If you are
interested in crime, dystopian or fantasy books, these are my top picks from my
Christmas reading!
Spinning
silver by Naomi Novik
I loved this
book set in Russia in the depths of winter. Miryem is the daughter of an unsuccessful
moneylender who takes over the job herself to stop her family from starving.
Her success attracts the attention of the Fairy King of Winter who kidnaps her
so that she can turn his silver into gold. In her desperation to succeed she
unwittingly draws in Irina, a daughter of a lord, whose father wants her to
marry the Tzar who harbours a demon that could destroy them all. Echoes of
various fairy tales including Rumpelstiltskin but beautifully done and good and
evil are not always what they seem. Oh, and never make bargains with demons or fairy
kings!
The book of
M by Peng Shepherd.
A debut
author with a great original story. People all over the world suddenly start
losing their shadows and discover that this means that they also start losing
their memories. The novel follows a husband and wife who hole up in a deserted
shack safe until Max loses her shadow. Terrified she is going to forget Ory and
become dangerous to him, she runs away and Ory tries to follow her. The story
tells of their separate journeys, the people they meet and the link between
forgetting and the power of magic. It is part dystopia, part fantasy and part a
human story of dementia with Indian myths and legends thrown in. The last half
of book is much faster in pace than the first so you need to stick with the
story because right at the end there is an unexpected but very poignant ending
that stayed with me and threw up interesting moral questions on what it means
to be who we are. I would thoroughly recommend it.
Bodies from
the library edited by Tony Medawar.
Lost tales
of detectives, mystery and suspense by various authors, all previously
unpublished and all written in the ‘Golden Age of Crime Fiction’ i.e. between
the two World Wars. Some authors like Agatha Christie I had heard of and others
were completely unknown. Amazingly, all the stories were really good, not
usually the case in a short story collection. After each story, the editor had
written a short biography of that author which was interesting and enabled one
to put the author in context. A must read for anyone into crime fiction and
very enjoyable.
Mrs Godden