A Novel Review Book Podcast

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   Christy Climenhage’s ‘The Midnight Project” is a sci-fi exploration of our own humanity. The world on the verge of ecological collapse, A billionaire thinks our survival will come through the mutation of the human species with marine life to live under the ocean. The morals and ethics are as murky as the depths the life would e...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   Stanisław Lem’s Solaris is less a tale of interstellar exploration than a cosmic therapy session gone awry. A planet covered by a sentient ocean toys with the psyches of visiting scientists, dredging up their deepest regrets in all-too tangible form. Instead of offering enlightenment, Solaris holds up an alien mirror that no on...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   Arundhati Roy and her Booker Prize winning novel, ‘The God of Small Things’ is a book where it was the small things I couldn’t make sense of. No matter what I tried, time flipped, names multiplied and the story piled up in a traffic jam that I couldn’t make sense of. This was a DNF for me     Painting: Today I painted a simple...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin brings and end to the tale of the Archmage Ged wrapping the Earthsea trilogy in quiet finality. Magic fades, and with it, the Archmage himself passes into legend - diminished, yet fulfilled. There’s sorrow in his end, a sense of something beautiful vanishing into the lines of the horizon. T...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com In Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, Balram Halwai claws his way from darkness to light, serving satire as sharp as his entrepreneurial instincts. Adiga's India is raw, roaring, and unapologetically corrupt – a state of jungle law, where only cunning predators survive. Balram’s journey from teashop boy...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   Summertime is the time to read outdoors, in the park, at the beach, at a café, wherever the sun is shining. Here are 4 books is read this summer!   Painting: Today I painted a beach   Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include:   The Fisherman by John Langan Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico Heart Lamp by Ba...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   In Naked Earth, Eileen Chang peels back the red curtain on Maoist China with shocking irony spanning more than one layer. Love tries to bloom amid slogans, paranoia, and political purges, but ideology has a habit of stomping on sentiment. It’s romance meets revolution - awkwardly.   Painting: Today I painted a field   Some of t...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   Two coming of age novels in a fantasy world richly imagined by Ursula K. Le Guin. Ged is a reckless and young mage from Gont, learning through action the consequences he faces form those actions while Tenar is a young girl, stripped of her family, name and made to serve the nameless ones. Both stories are similar in that both G...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com What is the cost of selling your blood for money? Sanguan is a man who sells his blood but understands that it comes at a price and that the money he makes has to be spent on something meaningful. But through the course of his life, meaning takes many forms and Sanguan discovers that sacrifice takes many forms as he wrestles with...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   The Odyssey. That great journey that is now the hallmark for all subsequent journeys, but as we are ferried along this perilous path, we ask the question – can a hero return home both physically and mentally? Stylistically more complex than the Iliad, the Odyssey weaves a tale of myth and fiction as one man struggles to return...

 To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   The Iliad was originally orally comprised making up part of the epic cycle. There was a paradox when it was written down. It went from being a flexible and fluid piece of literature that stretched with the imagination of the bard to a rigid story, captured and chained to the page. But, the paradox is, we are now thankful to ha...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple is an epistolary novel that spans the years and distance between two sisters that are trying to survive their respective worlds. Celie is stuck in an abusive relationship, married to a man that views her as his property to do with what he likes. Nettie escapes the doldrums of domestic life, beco...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   The Citadel of the Autarch is the final in the series Book of the New Sun and it is safe to say it ends how it begins… shrouded in mystery. A climax? I think so… Answers? Possibly… but do I know what actually happened? Ill save that for the second read. A masterpiece of a series that presents itself as something simple but the...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   ‘Whatever in creation exists in without my knowledge, exists without my consent’ A quote from today’s novel that is equally stark as it is brutal as it is mythic as it is beautiful. Cormac McCarthy’s famed novel, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West weaves a tale that draws from historical narrative. A novel with a...

Two men. Achilles and Odysseus. Two central themes across two books. The Iliad and the Odyssey. War and Home. One lives a life of inscincere happiness. The other a life of authentic grief, but is one better than the other? Painting: Today a photo I took while in Israel studying archaeology. It is an elderly couple walking hand in hand through a ruinous city. It is entitled, 'Until the End of Time....

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   Two boys and a kite with nothing but life ahead of them. A turn of events sees the world come down faster than a cut kite and suddenly the world and future of the boys’ lives is uncertain. Set against the backdrop of the Coup of the Taliban and spanning as far as the United States we learn that you can take the boy out of Afgha...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com In the Sword of the Lictor, the duty and honour bound Severian continues to wrestle with the moral responsibility he can’t quite escape. The novel passes like an ethereal dreamscape as Severian continues to pass through this world and our pages, and with each turning page, another piece of what Severian holds dear is taken from h...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   The Book World Tour has taken flight and landed in Afghanistan. In the Patience Stone, Atiq Rahimi gives a voice to women living through circumstances that see them constantly beleaguered by society. A woman nurses her husband who is in a coma in a room surrounded by the ongoing violence of war. But, as the story evolves, we le...

 To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com The 30 best book of the 20th century. A curated list presented over three episodes all comes down to this final piece of the puzzle. The top 10 best books (in my opinion) of the 20th century. A conclusion to a list that will take many shapes throughout my life.. and at the moment, this is what it looks like. Painting: Today I pa...

 To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com Expectation lingers at the peripherals of this tale as the pressure builds with every page. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s novel ‘Stay With Me’ explores the pressures of a society and culture that rest upon the foundation of expectation. The expectation to get married and have kids to further the family name. A pressure that bubbles within...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com The Claw of the Conciliator sends the reader deeper into the labyrinth of Gene Wolfe’s imaginative science fantasy novel. Weaving the tale, there is only one way in and one way out. Severian the torturer, tortures us as the reader with a story that raises so many questions in the chaos of the narrative and yet offers us only glim...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com   Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart flips the colonial script. Okonkwo, fierce as a misplaced proverb, fights change to a fault. But when tradition clashes with colonialism, even the strongest warrior can’t wrestle fate. Achebe doesn't just tell a story - he reclaims one, reminding us that when things fall apart, it’s the silence...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com Throughout literary history, many remarkable women writers have been overlooked or forgotten, their voices buried beneath more celebrated names. Among them is Marghanita Laski, a prolific mid-20th-century author and critic whose sharp insights and evocative storytelling deserve renewed attention. Laski's works, rich with psycholo...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com Creating a list of the 30 best books of the 21st century with some rules is difficult enough but what makes it harder is just trying to remember all the books you have read in the first place. Join Seamus as he starts his list, counting down the 30 best books across 3 episodes! Painting: Today I painted a lamp emanating a green l...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is a cozy cup of tea for the soul, steeped in heartbreak, healing, and the musty charm of secondhand books. Takako flees a crumbling life and tumbles into the quirky quiet of her uncle’s Tokyo bookshop - where literature whispers solace and dusty paperbacks double as therapy. It’s a love letter to bo...