Marvelous post-Cold War spy thriller about Finn, an Iraq 1 veteran whose hot air balloon lands in an Indian reservation and Parsifal, a long-dormant Soviet assassin revived for a new series of wetwork operations. Someone is shaking down the Indian's casino and anyone who tries to do anything about it meets with an accident. Finn looks into the shakedown and Parsifal receives instructions to off him. But why is a Soviet agent doing hits for what appears to be a Mafia operation?

Littell has been called the American LeCarre, and it's a well-earned title. His espionage novels are clever, nasty, full of twists, betrayals, bitter ironies and terrible human costs. The end of the Cold War doesn't faze him in the slightest. The intelligence game endures, deadly and terrible and self-sustaining. This is a tight, sharp, tense thriller as Finn and Parsifal work their way back up the chain of command to get to the truth. Riveting.

I ordered this from the library off the back of Hammer For Princes, and as luck would have it, it turns out to be set in Ireland in 1014, the lead-up to the Battle Of Clontarf, which, as it happens, happened, as it happened, a thousand years ago this coming weekend. For various ways and reasons, I haven't read much historical fiction set in Ireland. Looking over my Goodreads list, I see Year Of The French and that's it. I'd love to read more like this.

Our hero is Muirtagh, bowman and harper, clan chief of the O'Cullinane's, who have stayed in their refuge in the Wicklow hills for these last twenty years, since they were massacred and chased out of Meath by the mac Mahons. After pursuing and slaying a gang of Danish horse thieves, they are intercepted on their way home and summoned to Tara at the behest of the High King, Brian Boru. In the wake of the subsequent events in the High King's hall, the old feud is rekindled and Muirtagh's desperate efforts to save his clan end with him renouncing his chieftainship and fleeing as an outlaw with blood on his hands. The story culminates in the Battle of Clontarf, with Muirtagh on the side destined to lose.

I can't get over how good this is. Not being a big historical fiction head, with a few notable exceptions, I can't say whether these books are actually as underappreciated and abandoned to obscurity as they appear to be, but if so, it's truly undeserved. Holland's prose is spare, polished and unadorned. The story and the characters are superbly crafted, and the whole things is lean, smooth, tight, muscular and amazingly readable. Going by my own tastes, this book is in a magical, if unlikely, zone where Dorothy Dunnett and George RR martin overlap and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to fans of either.

This is one of those books that I put off reading because I knew it was going to be so good. I’m a depressive, and sometimes exposing yourself to a truly great writer and a truly great book makes it difficult to keep the shields up and stop yourself responding to the emotions generated by reading it. It’s tough enough to keep an even keel as it is. I paid the price for this, along with one or two others, but it was worth it in the end. Certainly the best science fiction novel of the new century, if not one of the all-time greats. A beautiful, heartbreaking, hopeful joy of a book. I have this fantasy that maybe The bloody Tubridy Show on Radio One will adopt it for their book club and it’ll sell loads and the world will genuinely become a better place as a result. If the plain people of Ireland could handle Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, they could sure as hell handle this, is what I think.

Found this a bit if a slog, to be honest. Not sure why. I quite like Harrison, and he seems a good fit after a Mieville. This is the science fiction novel as mood piece, a piece of improvised jazz noir - I think it says that somewhere on the cover. The space-port setting is amazingly atmospheric, the surreal but ultimately meaningless labyrinth like something out of Borges provides a sort of abstract null attractor at the book's centre, a void of meaning that replicates the moral void at the heart of noir. The writing is cool and clipped, shiny and sharp as diamonds, like something uttered laconically from the corner of the mouth of a PI poet staking out a street corner or holding up a bar nursing his drinks and his scars. Kinda brilliant really, even if it took me a while to get in the mood.

Peter Straub's second foray into the horror genre, and i find it odd that I haven't read it, being such a big fan of his stuff when I was a teenager. Nowadays I prefer his later books, the Blue Rose trilogy and The Hellfire Club, big, chunky literate and literary thrillers with no supernatural element. Oddly enough, this book anticipates the move from horror to thriller in a few different ways, and even retains a certain amount of ambiguity about the ghost story element, up to a particular point. The blurb of my copy of the book manages to drop three spoilers in the space of two sentences, and then reiterates one of the spoilers just in case I was slow on the uptake. I shall endeavor to avoid doing something similar. Though I think the Goodreads blurb is similar so I don't know why I bother.

Miles Teagarden returns to his family's old home, ostensibly to write his thesis on DH Lawrence, but more likely to keep a childhood promise. Right off the bat, things go poorly for him. A girl has been murdered and strangers are greeted with suspicion, and Miles himself didn't have the best reputation when he left. Miles exacerbates the situation by being generally clueless, clumsy, rude, and not a little bit cracked in the head. Soon he is surrounded by hostile neighbours, including his cousin Duane. His only allies are an old great-aunt and Duane's teenage daughter. Another girl goes missing, suspicion and resentment turn into violence and rage, and one or two ugly secrets from the past, as is often the case in books like these, come back to haunt the guilty and the innocent alike.

Miles is an academic, so the book is mostly written in a rather purple, prolix style, which, in fairness, Straub pulls off very well, and it does heighten Miles' sense of alienation from the farmers and shopkeepers and housewives he collides with. As a character, you do want to reach into the book and slap a bit if sense into him, but it's clear that the style also conceals just how unhinged he has become. As a murder mystery it's a compelling read; as a ghost story, it's strange and chilling spooky. He just about manages to merge the two by the end, but this isn't his strongest book by any means, which isn't to say that it isn't worth a look.

I DON'T BELIEVE THIS THING JUST ATE MY REVIEW YOU SOD YOU CREEP YOU THING! Gah. Fine. Never mind then. Right. Excellent book. Joseph rocks, Mendoza turns whiny, but that's okay she's mostly off-page, people from the future are weird and Indians Were People Too. God dammit.

This is one of those rare books where I feel I let it down rather than it let me down. A recounting of the events surrounding the Fenian rising of 1867, focusing on the small village of Kilpedar which achieved a certain amount of notoriety when a police barracks was burned down and a minor skirmish in snowy woods were later transformed into an heroic battle, the book sets out to slowly introduce the characters, the place, the time, the context, the history, the landscape, the society, the organisations, the landscape, the peoples, more landscape, humanising and demythologising with a lovely, slow ponderous grace, describing and redescribing and contextualising and recontextualising and presenting different points of view and oh my God two hundred pages in and it feels like it still hasn't properly started, hopping backwards and forwards and sideways in time like a scholarly and obsessive Doctor Who. Never a sentence but a thing of beauty, never a character but complex and living, never a bit o' landscape but evoking memories and thoughts and ponderings.

Where Year Of The French shook with barely repressed rage, and the top-to-bottom portrait of a dysfunctional, unjust, self-cannibalising world that spared no-one seared the reader and welded the book to your hands, Tenants Of Time meanders sadly in a fit of melancholy, an elegaic and almost wistful meditation on futility of actions and of history and the transformations wrought by time. The rising merely sets the stage, you see, for two hundred flippin' pages, before the rise of Parnell and the Land League and the passing of the Great Houses and the decline of the Anglo Irish aristocracy in flAmes and bitterness and the odd murder here and there.

But what a slow, weary read it is, without an ounce of the urgency and energy of YOTF. Brilliantly written, no question, but I think the pace and the size clashed with my mood and it became a slog, which seems a pity.