Book reviews

Classic novel of a daring experiment in human intelligence.

Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.

Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence-a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

High fantasy, low stakes - with a double-shot of coffee.

After decades of adventuring, Viv the orc barbarian is finally hanging up her sword for good. Now she sets her sights on a new dream - for she plans to open the first coffee shop in the city of Thune. Even though no one there knows what coffee actually is.

If Viv wants to put the past behind her, she can't go it alone. And help might arrive from unexpected quarters.

Twenty-three-year-old Frits – office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes – finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.

This is the story of ten evenings in Frits’s life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city streets and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him.

On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony's erudite university -- and Mossa's former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth's pre-collapse ecosystems.

Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti's assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake -- and, perhaps, their futures, together.

The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism.

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart.

Bento Santiago is madly in love with his neighbour, Capitu. He even breaks a promise his devout mother made to God that he become a priest in order to marry her. But, once wed, Bento becomes increasingly convinced that Capitu is having a torrid affair, that his son is not his own, and that his best friend has cuckolded him.

What follows is a rich and sardonic narrative, as Bento attempts to discern his son's paternity. Are his suspicions actually based in reality or have his obsessive ruminations given way to deceptive illusions?

The Japanese bestseller: a tale of love, new beginnings, and the comfort that can be found between the pages of a good book.

When twenty-five-year-old Takako's boyfriend reveals he's marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle Satoru's offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above his shop. Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, the Morisaki Bookshop is a booklover's paradise.

On a quiet corner in an old wooden building, the shop is filled with hundreds of second-hand books. It is Satoru's pride and joy, and he has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife left him five years earlier. Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the shop.

Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?

An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge - for readers of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan's Atonement.

It's 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season . . .

At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in sub-zero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to explore neighbouring exoplanets long suspected to harbour life.