All about one of those poor eedjits that everyone, including themselves, think are thick, and about land and corruption and money and bullying and cheating and lying pushing one poor eedjit to braking point. A haunting, beautifully written, painfully observed book, as tight and taut as a thriller, evoking the claustrophobia of the countryside when all your protections and protectors are taken from you and it turn out they've left you ill-prepared for life on your own. The great tragedy is that he was never as big an eedjit as everyone, including himself, thinks, and that even people who think they're great eedjits can find some solace and company, but only if they're allowed.

Melanie is a little girl who lives in a cell under heavily armed guard, who goes to lessons five days a week with other children, all strapped down tight in wheelchairs. The world outside is full of mindless things called hungries, human survivors live in a walled town, and Melanie and her friends may be the salvation of the world. Or not.

Sometimes you work out what's going to happen, and you know it's not gonna be pretty and if you're in a weakened disposition like me - laid up with a sprained ankle in the heat and humidity of Summer - you have to fight against the sense of dread you feel as you get closer and closer to being right. Honestly, I wouldn't have made the effort only it's just so damn well written. Melanie's voice of innocent but highly intelligent youth seeing the world with new eyes is brilliantly conveyed, but so are the other characters, particularly no-nonsense Sergeant Parks. The pacing is flatout but never seems rushed, the plotting excellent, the ideas scary, the suspense high. It says something that a high-end zombie novel can be marketed now as a mainstream thriller. I expect it helps that this one has real emotional resonance.

So the voice and the style and pace and the heart of the book won out over the dread, and I devoured the book with the ravenous fungal speed of a hungry. But I was not wrong.

The Abominable is an epic ripping Boy's Own yarn of adventures and peril and derring-do in the Himalayas. That's what it turns out to be, at any rate, though it plays a few clever games of misdirection and sleight-of-hand with reader expectations. Those familiar with previous epic historical yarns, Drood and The Terror will be primed neither to take anything at face value nor to be sure what to expect around the next glacier.

Our hero is Jake Perry, callow young American graduate tooling around the Alps with two new-found friends, one English, one French. At the summit of the Matterhorn, upon reading their sandwich wrapping, they hear the news that Mallory and Irvine have vanished on Everest, along with two others not part of the Mallory expedition. The news prompts the Englishman, Deacon, to seek funding from a grieving mother to go to Everest and search for a missing body, though the real purpose for the three climbers will be the summit of Everest itself.

There follows and extended period of preparation and investigation, priming both the characters and the readers with equipment and information for the coming climb. Simmons takes a science-fiction writer's delight in the technological advances that will make the climb possible while familiarising the reader with the language and techniques that will be employed in the Himalayas. Meanwhile, mystery surrounds the deaths of the other two climbers, and an unwelcome cousin could threaten to derail the whole exercise. At last, the mountain is reached and the search begins, but as has already been intimated by the book blurb, events are due to take a dark and bloody turn.

Despite the lengthy preamble before the action begins, this is a pacy, lively, fascinating tale, and when the action truly starts it never lets up. The book does play a trick on the reader, and it might annoy some, but I thought it was clever and there was a point to it. If I have any real reservations, it's to do with the bloody fate of the native redshirts, an aspect of colonial adventure fiction which Simmons doesn't manage to subvert as well as he does other, similar aspects. Which is a flaw in an otherwise hugely entertaining book.

Clever yet heartfelt sci fi from Vaughan and Staples. Lovers from bitterly opposing sides in a galactic war on the run in a plant-based space-ship with their baby and their ghostly baby-sitter and pursued by both a bounty-hunter with a lie-detecting cat who teams up with one of the lovers' exes, AND a royal prince from an android race who is allied to one of the sides, suddenly find this peaceful existence disrupted by the arrival of one set of parents. This they now do.

Fleeing the smallpox that kills his parents, Jack Parker, his sister Lula and their Grandfather encounter some very bad men on a river-crossing, ending with Jack alone and Lula carried off. His efforts to rescue his sister are bolstered by an unlikely pair of bounty-hunters and their hog, and he soon finds his faith and his set ideas tested by what he encounters on the trail.

It's Lansdale, so you know to expect the unexpected, but this is a marvelously palatable mix of Tom Sawyer and True Grit, pitching the compassionate against the mindlessly violent, with a little help from the more mindfully violent to keep them more or less alive and whole. It all leads down to a dense green wilderness hideaway and a brilliantly executed, utterly shambolic, bloody and chaotic shootout.

More of Leckie's wonderful Cherryh-meets-Banks space opera, with the drama moved to a station cut off from the rest of the Empire, but possibly about to become central to the growing conflict. Breq is now Fleet Captain, though this is but a poor echo of her former self. She encounters complication after complication, some caused by the civil war, some by old class and power structures and attendant abuses and transgressions and one by her effort to make some sort of gesture to the sister of the Lieutenant she loved and murdered. Corruption and aristocratic entitlement, hints of dangerous alien presence and some very old ghosts all make this a cooler, less jolly version of Lois McMaster Bujold novel, though it also sets the stage for bigger dramas to come.

A selection of oral tales collected by the great Eddie Lenihan, all from a geographical area familiar to me - Ferenka gets a mention, and Doon, and Kilaloe, so yay for familiarity. It's a cracking set of stories, though variable. Some are masterfully crafted, absolutely perfect exemplars of the form. Others are a bit more ragged and fragmented, and if you're in it purely for the craft it's a let down, but they all build up to a satisfying survey of folkloric beliefs and tales associated with the Good Folk. My favourite was the laugh-out-loud Skeptic's Tale, which isn't even a fairy story proper. The most arresting was one of the opening tales which came off at moments like a Wim Winders film, and the whole thing is rounded off with a gruesome tale of bloodcurdling horror, just in case you were getting in any way complacent.

This is fun, and it wants to be fun and for the most part it succeeds. Working as an aide for an admiral in Komarr, Ivan Vorpatril, the Wooster to Miles' Jeeves, if Jeeves fecked off out into the universe and did his own thing with Wooster waving him on from the distant sidelines because Jeeves is a bit of a trouble magnet whose solutions cause more trouble than the trouble as far as Wooster is concerned, finds himself in trouble when a cousin, no a different cousin, sends him off to pick up a woman and take her out for a night for unspecified reasons. The picking up is disastrous because the woman and her half-sister are refugees from a nasty coup on Jackson's Whole, and they promptly stun him and tie him up and ponder loudly about how to dispose of his body.

So, a comedy of errors, at least to start with, turning into something vaguely farcical as Ivan, the refugess and the cousin are trapped in an apartment with two types of duly authorised arresting officials trying to get in and nowhere to run, leaving Ivan with no choice but to do the obvious thing and marry her.

That sorts out their immediate problem Everyone returns to Barryar to contemplate the can of worms. There follows an extended middle section of the book where various sections of Ivan's rich, powerful, priveleged, aristocratic but also massively competent, capable, intelligent, over-achieving, highly moral and nice, but tough when they need to be, family, contemplate, with distant amusement and exasperation, Ivan's problem. They are arch, splendid, caring, shrewd, and let us not forget, the scions of a once-nasty, now-nice galactic empire, Bujold's ongoing happy ending for the Miles Vorkosigan series, the kind of equilibrium a comedy is supposed to throw into disorder, but this lot are so awesome, it doesn't look as if anything short of a nuclear bomb would ruffle their feathers.

We don't get a bomb, but just as you're about to build and throw one yourself, Ivan's new in-laws arrive en-masse, scheming, ruthless, haughty, on the run but still, somehow lovable in their own way, and things get interesting again.

So, yes, it's a science fiction rom-com, harmless and fun and inoffensive, wittily written, clever and warm-hearted. It's only real flaw is it's a bit too in love with the setting and the characters to really upset the apple-cart or do anything especially subversive or threatening.

It was Hitler in Poland with the blitzkrieg what done it. Meanwhile, in an English country house, a genteel gathering is disturbed by a genteel, if suspiciously complicated, murder. It turns out that nice Mr Hitler has the right idea about them Jews and bolsheviks, so let's slide into fascism, yay! I may be suffering from mental exhaustion, but at least I'm not in a universe where Hitler won and a single murder is set to bring England in line! Can the doughty Scotland Yard Inspector solve the murder? Can the sensible aristocratic daughter who peeved her mother and society no end by marrying a Jew save her husband and herself? Is the future as bleak as a blasted heath? Five yellow stars pinned to a dead anti-semite and covered in fake blood for this!

Lois McMaster Bujold, an accomplished and expert writer of science fictions, applies her enviable skills to this, the third in her Chalion novels, self-contained fantasy tales that are tightly-plotted, character-driven dramas set in a carefully constructed world where the quasi-medieval politics and the supernatural mix to deadly effect. In The Hallowed Hunt, an exiled prince is murdered, and a young lord sent to bring his killer to justice. Except the prince was dabbling int forbidden rites and intended to force himself on the young woman, who bashed his brains in with his own war-hammer and received an unwelcome spiritual gift in return. The young lord has laboured his whole life under a similar burden, but it is not the wolf spirit welded to his own should that causes him to try and kill his charge.

What was the nature of the rite, and who placed the ugly spell on the lord, and what does it have to do with the impending death of the current hallow king and a conflict that came to a blood-soaked end centuries before?

I found this a bit slow to start. I found the last book I read a bit slow to start. I found the book before that slow to start. I think I may just be in a finding-books-slow-to-start kind of a mood. Past a certain point, Bujold's innate, not to say addictive, readability kicks in and between the compelling characters and the intractable mysteries and the tangled plot, slow turns to quick in no time flat.