It’s a very strong month for sci-fi, and some good stuff in thrillers and Non-Fiction. Not much in the classics and contemporary fiction veins, but I think overall a good month for Kindle bargains and most people could spend a fiver fruitfully. As ever, there are other bargains for prices as extortionate as £2.99 but I try and stick to the 99p limit.
Detective and Thrillers
Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey – classic detective story about the true fate of Richard III
The Nine Taylors – Dorothy L Sayers
First of the Lord Peter Wimsy series – Golden Age Detective fiction
Prussian Blue – Philip Kerr
Much-loved Bernie Gunther no 2. For those new to these Bernie is in the Berlin police in twenties – forties Berlin and so the novels explore police procedurals during the Nazi era.
Non Fiction
The Age of Football: The Global Game in the Twenty-first Century by David Goldblatt
Mammoth investigation into the last 20 years of the game. As a City fan I am not expecting us to come out of it well.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
Vietnam war classic.
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safar Froer
I like this writer a lot, and this is his manifesto around factory farming and the impact of meat on the environment.
Sci-Fi
The Fated Sky (The Lady Astronaut Book 2) by Mary Robinette Kowal
I have read the books either side of this one in the sequence, and suspect this will make little sense without reading volume 1. Kowal’s alternative history of the space race is curious in the extreme, but after two volumes I think that’s enough for me.
Gridlinked Neal Asher
Like Adrian Tchiakovsky Asher writes too much and the law of diminishing returns sets in. This, the first of the Cormac novels, is a cracking genre read and would go down well with any fans of Altered Carbon for example.
The Wandering Earth by Cixin Liu
Now a po-faced but strangely compelling party-approved Chinese blockbuster on Netflix (watched a few weeks ago). A collection of stories with the title the one that was filmed. I like the Three Body-Problem a lot but have not read this yet.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
A modern classic of steampunk socialist sci-fi fantasy. First of the Bas Leg series followed by The Iron Council and The Scar. If you’ve not read this then you really should. The BBC proved that his stuff is fairly unfilmable with The City and The City, so if you’re still scarred by that mess here’s a great chance to move on.
The Man Who Fell To Earth – Walter Tevis
A classic example of the rule that second rate literature makes first rate movies IMHO.
Roadside Picnic – Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
Actually, this is a cracking novel too and the basis of course of Stalker. A case of first-rate literature making one of the greatest films ever made.
Contact by Carl Sagan
Workmanlike prose and basic characters, but the science is as you might expect sound and interesting for this very eighties novel of first contact.
NOVELS
Not read either of these but both writers with excellent reputations.
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Really interested to hear from people who watched the TV series of City and the City without reading the novel first – could you work out anything about what was going on?
Couple of good thrillers – John Lawton’s Blackout – first in his excellent Frederick Troy series, plus a recent Belinda Bauer whose title i am ashamed to say i am far too lazy to look up
The Nine Tailors (not Taylors) is an absolutely brilliant yarn. You’ll never hear church bells again without being reminded of this book. It isn’t the first Wimsey book, though, it’s well into the canon.
Ah yes -‘number 11’ not ‘1’ and the Bernie Gunther is 12 not 2. Corrections corner.
Grabbed “Prussian Blue”.
I think I read “The Nine Tailors many years ago. Too many to remember but I do remember the Lord Peter Whimsey TV series, which was also a long time ago. Think I’ll grab that one too.
Ive been picking up the kindle editions of the “All the Songs’ series when they have been discounted, as they invariably are. Anyway Amazon e-mailed me to tell me that the Springsteen edition is £3.99; bought. Not sure If its time limited and the kindle editions don’t include photos etc. but they are a snip at that reduced price.