Cook's Books

Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness are a weird and wild ride. A couple are well regarded, most are obscure, and I think the series took a general sales nose-dive in its second half. They were written between 1986 and 1992, so immediately after both the Belgariad and the first Shannara trilogy had just wrapped up, and […]

The Sound of Guns: sneak preview of Guns of the Dawn

Well, perhaps not the sneakiest of sneak previews as this is the section I toured with through 2014 — if you heard me read at a convention, this was likely the piece. However, it's a nice, concise bit and it gives the flavour of the book very well. Emily Marshwic, our hero, has gone from being a gentlewoman in the […]

2015: Attack of the Release Dates

Very brief post to say: I have release dates for both of my novels coming out next year. Huzzah, I say. Guns of the Dawn, my sort-of-Napoleonic/Regency fantasy, is being released on Thursday the 12th of February, and for the first time ever I will be in Forbidden Planet on the evening of that very day, signing books […]

The best of what's left of…

Like many author-bloggers, I do a year-end thing about books of 2014(1). I try to stay away from a "best of" list. I've posted through the year on books I liked, and what's best is very subjective based on when you read it and what is juxtaposed with it (2). Hence, I would direct you to my post here where […]

More Good Work

It's about time I talked about someone else for a change, so here is another set of books I've read and enjoyed, and feel should be better known. I came across John Guy Collick's Thumb (1) in a random Facebook exchange. You get a lot of books thrown around on FB, and many of them sound quite mad, and after […]

Other People's Trumpets

I figure I've talked enough about how I'm shortlisted for the Gemmell Legend Award and desperately need every vote I can get so I want to highlight some excellent stuff I've read recently. I've been on something of a reading spree , mostly because I've been travelling around and that tends to give me more time for it. […]

You Might Also Like…

I did get through a metric crapton(1) of books this year, and a lot of them were very good. I'm not going to do a 'best of', but I want to flag up a few reads that people might not have come across, and that I think deserve some attention. If you're looking for a good, solidly written book with a different […]

Pushing Boundaries

Apropos of absolutely nothing, a post about how to jump the checkpoints of genre with such elegance that the border guards don’t even have time to get their guns out. Genre distinctions are one of those evergreen topics for convention panels, and the eventual consensus tends to be that no, they don’t mean anything, but yes, they […]