Pages

Monday 7 June 2010

Recent reads.

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

This was a beautifully written little book - a successful combination of research and imagination.

The nature of the novel is that it describes a one year 'slice' of time. Consequently the ending does not provide conclusions or solutions, but is more like the drawing of a pair of curtains on a scene that continues beyond the reader's sight - a frustrating way to end, but a lovely book all the same.




A Stain on the Silence by Andrew Taylor

** SPOILERS **

Disappointing. The blurb is misleading at best. The author writes:

'The novel starts from three very simple premises: what if a childless man in his forties discovers that he has a daughter, the result of an affair 25 years earlier? What if the daughter is pregnant? And what if she’s on the run for murder?'

However, the daughter is not his daughter and she is not on the run for murder and while there are some intriguing twists in the novel, the characters were not compelling enough for me to really care about what happened to them.

No comments:

Post a Comment