost her factory job and her benefits have expired – the whole novel is a one-sided series of interviews with a welfare department employee who is assisting her with getting another job and assessing whether she’s eligible for further benefits. Sounds pretty dull, eh? Well,…

If you could know how long you had left to live, would you want to know? Would you do things differently? Would you be prejudiced against people with shorter lives? Maybe not hire them? Or not date them perhaps? The Measure asks many of these questions. The eight or so main characters are in different…

In an interview, Kurt Vonnegut explained that he writes all his novels in short, uncluttered sentences, never using words or phrases that a teenager couldn’t understand. He joked this was because he wanted to get onto high-school curriculums, and the sight of a semi-colon would scare the kids off. This simplicity also generates a fairy…

As debuts go, this is impressive and I’m sure Jon Ransom has a healthy writing career ahead of him. The problem, I felt, was that he tried to cram all his creative ideas into a single book – dysfunctional family, (non-)romantic trysts, and a bit of the supernatural (or mental health, it’s never made clear).…

The Whispering Muse is a good summer read – well, late autumn read I guess now. It’s well paced, describes the theatre and the productions well, and is easy to read. The ending felt rushed (was the deadline looming or was the mortgage payment due!), and I’m sure it’ll be forgettable in weeks, but it’ll…

Tim Ferriss has recommended this book several times, so I was keen to give it a try, but wow, this was a slog. I believe it was transcribed from de Mello’s classes and presentations, and may be in the flesh it works better, but in the written word it comes across as smug and arrogant.…

I read George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardot a few years ago and was blown away by his creativity and narrative style. He takes well-used concepts, strips them bare, then reassembles them into unique and quirky stories. This collection of shorts certainly won’t be for everyone – his inventive use of language and punctuation takes…

Lessons is more biography than novel. It follows the span or Roland Baines’s life, from his youth in the Middle East to his twilight days in London, and because of the length and slow pacing I felt at times that I was living this in real-time! Every description is huge, passing characters are given full…

Could you alter genome sequences to give yourself superhuman advantages? Could you run for miles without fatigue, use two computers at once, absorb multiple media sources simultaneously? That’s the premise of Upgrade. This amazingly researched, fast paced thriller often feels like it’s a movie script, and I suspect it won’t be long before someone snaps…