All the wrong questions have been asked, and some of the right ones, and now come the answers, racing on a benighted train beset by enemies and plots, our beleaguered hero has one chance to thwart a plan he doesn't understand. But first there's murder most foul and villainy most base and even if he asks the right questions and gets the right answers and defeats the villain, what will he lose?

Brilliant conclusion to a terrifically entertaining series. Exciting and melancholic at the same time, very noir, our hero is a mix of Marlow and the Continental Op, walking down mean streets and mean railway carriageways, playing dangerous games and falling for a dangerous lady. Lovely. Please let there be more.

Jade, a young MMA fighter with a temper problem, decks a film star and ends up packed off to a training camp in Thailand to keep her out of harm's way. She discovers that her trainer and her gym may be involved in awful crimes, testing her loyalties and her grip on reality. Mya, a young girl working for an English Doctor in Thailand, makes journeys from or world into a mystical forest full of ghosts and gods. The doctor has terrible plans for Mya, but can she escape and keep her family safe? The two stories, one of the hard, bruising, physical world of training and fighting, and the other of disembodied souls and fickle deities, become intertwined, and one world leaks into another with dangerous consequences.

Snappy, pacy writing and the endearingly larger-than-life Jade, with her mixture of pure toughness and hidden vulnerability, make this a quick, smooth, action-packed supernatural thriller. The fighting, and the fighting culture, have an authentic feel to them, and the bone-crunching bouts are a highlight.

The finding of a magical charm that half-grants wishes, or grants half-wishes, gives four children the adventurous life they've been craving as they learn first to calculate their wishes precisely and then think about carefully about what they're wishing for. This is a light, breezy, fun and funny tale. I'm not sure I'd call it timeless as one or two old-fashioned attitudes might make a modern reader wince, but it's easy to be forgiving with a book this open-hearted and good-natured.

I've had this book for ages, and I've started it three or four times, but it keeps getting lost. Like Moll and Gryff, the adorable gypsy-girl-and-wildcat duo at the heart of this adventure, the book is a bit of a wild thing, hard to pin down, and would rather be off having adventures than sit around being read by boring old me. And when I did read it, I flew through it breathlessly. Dreamsnatcher is a sturdy, pacy, tough-nosed but soft-hearted tale about a gypsy orphan plagued by a villainous witch-doctor who's hunting her for reasons unknown. Some of those reasons turn out to be deep dark secrets to do with her parents and strange powers and prophecies, but before Moll can do anything about it, she's kidnapped, and the key to her escape may lie with one of the people who kidnapped her.

Expertly crafted, this is packed with great characters and strange magic and nasty fights and sinister villains and good friends and loyal families. There are hunts and chases and riddles and secrets uncovered and hidden places found, pretty much everything you could ask for in a fantasy story for children. And now that I've finished reading the book, I can set it free for adventures of its own. No doubt it's climbing around the bookshelves as we speak.

Never in all my natural did I imagine that one day I would find myself reading an alternate fantasy historical novel set in Victorian Ireland that incorporated all the stuff of childhood classroom lessons in villainous rackrenting landlords, the Famine, evictions, fields of potatoes, wakes and Dublin slums aong with unique mad-science stuff of machine animals and landed gentry with superhuman powers. But here it is.

Nate Wildenstern returns to the less than tender bosom of his family home, ruled with a detachable claw by his ruthless, heartless, formidable father. Neither he nor his older brother Roberto are made of true Wildenstern stuff, but their brother Marcus does, and it is he that is set to inherit. When Marcus dies in a climbing accident, Roberto is propelled into the unenviable position of heir, but it is Nate who is chosen to take over the task of running the family's vast business interests whether he wants to or not. Nate is determined to discover whether his brother's death was really an accident, murderous power-struggles being a family tradition, but events are complicated when a disastrous explosion unearths the preserved bodies of some distant ancestors, one of whom wears a Patriarch's ring.

With the family seeing conspiracies and rebels in every corner, Nate and his sister-in-law Daisy must endeavour to keep their heads before everything goes horribly wrong. Then everything goes horribly wrong.

What a cracking, thrilling, mind-bending, sly, gothic little saga this is. The place and time are wonderfully constructed and the bizarre elements are fitted seamlessly into the setting, creating a delightfully twisted version of staples of Irish history and fiction. Massively loaded and complex webs of class, race and gender relations are handled effortlessly. I loved it.

You leave your lovely, tolerant peaceful kingdom to go north for just five minutes and when you come back everything's gone to hell. When Wynter and her father come home after a few years in the Northlands, there's gibbets everywhere and a missing prince and nobody's allowed talk to cats or ghosts without ending up in one of the gibbets and the royal bastard is about to become the royal prince whether the royal bastard wants it or not, and if he objects his very good friend may end up in a very uncomfortable chair. Wynter and Razi and Christopher find things fairly uncomfortable as it is, brutally forced into a corner, they are faced with fewer and fewer alternatives.

With three strongly-drawn characters caught up in an ever tightening noose, this is a tense and dramatic story of politics and court intrigue and personal survival in a claustrophobic world going to hell in a handbasket. Top-notch fantasy.

I remember this as always being my favourite of the Prydain books, the absence of Elionwy nothwithstanding. I now recognise the way in which it is one of the few fantasy novels to so consciously and carefully follow the patterns of certain types of heroic fairy tales, the young man on a quest of discovery and the various encounters on his journey that teach him the lessons or equip him with the magic or equipment or companions he needs to win, but presented as a modern piece of literature with fully realised settings and characters. It's a brilliant tale of growth and learning and the long and arduous acquisition of a tiny piece of wisdom that you knew all along, you just didn't know it. Heartbreaking and lovely, but also delightful and clever and warm, I can see why it appealed to me, a fantasy novel directly focused on growth and maturity, the sadness of leaving childhood and entering the grey complexities of adulthood echoed the bittersweet tones of The Lord Of Rings.

Well this was... haunting. Deep old powers in the Welsh hills, terrible family secrets, a lonely boy and his beloved dog, a convalescent protagonists who is more than even he remembers, wild grey foxes and mad farmers with shotguns. Caves under the mountains full of secrets and a magic harp and an enchanted lake. Stunning writing, clear and sharp and cold as a mountain stream, and the great chill of the whole sequence, the distance between Old One and human, and what Old Ones will do to defeat the rising Dark. Bit of a masterpiece, on the whole.

A thrilling adventure set in the Elizabethan Court, with Lady Grace Cavendish, one of the Queen's Maids of Honour, caught up in a turbulent episode when one of her fellow Ladies becomes inappropriately involved with a certain Captain Drake, and then vanishes. Can Grace rescue the missing girl with her honour intact without getting blown up at sea or, worse, rising the wrath of the Queen? Fast-paced and inventive, this packs a lot into its short length. Finney is utterly at home in the world of Elizabethan intrigue and makes the whole thing come alive.

Now this was a bit scary and creepy and unsettling, which I'd forgotten. I finally got around to watching the film recently and enjoyed it a lot, and it's a good example of a film that changes aspects of the book to take advantage of the medium - stop-motion animation - that add to rather than detract from the source material. Still the book is better, because it's hard to beat Gaiman's prose, with its cool, sinister economy and rich characterisation and evocation of a deliciously skewed variations of reality.

Coraline Jones discovers a doorway to a neighbouring world that's a lot like her home, filled with people that are a lot like her family and neighbours, but which isn't or aren't. Her other mother and her other father might seem like they want to bring her joy and happiness and interesting things, but there's something off and wrong about everything. Unfortunately now that she's passed through the door, her other mother isn't going to go away. She loves Coraline and wants to make her happy, no matter what.

Spooky and creepy but also lovely and lively and oh-so-readable. It may seem more subdued than the elaborate pyrotechnic visuals of the film, but this pulls you in and takes you along with the mounting suspense and atmosphere of foreboding. And the rats' song remains one of the creepiest things ever.