Gaiman N, Coraline, Urban Fantasy, (Bloomsbury: 2002)
Link :Amazon, Goodreads. Price £5.94
Corliane is a bored adolescent stuck in a strange new home with parents that don’t listen to her and a cat the occasionally talks. But that isn’t the strangest thing about the house. The strangest thing is the hidden door in the drawing room; the door that leads to the other mother, the mother with the button eyes, the one that wants to keep and love and care for Coraline forever, if she’ll only let her take out her eyes.
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Pearl A, The Chair Man, Thriller, (Fizgig Press:2019)
Link: Amazon, Goodreads. £9.99
Corporate Lawyer Michael, severely injured in the 7/7 terrorist attacks, left wheelchair bound and thirsty for revenge, is on a quest to track down British jihadists that will drag his friends and family into mortal danger.
I am a disabled veteran, with some counter-terrorism training and experience, who was forced to use a wheelchair for 6 years during which time I retrained as a corporate lawyer. Oh boy.
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Damned Pirates!
I have spoken to a number of authors who were very cross to discover that their work was being pirated. I totally sympathise. Whether indie or in house, we work incredibly hard on our books, they are sold at a very reasonable price (most indie authors spend at least some time selling their e-books for 99p), and we see little of that money. To find that people are so cheap that they would rather steal our work than pay less than the price of a fifth of a bag of Maltesers is hugely frustrating. Top it off with the publishing industries plaintive wailing that piracy is destroying the industry, and it is easy to see why we get upset.
But there are several good reasons why we should not get ourselves wound up about piracy. In this article I am going to explain what they are.
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Druon M, The Strangled Queen, Historical Fiction (Harper: 2013), tr. Humphrey Hare
Link :Amazon, Goodreads. Price: £7.99
Philip the Fair is dead, and his feeble, sadistic son Louis X is King of France. Even though France is in the grip of Famine, and divided between warring factions at court, Louis is obsessed with the state of his marriage. His first wife cuckolded him and has been confined to a monastery, he cannot have the marriage annulled as there is no Pope, and he lacks the political and financial power to install a new Pope. Will victory for this weak-minded King be the beginning of the end for France?
I have spoken elsewhere of how Druon is both a fabulous historian and writer, and this book reads just as well as the first in the Accursed Kings series. It does, however, face a particular problem: the reader already knows the outcome. You do not need to know anything of the history of France to be aware that if a King wants rid of one wife to replace with another, he is going to get his way. Plus, there is the title of the book.
Druon’s clever solution is to tell you straight away. He is totally up front about how things are going to work out for Louis (in this regard), and the long-term consequences for France. This lets him concentrate on the ancillaries, the nobles and clergymen and bankers, fighting one another to be the one to realise or defy the Kings wishes, and whether or not they will survive them. It makes for compelling reading – almost like wondering who will get off the Titanic. This is a time when life is precarious and power fleeting, and I thoroughly enjoyed the twists and turns on the way to the strangling of the Queen.
Rating: *****
Norrie J, The Magic Carpet, (Indie:2019)
Link: Amazon, Goodreads. Price £9.99
London, 2016, and a community primary school sets its eight-year olds a project: to adapt a traditional fairy tale for the school festival. But this is not a united community. Adults and children with different ethnicities and backgrounds are struggling with all the problems with family life in an England that seems to be becoming increasingly hostile to anything they define as “foreign” (be they born in England or not.) Will the story of The Magic Carpet draw these families together or will the strands fall apart?
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