A Novel Review Podcast

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com

A question I wondered as I started reading Richard Adam’s ‘Watership Down’ was – how affecting will a book about rabbits be?

It turns out that a story, that was originally orally comprised for the entertainment of his children, journeying for a better life across fields can sweep you along a great Odyssean tale of hardship, friendship, endurance and belief. It tur...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – I volunteer as tribute to read these books for you. The duality of power on display amongst the gross pageantry of the upper class exercising their abusive ‘right’ to control the citizens of Panem. Katniss Everdeen volunteers for the the annual Hunger Games. 24 children enter the arena and only 1 will come out…  all televise...

To follow and support us, click here: http://anovelreviewpodcast.com

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald has all the making of an idyllic dream coming to fruition. A lifelong dream of opening in a quaint English town is something everyone should like. But what happens when not everyone wants a bookshop? Seen as an outsider, Florence and her bookshop don’t quite fit into the puzzle of this small town and so she finds herself as an...

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 exist as, as gene editing scientists...

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 one wants to peer into for long. Lem ...

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 view of a field

Some of the books...

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. The sea stretches on, but Ged’s voya...

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 businessman is a rags-to-riches ...

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 Banu Mushtaq
• The Moustache by Em...

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 the books and authors discussed in 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 Ged and Tenar have to search for the...

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 his familial identity and understa...

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 his home, and even if he makes i...

 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 have this historical piece of literat...

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, becoming a part of a mission in Africa....

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 closer you look, the more confused ...

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 mythic quality to it, the prose is...

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. Some of the books and authors disc...

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 Afghanistan, but does this physical dist...