If Wells and Wong are a Holmes/Watson pastiche, then All The Wrong Questions is a playful and affectionate homage to a different side of that genre - the detective story. Written like Chandler on downers, with Lemony Snicket himself the tarnished angel on the mean streets of Stain'd By The Sea, serious-minded but far from mean himself, following the clues and asking the questions, right and wrong, dealing with bumbling officialdom and twisted criminals and a femme fatale doing the wrong things for the right reasons. A missing person, a suspicious apothecary, a reclusive war hero, a once-wealthy family and of course the mysterious missing statue all challenge Lemony's dogged, incisive, slightly downbeat determination to make things right. But can he solve the case and prevent his friends getting hurt? And does solving the case mean abandoning his sister to perform a dangerous task on her own? Thrilling, hilarious, hugely readable stuff.

Fires, fires everywhere, but missing witnesses and framed librarians and children in the wrong school are everywhere too. The penultimate book in the series sees the fiendish deeds deepen and Lemony Snicket's dilemmas and difficulties divide and multiply. While he works to puzzle out the mysteries of Stain'd By The Sea, to save his friends, to rescue the town, he is leaving his sister alone to face her own dangers. The noir gets noirer and the Chandleresque prose gets Chandleresquer. This is fun and smart and enjoyable and intriguing and I can't wait to find out how it all ends.

Wells and Wong return, spending hols in Daisy's family mansion, with a birthday party planned and guests arriving and storms brewing and floods flooding, you've got yourself a classic stately mansion whodunnit. One guest in particular seems to have nefarious designs and inspires enough suspicion and ill-will that when he falls foul of poisoning, the list of potential culprits includes most of Daisy's immediate family. Daisy, with heady obliviousness, ploughs ahead with her investigation while Hazel worries about the rather dark and grown-up secrets and situations that appear to be arising. That's been the hallmark of the series so far - dashing jolly-good schoolgirl detectives running down the darker corridors British life in the 1930s as delineated by the conventions of the British murder mystery. It's handled with delicacy and a certain amount of unflinching courage, but tight plotting, high stakes and intriguing mystery helps. I did work out who did it, but only a chapter or so ahead of our heroines. Maybe they'd let me join the Detective Society?

A strange and beautifully written tale of Cromwellian London and fairy-tales come to life. After the death of her mother and the flight of her father, Coriander is left to the tender mercies of her Puritan step-mother and a fiendish preacher. Her mother was not of this world, however, and has left something precious and powerful behind, something coveted by a malicious witch who is manipulating Coriander's misfortunes and plotting her murder. Can Coriander travel between the two worlds, defeat the witch, rescue the prince and be reunited with her father? It's a classic fairy-tale with a wonderfully evocative setting, packed with danger and wonder.

A tale of bravery and heroism about a young cat who leaves home to learn the skills he needs to save his family. I love the way classic tropes are used here - an aristocratic family heedless of its own impending doom, a setting of secluded luxury that is under a threat they won't even acknowledge, and an unregarded younger son, weak, a dreamer, who in a mixture of courage and foolhardiness sets out to explore the wider world. Of course, it's all done here with cats. Varjak Paw is a Mesopotamian Blue who lives in the home of the Countess. But the Countess is sick, perhaps dying, and there is a mysterious Gentlemen and his strange black cats, and Varjak knows something is terribly wrong. Inspired by the tales of his heroic ancestor, Jalal, Varjak climbs the wall and goes into the city, where he encounters gangs and dogs and cars and vanishing, but also trains in the Way Of Jalal, which will give him the power to challenge the Gentleman and his deadly cats and save his family.

Embellished with Dave McKean's beautiful, sinuous, shadowy illustrations, this is an utterly fantastic and captivating tale, a new iteration of an ancient tradition that still has the power to rouse and inspire.

I suppose it's a sign of age that I'm starting to prefer shorter books - or maybe that I've finally admitted to myself that I do. No longer do I long to set out on a voyage across millions of words, but rather I hanker for tighter, leaner, shorter books. I'll be first in line for Martin's next ten-thousand page volume, but overall, thinner is better.

And here we have an epic fantasy trilogy of thinner books - well, this one is 480-odd pages, but 480-odd pages doesn't mean so much any more - and I must say it works a treat. Half The World, another self-contained volume that is also part of the larger story of the Shattered Sea Trilogy. Thorn and Brand are a pair of young warriors. Brand, unfortunately, does not have a taste for killing and does have an unfortunate bent to do good. Thorn is a savage fighter, but is roundly despised because she's a girl. At their final testing, a boy dies, and this sets in motion events that will send them off on a voyage to the far side of the world under the cunning and watchful eye of Father Yarvis, who plans to win peace for his country at any cost, and Brand and Thorn will play their parts.

It's rough and tough, grimy and grungy. That it's unsentimental and even cynical will come as no surprise, that Abercrombie has matured enough as a writer to leaven the grimdark with humanity will come as a pleasant one, though perhaps we should wait until the final volume to make a final judgment there. The writing is superb, muscular and hard-boiled, the vaguely Viking/Anglo-Saxon language drawling and natural. But it's the plotting that Abercrombie always excels at, plots within plots, setbacks and reversals and ironic twists and turns keep things lively and compelling, while the action is brutal and the politics nasty.

There seem to me to have been some extraordinary storytelling choices made with this book. Sideline the hero of the previous volume, have him absent for nearly a third of the book, tell the entire story from the perspective of a young priestess raised to worship dark and terrible powers in a warlike expanding empire. It's as if the sequel to Star Wars had been told from the point of view of a trainee Sith and Luke Skywalker turned up just after having his hand chopped off, an invalid in an Imperial prison. And yet it is a beautiful book about learning that the things you have believed and taken for granted all your life are far narrower, more constrained and fundamentally strange, if not downright bad, than you could have imagined, and that your life in devotion to this thing, which you never had any choice about anyway, has been wasted. Haunting and written with an attention to craft and detail that makes the heart ache and the mind snap to attention, this is one of the great novels about breaking free.

You know how you read things for the adventure and the excitement and the danger? Thrill-seeking, one of the more basic forms of escapism, where you can slip into the adventurer's skin and and experience their wild ride by proxy. I loved that. I was addicted to that. How on earth did I find this, then, and keep going back to it? Obviously I picked it up because it's a fantasy novel and I was all Lord Of The Rings yay! But this... this is a carefully crafted, masterfully controlled piece of literature. It is full of adventures and physical and spiritual dangers, but it's not written as an adventure narrative. Look, this is all my way of saying that after rereading it for the first time in about twenty five years, i found myself on the verge of tears every second or third chapter. It is a book full of deeply moving moments, and of profound, human insights and tenderness and friendship and redemption and finding wisdom after folly and hard experience. It's an adventure story, all right. The story of a young man who makes a dreadful mistake and who must confront the mistake before it consumes him. I just don't remember ever before putting the book down when the young men have returned and Yarrow runs to greet them with tears in my eyes. On a Monday morning in the middle of the dismantling of the Electric Picnic, no less.

After the events of The Deserter we're back on the ground and things are only getting worse. Stopmouth's old tribe are trapped, the aliens around them dwindling as the Diggers close in, while above the lights of the Roof flicker and die. Chief Wallbreaker is a coward, but a survivor, and he knows his days are numbered. The arrival of a fugitive from the roof with intelligence about the world around them and the nature of the Diggers compels him to send the tribe on a desperate and suicidal migration to where rocky hills may keep the Diggers at bay, hills occupied by another humantribe led by Wallbreaker's traitorous brother Stopmouth.

Another nasty, violent, bloody adventure of survival in a world artificially contrived to bring out the savagery in any thinking being - purely for the purposes of punishment for a generation's-gone crime and entertainment for a decadent, disintegrating society - and yet one that within the savagery allows for the flourishing of a noble selflessness amidst ignorance and casual acts of brutality, a love of family and tribe where the ultimate sacrifice is taken for granted, and never wasted.

This is the climactic volume of the Bone World Trilogy, where everything falls apart and new thinking is needed, and though Stopmouth is a figure of heroic stature, it is his selfish brother who somehow finds the vision and ingenuity and ruthlessness that may save everyone. Bone World is a world of ironies and contradictions, and this trilogy is fantastically readable and exciting and suspenseful, with wonderful characters and real emotional heft, and should easily appeal to fans of the Chaos Walking Trilogy by Patrick Ness.

The Earthsea Trilogy (before it became the Earthsea Cycle) cemented its reputation and its literary standing with this fraught and eerie quest in search of a man who has returned from death and therefore destroyed all meaning in life magic is draining from the world, but not just magic; all craft and drive, ambition and openness. Archmage Ged and a young prince Arren voyage across the archipelago to find a place from which there is no returning.
If the trilogy has been about anything, it has been about growth to maturity, of mastering oneself and the nature of responsibility. The Farthest Shore is a return of the king narrative, ultimately, where the greatest good that can happen to Earthsea is for a king to assume the throne. I suspect we're in allegorical territory here, with Earthsea's fairy tale roots on show, where a person can only truly be said to rule oneself when one has confronted death and accepted it and found greater joy and meaning in life having done so. Or maybe LeGuin's a monarchist.
I suppose on reflection that this seems worthy and dry, a heavy spiritual message for a piece of children's fantasy, rest assured this is a beautifully written, keenly observed, wise, harrowing, terrifying and ultimately quietly uplifting book. It has dragons, too.