Overarching concept is good: people 200 years in future able to interact with people in present day through an advanced drone, and have been able to send a very advanced artificial intelligence bac...

Incredibly inventive book in which Banks manages to create, in some detail, an ancient, globe-spanning business with a finger in every pie, and even an entire small nation which the Business seeks ...

A John Rebus instalment without any action and without any of the Edinburgh atmosphere which this series usually oozes. However the plotting and characterizations, especially the character interac...

Incredibly complex with a fantastic cast of wond...

The families of a brother and sister spend a week together in a house after the death of their mother, and it is a day-by-day account o...

Core of story is her ex-husband turns up and tries to blackmail her on the id...

After a royal state representative is killed, his (male) partner is forced to marry a replacement otherwise a trade agreement cannot take place. The two men have a difficult mis-understanding rela...

A quarter of the book is taken up by an academic-written introduction, which sets it up as the best American book ever. This rather puts expectations on a high level, and initial reading feels kin...

Hard...

Funny autobiography of comedian with cerebral palsy who is unable to speak. Very open and honest with flowing writing style, and makes everything seem rather straight-forward. None of the real pa...

Some memoirs of a person disillusioned with the general practitioner profession finding herself perchance working in prisons, for the new challenges. The voice of the author is quite strange, comi...

Much the same as the original book, but now based at Europe’s largest female prison, where we learn that almost all of the inmates are women who have been forced into a very hard life, and many f...

My first Ballard, and supposedly his best work. Thus my extremely high expectations were sure to be confounded. But the work genuinely has a sense of place: the near-future Cannes industrial comp...

This is just so different to anything else I’ve ever read. Paris was hit by a cataclysmic disaster engineered during World War II, wherein surrealist art comes alive with consequences obverse to...

Starts off as a bit of a slam-dunk adrenaline powered kill-fest, but gradually sublimes into a surprisingly delicate work, culminating in the protagonist--more later--entering the mind of a body ta...

After reading Elizabeth Moon, it came as a great relief to read prose with texture and depth. Richard does a really good job of imbuing said texture and depth into the richness of the characters a...

A ship carrying a distinguished soldier is sabotaged and goes down on a continent considered to be uninhabitable. Story drags out survival at sea, then on land, then they discover a secret dessert...

Well constructed story: An entire star system was manufactured in distant past using a machine which is recently discovered. Daughter of evil Emperor-wannabe escapes his clutches, works for a rebe...

A history book. First time Iʼve ever read such a thing. Reads like a bland novel bereft of dialog: pure exposition. Royle makes the sequence of events entirely believable, and does his best to ...

An entire, massive, civilization is about to sublime to a higher state of living. In their wake are predators who will be taking their left-over possessions, and the Culture will be overseeing eve...

There are three races of people known variously as Ariekene, Terre, Hosts, Ambassadors, `monsters' which defy generic description, people who always go around as (more or less) tethered pairs; ther...

Disappointing Rebus installment, mostly let down by the ending. It takes time before the atmosphere really establishes, and on the whole there are too many characters to be able to follow. ...

The opening paragraph on the first page tells you he got off Mars, and since the whole story is told from the first-person viewpoint of a soldier in peril on said planet, suspense is dead at the ou...

It is well-established that Terry Pratchett has a universe in which he can be, and is, as diverse as he wants to be, especially with regards to ethnicity and race relations. Nevertheless, it is ha...

Once again revolves around DI Rebus. The G8 summit at Gleneagles is going on, an MP falls to his death over Edinburgh Castle ramparts, his colleague's parents take part in a peace rally and are bl...

The only realistic way for mankind to explore the galaxy is to clone oneself (shatter) into 1,000, not quite identical, parts, send them on differe...

A book without much mystery as all the characters, including a local police team, a national one, an institutional researcher, and the sole assassin, are introduced at the beginning and all of thei...

A book which tries hard and ultimately fails to live up to its potential. The opening tries to put a human being into the ultimate horrific situation (wakes up in a strange, freezing place, starvi...

Okay, so two competing teams spend the whole book scheming to raise the Titanic--nothing as exciting as even a race--, and then in the last chapter an underwater avalanche covers it in mud and that...

Massive pretext: universe has fewer civilizations than it should because there has been a previous mega-war (we're talking millions of years ago), and ci...

Straightforward plot: A woman born into sexual slavery is killed by her owner, gets re-vented by a Culture eccentric ship, and goes back to exact revenge with the culture and other interested parti...

A giant squid goes missing from the Natural History Museum, and it turns out to be an actual dead god worshipped by a church who have taken it, through the expedient of seducing a Trekkie into usin...

A story set on a world populated by anthropomorphic robots, which procreate by the man providing special blue wire containing 'life force' to a woman who knits it into a child's mind, from which po...

I can't believe this book is so big mostly due to the fact that the pages turn very easily, but also because the story seems simple enough to pass by in fewer pages. Despite that the pages turn ea...

The dysfunctional crew -- everybody necessarily a world apart: robot, android, human, AI mind, simpleton, old lazy woman -- of a spaceship uses software it does not understand to enact trades of ca...

A story which could only be told in a universe where human souls can be freely replicated, stored and moved between bodies, both artificial ones and real ones (termed ``sleeving''). A very rich th...

Incredibly over-eclectic mix of hard science and psychedelic flowery writing, over-permeated with Portuguese phrases. To be fair the Portuguese does distract an awful lot from the story, and in pl...

A near future in which promotion in the workplace occurs through duels to the death with peers, enacted in souped-up cars on a motorway network deserted by a broken society in which the vast majori...

As an entry in the long-running series of John Rebus novels this one charts an interesting time: that of the week of his retirement. Given that the series has been fairly true to time -- charting ...

Book set in an extension of Jonathon Swift's Lilliputian universe, but really any load of giants and dwarfs would have done. The more factual representation of the mid-nineteenth century is actual...

This wonderfully imaginative book is a play on the Canterbury Tales where the author uses the pilgrimage of seven people to unravel the details of an almost mythological creature (but actually quit...

I've been avoiding Iain Banks since I read Dead Air, but just couldn't resist. It turned out to be a wonderful read, full of whacky characters which are eminently believable by virtue of their ful...

This is a book of three parts, and while they join together seamlessly they are on altogether different scales and for all practical purposes take place in different universes. The first part conc...

The story is told from the vantage point of said female, in heaven. The book makes pains to k...

The book begins after the introduction of travel to Earth orbit by riding the ...

Internet-in-the-head is introduced to the world. But for one soul in the world's most undeveloped village, the initial test goes wrong leaving her both permanently connected to the new web, and wi...

The book...

A word the author likes to ...

In the former Gregory very carefully described the whole process of extra-terrestrial travel and the...

Mankind has encased himself in a sealed city, except that every million years a soul is let loose to test the water and...

The story is shallow -- a strange car turns up which every now and th...

This starts out as a book which alternates mechanically from one chapter to the next; from the year of the launch of a mission to Mars, to the last days of the astronauts' time on Mars. I've come ...

A book with a long beginning, no middle, and a very broken, disjointed ending. The beginning seems to take up two-thirds of the book, and continually draws you in, deeper and deeper. The plot is ...

A very self-conscious re-telling of a Greek play, the outcome is already known, and there are really no surprises, which is in itself a surprise because the book describes a universe of mythical mo...

It is a push, but the scientific plausibility can be obtained. For example, six suns surround a planet, and change positions randomly every day. This would imply that the biological clocks of the...

It is a big book. Banks enjoys his writing. Starts out being in essence a quest for the holy grail. The final reveal is brilliant. Always hinted at through the book, but never anticipated. I c...

My second reading of this, and it's not the book I remember. It's a book basically about the life of a Culture whipping-boy, who gets sent into ridiculous war situations to sway the odds on one si...

Unchallenging, easy-reading Dan Brown-a-like without much excitement. An antique dealer gets hold of a journal from someone who sailed on a British Navy ship, which describes a journey in which he...

Another installment in the John Rebus series. If it was the first one I had read, I would probably pronounce it brilliant and look forward to reading the other fifteen. As it is, the same old for...

This is Dan Brown's best. People opposed to the Vatican have taken antimatter from CERN and hidden it in Vatican city, where it will annihilate in a few hours, taking all of Vatican city with it. ...

I found it really shallow and emotionally detached. Here's a woman who met a time traveller, had six miscarriages, saw him after being blown to p...

I struggle to put a rating on this book. It is absolutely riveting and in parts had me on the edge of my seat, but on the other hand it contains ridiculous action and is a shallow political thrill...

Quick comparison: Digital Fortress is even better than the Da Vinci Code. For a long time while I was reading this book I was making plans to modify the BookBlog software so I could award six star...

Another episode in the rosy life of Mma Ramotswe. Like all the others it is naive, quaint, quirky, mildly funny, and immerses itself in the tiny nuances of life in Botswana. The series has grown ...

This is the most boring Rankin book I've ever read. It all takes place in Edinburgh, starts with the discovery of two bodies in the half-constructed parliament building, and then is basically a da...

Well, this is the first Stephen King novel I've read, and it might well be the last. He may be the best selling author in the world, but this stuff is not for me. This is a book of four short sto...

This is incredible. It has all the opposites in all the right proportions. There is hard action and deliberation, historical truth and fictional nonsense, heroism and anti-heroism. The story inv...

There are types of literature I'm not so keen on: disaster stories, planet-bound sci-fi, microbiology/biology/chemistry sci-fi. This book has all this, but I was hoping Greg Bear would provide some...

Agatha Christie whodunit job this one. I'm not even sure that the plot relies on the famous laws of robotics, or even on the futuristic `womb city' landscape for its realization (it could probably ...

A reissue of an early Rankin spy novel. Surprisingly Ian tries and manages with some success to convey a sense of atmosphere in this book, as well as demonstrating his skill at developing character...

This is not a Terry Pratchett book in the normal sense. Reading this after the others is like moving from the west coast to the eastern seaboard of America, and finding the pace of life taken more ...

Collection of about twenty short stories, one being long enough to class as a novella. Trouble with short stories and me is that immediately after reading them I get a glowing impression, and short...

This is as good as I can imagine crime writing ever getting. An established criminal is in jail, and an upstart has moved onto his old territory to take over. But the Japanese Yakuza (bit like Chin...

Quick comparison: Chris Ryan is not half as good as Andy McNab. This book reads like it has been dictated to an average typist by a fourteen year old. It is, almost literally, only half there; ther...

First some shallow observations: the book is full of typographical errors, which must be a production problem as the author is clearly capable of impeccable work; the chapter breaks are erratic, so...

More of the same after The Number One Ladies Detective Agency, but the form is still refreshingly naive, and the characters continue to engross. The storyline is equally simple, and although it is ...

Story about a spastic who's father murders the dog of a neighbour who has run away with his wife. When the spastic finds out who did it, he becomes scared and runs away to live with his mother. The...

Up to the halfway line I thought I was getting the gist of this book. A man (in a world where most men have died out due to a plague) is held in captivity where he is being used to farm some bugs, ...

He finds himself making an epic journey to a planet in a distant reac...

This is a thoughtful study of how such a population might ...

Fleet is run along lines of the British Navy, circa 19...

None of the Seafort sequels I've read have anything like the sharpness of the orig...

Believe this plotline if you can. There's this woman called Acorna (dunno why; maybe it's because she's got this great mass of white hair and a bloody great horn sticking out of her forehead), and ...

Unfortunately it also has ...

It's about a bunch of autistic people. Th...

The novella is significant because it recounts the time when the Culture comes into contact with ...

Peter Carey presents a story as if the hero was the narrator, telling things from his own perspective. N...

A woman living in Botswana throws...