With good Sherlock gone, the series has lots its brilliantly antagonistic focus. It was a nervy move, though - how can anyone now oppose bad Sherlock? Even a new good Sherlock has to play catch-up, though he has some help from amoral Sherlock. This new tripartite arrangement can't replicate the intimacy of the original mind-games, so it's just as well we're left with one more volume to wrap things up. Surely Kira is headed for a downfall and the only question is how it comes about?

Fraction and Aja's take on Hawkeye - the good-hearted slacker prone to screwing up lost in a new world of hispters and mobsters, trying to protect the inhabitants of a run-down tenement building from the depredations of the Russian bros and their creepy hitman. Despite his best efforts he is not alone, with his brother and the other Hawkeye turning up to get his back. Hi jinks ensue, with added deafness and the storytelling thta results is pure semiotic bravura.

Ananke is dead, but she was scared of something and that something is still coming. The gods are becoming more and more themselves, with all that entails, including the coming deadlines of doom. Do they step up to battle the darkness or do they just go ahead live their best lives, what's left of them? The answers will surprise you! This is full of surprises and shocks and it all looks so incredibly gorgeous. Best-looking comic since Phil Jimenez on The Invisibles, easily.

When Laura's brother Jacko is marked by the revolting Carmody Braque and starts to quickly deteriorate as the life is drawn out of him, she turns to odd and infuriating Sorry Carlisle, Head Prefect at her school and, she happens to know, also a witch. But he can't help her, not directly. Nor can medical science, nor can her mother's new boyfriend. To trick the evil Braque she must become a witch herself.

What an incredible storyteller Mahy was. Combining a suspenseful supernatural thriller with a teenage romance, filling it with spiky forthright attitudes to sex and maturity and love and adulthood, The Changeover is a terrific novel full of wisdom and insight about human nature and relationships.

As the world around us flies aaprt in fragments of plastic and psychosis and the internet is my fidget spinner, an endlessly whirling toy of facts and jokes and horrors, it's odd to find some sort of comfort and catharsis in an epic fantasy novel of such seemingly overwhelming hopelesness and despair as presented in the first two volumes. A massive rift is venting ash and smoke into the sky. The world is reduced to hunkered down communities and roving bands of starving bandits. Roggas, who can control such eruptions and outbursts are despised and feared and murdered on discovery or sent to be brutally trained and used. What future can there possibly be to look forward to?

Essun, travelling with a unique community of orogenes and stills to a city abandoned - largely because Essun killed them all when they invaded her new home - is torn by a desire to save her daughter and take use the obelisk gate to restore the Moon and close the rift. Doing the latter will kill her, however. Meanwhile daughter Nessun in the company of a Guardian travels to an ancient, hi-tech city the other side of the world with a similar plan on a larger scale, but the lessons she has learned incline her to a more catastrophic approach to making the world a peaceful place.

The finale plays out in a masterful and titanic battle of magic and tectonics and physics between the traumatised and damaged hearts and minds of mother and daughter to an ending that did not seem remotely possible or likely in our first introduction to this world. But it felt earned and logical and right. A crowning achievement to one of the the defining fantasy works of the age.

-So whatcha readin'?
-HHhH.
-Hhhh?
-No. HHhH.
-HHHH?
-I said HHhH!
-HhHhHhHh? Any GGgGood?
-(Throws book at them.)

Yes, is is very good. A writer tries to turn a historical event which has touched him deeply into a novel, but has intense scruples about the process of inventing fictional novelistic elements when the real events are so compelling. he wrestles with this, he explores his own fascination with the event, he comes u against the limits of attempting a simple truthful and accurate retelling and catches himself more then once inventing details, or possibly misremembering details and being forced to choose.

The event is the assasination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague, a great deal of time is spent on Heydrich's life and career and the increasingly efficient orchestration of mass murder. It doesn't take much to make the reader thoroughly invested in seeing the fucker murdered himself, but this is nonetheless done with skill and precision, creating a narrative that feels non-fictional, yet with breaks where the author insists that he is working on a novel, and these breaks actually add to the momentum and the engagement, because the authors commitment to the story is itself so thorough and passionate, his minor literary and historical struggle set against the massive struggle and brutality and sacrifice taking place on the pages.

It races to its end with the breathlessness of a thriller and the inevitability of a tragedy. Perhaps in the end, the story it tell is non-fiction, but the novel is a about a writer trying to tell that story in a way that remains true to his own principles and does honour to the people it describes. Maybe it shouldn't work, but it does, because of the sincerity and heart of the author - the device is not an ironic, distancing alienating one, but one that pushes you right up against the very idea of a modern person looking back at historical events that are themselves distant and trying to make sense of them, almost become a part of them through an exercise of sympathetic imagination. It's brilliant, whatever it is.

It's hard not to imagine the inspiration for this book coming on less like a lightbulb going on and more like some sort of brain aneurysm. Even for Grant Morrison, a hard-boiled, brutal, sordid and degraded crime character suddenly visited by a child's imaginary friend with the appearance of a blue horse with feathers is a bit wtf.

Nick Sax, ex-cop, current killer-for-hire kills a bunch of people and then has a heart attack or a stroke or some horrible thing, ending up in hospital and visited by cops and torturers and a blue horse called Happy who desperately needs him to get up and save Hailey, the girl whose imaginary friend Happy is. Hailey and some other children have been kidnapped by a horrific pervert monster Santa Claus and the clock is running out, but Nick is being chased by gangsters and torturers because he killed the wrong person and may hold a password that unlocks a fat bank account. Murder and bloody mayhem and bad langiuage and sleaze and drugs and horror are the stuff Nick wades through with Happy as his cheerful, if slightly desperate guide, trying to persuade Nick that he's real and to go save Hailey.

It's appalling. And brilliant. And funny. And I feel slightly guilty and unclean for having enjoyed it. But in a good way? I think this makes me a bad person now.

The Young Avengers are chased across the multiverse or whatever it's called in marvelspeak by a literal evil manifestation of bad parenting, lead by the nose by a guy they really shouldn't be trusting at the best of times. Meanwhile, there is romangst and mysterious figures and unexpected returns and possible intimations of horrible revenge and crazy super exes in a super-stalker's support group. Really, just so cool.

Long, exhausting, and, frankly disheartening book charting the myriad catastrophes and occasional triumphs of the CIA. From its origins in the OSS, whose romantic gung-ho legacy it completely failed to shake off, to its colossal betrayal of everything it should have stood for in the creation of the case for the Iraq war, the CIA seems to have mostly succeeded in spending lots of money, killing lots of its own agents, overstating the threat of Soviet communism and reacting with horrible blunders or equally horrible successes that either became self-fulfilling prophecies or worse for the people involved than any communist regime. It also failed as at espionage but everybody, including a succession of presidents, loved the covert action stuff, even though it generally made everything worse. Oversight was a joke, and so was their intelligence. Scandals and leaks and murders and corruption and cover-up and betrayals and finally a terrible eagerness to please and tell the president only what he wants to hear.

Highly readable, packed with various colossal giants of history, this sticks closely to the CIA view of things, so as a history of the various events it gets caught up in - Bay Of Pigs, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, it's necessarily incomplete, leading to a certain amount of whiplash and a longing for closure. Anyway, the CIA: it sucks, and this book shows how much damage a powerful secret institution in thrall to romantic methods and ideas that were born, had their heyday and died in WWII, can really do as it careens out of control down through the century.

The comic strip adventures of Moomin and friends - cute and absurd and surreal and utterly charming and adorable and wise. Both the writing and the art are enchanting and lovely. Wonderful.