Marlowe has always somehow been more interesting than Shakespeare. The Bard is established canon, taught in schools, safe and accepted and familiar. Marlowe is more secret and dangerous and obscure by comparison. Atheist, homosexual, spy, who wrote the ultimate play of damnation for knowledge, he lurks in the shadows of Elizabethan England, his death a mystery never to be solved. Burgess sheds a little light on the shadows, but it's a fictional light, for what that's worth, itself a kind of shadow, and the whole novel is a kind of play, constructed with Elizabethan language to create the set and the sights and the sounds, full of word-play and poetry and clashing ideas, rationality wrestling with religion, and danger everywhere, every thought and deed a step to the Tower or the noose, conspiracy, real and fraudulent, and plays of power and brutal clashes of doctrine. Once grown accustomed to the language, the book comes to life and follows Kit Marlowe's life to that fateful reckoning in Deptford.

Alexei Korolev, a policeman in Moscow, 1937, is once again drawn into a case where the murderer is less terrifying than the political snares the investigation has to navigate to find them. A scientific director is found shot, but his work was for the security services, meaning that it was both secret and of questionable ethics. It may not even have been particularly scientific, according to his replacement, who ends up stabbed a few days later. Korolev is on the case and then, because a quick and efficient answer is more desirable than an accurate one, he's off it. Then he's back on it again, ostensibly to get to the truth, but also as part of a deadly power struggle between competing security departments. To make matters considerably worse, Korolev's son, Yuri, is missing, and may be in the hands of the institute where unspeakable experiments were performed on men and boys. Korolev doesn't care about himself, he wants to save his son, and catching the killer is less important than finding a way to survive.

Another superb thriller set in Russia at the height of Stalin's Terror. Ordinary lives lived in the shadow of fear and paranoia, and the near impossibility of doing the right thing and getting away with it give this whodunnit a texture of suspense and humanity, and Korolev, the tough but dogged and good-hearted policeman is a hero who can never be out of danger.

Genuinely incredible book. In the wake of the her brother's suicide a women remembers a terrible event from their childhood, an event that dislocates her from her life and her large family of brothers and sisters as well as her husband and two daughters. Her own memories and imagined events from her family's past intermingle with the return of her brother's body to Ireland for the funeral and the freefall fallout months later. Enright writes the heart out of this with painful fidelity to truth while wrestling with the difficulty, the impossibility, of truly knowing it, but also her compassion and insight into the frail and flawed humanity of her characters. This is a searing portrait of family in modern Ireland that hurts and haunts and gets under the skin. I found myself utterly caught up in Veronica's voice and life and perceptions, immersed in her memories and imaginings as she fights to make sense of the fear and pain and strange damage in her life and her brother's which may or may not spring from something awful that happened one summer in her grandmother's house. A book about damage that does its fair share in the mind and heart and psyche of the reader.

A missionary takes his wife and four daughters to a tiny village in the Congo in 1959. As events will show he is not a particularly good missionary. Nor is he a particularly good husband or father, but he will shape and scar their lives indelibly with his certainties and his vanities and his colossal foolishness. The story is told through the voices of the wife and the four daughters, the women who will be made and remade by the missionary and by Africa, just as the Congo is being made and remade by other men with their own agendas and certainties and vanities. They're not very good missionaries or fathers to this country, either.

Told in the most beautiful, brilliant, expressive prose that describes lush jungles, the intricacies of village life, the thoughts and feelings of four girls and one woman as they struggle to live in this new place. Wonders and horrors abound, the everyday joys and cruelties of a community with its own ways and its own voices. The story takes us through the slow degradation of the missionary, mostly because of his own ignorance, to a terrible family tragedy that catapults the survivors out onto the larger tragedy of the Congo, it liberation and betrayal and brutal exploitation.

An incredible, epic, powerful, deeply moving novel that vibrates with anger and struggles with terrible questions of life and survival in the midst of brutality.

Wonderful historical-intellectual-theological-scientific romp. Chloe Bathurst, actress turned zookeeper, must raise funds to rescue her father from penury. She sets her sights on the £10,000 prize offered by the libertine Shelley Society for the first person to succesfull prove or disprove the existence of God. Appropriating the work of her employer, one Charles Darwin, she sets sail with her brother and a conflicted reverend to collect specimens from the Galapagos Islands to prove her purloined theory of natural selection, while a rival expedition sets out to search for the remains of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. Tempests and shipwreck follow, and a voyage up the Amazon and over the Andes, racing a ship full of convicts under orders to massacre all the lizards and birds and turtles of the Islands. Adventure a-plenty, and a great deal for the brain to chew on while enjoying the pastiche-Victorian stylings and the indefatigable character of our heroine and her motley collection of followers and devotees.

Theseus grows up in Troizen, though to his mind he doesn't actually grow anywhere near enough, believing himself to be the son of Poseidon. This turns out to not be literally true, but Theseus is a devout and sincere matter-of-fact believer, and he hears the voice of the god, so he has two fathers, one a god and one the beleaguered king of Athens. On the way to join his father, he becomes part of a yearly ceremony where an old king dies and a new one marries the queen. Theseus knows that he himself will die when the year is out, but submits to the logic of the rites and sacrifices. Avoiding his fate, he eventually joins his father, only to find himself, for similar reasons of rite and sacrifice and obligation, to volunteer himself as part of the annual tribute to Crete. There as a slave he is made into a bull dancer, and because of his pride and confidence and inner certainty, he becomes a supreme bull dancer while remaining true to himself and his sea-god father.

This is told in the voice of Theseus, tough, matter-of-fact and generally straightforward except when he tries to deduce the reasoning of the gods and obey their will and do them honour. He is proud and fierce and pragmatic, but also clear-sighted and sensible. An unusual hero for his grounded sense of his own importance and the profound responsibilities that go with it, particularly his acceptance of the probability that at some point he will have to be made into a human sacrifice. This is a theme that recurs through the book, and the inherent corruption rotting the heart of Crete and bringing down the wrath of the gods is their failure to make this due observance.

A strong, sturdy, sensuous, earthy book, this is an amazingly vivid and fascinating retelling of the old myth as a series of historical events that are nonetheless drenched in the everyday reality of belief on the gods. Brilliant.

Set in a near future of rural poverty and slightly further future where the 1% of our days has survived an apocalypse and now rule the greatly reduced world, an information-only form of time travel links (and simultaneously breaks the causal link) between the two times. A young woman who thinks she's being paid to play a computer game witnesses what looks like a suspiciously real murder. This sparks a temporal, economic and physical conflict as forces reach back from the future to destroy the witness and possibly her whole world as collateral. However, she can go forward, too, ingeniously, and a race to protect her and prepare her transforms her world, but the key to saving it lies in the future.

Great to see Gibson back doing mad sci fi. I love the rough and ready lo-fi vision of industrial laser printers versus the smooth sleek world of nanobot assemblers. Great writing, great characters, and as usual, a crackling portrait of the tensions pulling our world apart and the will to save it.

I'm not in a great state to be reviewing this, but I did enjoy it. A band of hard-bitten mercenaries fighting for the side of evil in a grand manichean conflict - except the rebels aren't really all that great, either. Lots of magic and action and hard-bitten attitudes. The language veers a bit into vaguely Vietnam War-ishness without really using it to make a point other than the universality of manly bonding over casual atrocities, but it's quite clever and keeps it at grunt-level albeit awesome fighting mercs-with-a-shred-of-honour grunts while everyone else gets ground up and slaughtered by the thousands.

Gaiman's third story collection includes interesting introductions and ghosts and fairytales and murderers and Sherlock Holmes and statues and dwarves and uninventors and labyrinths and caves and so on and so forth. I wish I could do it justice, but I found it every bit as enjoyable and spooky and scary and uplifting and inspiring as his other collections.

An American evangelical ministry is bringing Jesus back, but it's not the Jesus they think it is. Bob Howard is assigned the job of sorting it out with supposed outside contractors who are a pair of super-witch-spies. They take off to Denver, about to be swamped by an unnatural snow storm and cut off from the outside world while a huge sacrifice is planned to bring about the Apocalypse. Slick, action-packed sci-fi-spy-horror romp.