The Forgotten Palace: An Adventure in Presadia by Luke Aylen ★★★★★ Delightful children’s fantasy novel with real-world relevance Fourteen-year-old Antimony is a dwarf unlike other dwarves. Too tall to work in the mines, unable to grow a beard, yet exceptionally quick-minded, and brilliant with numbers and calculations, he has always known that he was different – that his abilities and reactions were at odds with those around him. His world is the kingdom of Presadia, a kingdom from which the king has long been exiled, having been betrayed by his closest ally, known as the Vengeful Servant or the Usurper. Presadia is now a land in which the dwarves became wealthy selling weapons, causing war and bloodshed, and resulting in an influx of...

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan ★★★★★ Reviewed by Jo-Anne BlancoGenre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction,Time Period: 1920s & ‘30s; 2014Africa by Region: South AfricaAsia by Region: IndiaSubgenres/Themes: Debut, Generational Family Sagas, Dealing with Loss, Asian Writers, Strong Women, Magical or Supernatural ElementsAn evocative, poignant, captivating story of a young girl who discovers the secrets of an old house and the djinn who haunts it.   Review Shubnum Khan’s eloquent and moving debut novel opens in 1932, where a djinn (a spirit from Indian mythology, see Beyond the Book) that haunts a house by the sea is in mourning following an unexplained violent event, at once engaging the reader and setting the...

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei ★★★ Reviewed by Jo-Anne BlancoGenre: Sci-Fi, Thriller, MysteryTime Period: The FutureMajor Regions: Space, USA, JapanSubgenres/Themes: Debut, Dealing with Loss, Generational & Family Sagas, Asian Writers, Female Friendships, LGBTQ+ As Earth teeters on the verge of environmental collapse, an elite group of eighty women are chosen to travel into deep space to repopulate a new planet. When a bomb planted on the ship kills several crew members, Asuka is assigned the task of finding out who is behind the explosion. Could it be one of the groups on Earth who oppose their mission … or is there a saboteur on board?   Review In Yume Kitasei’s sci-fi mystery-thriller The Deep Sky, Earth is in chaos....

The Astral Traveler’s Daughter – Book Two of School For Psychics by K. C. Archer ★★★ Investigation into a secret corps of psychic vigilantes Following the betrayal of one classmate and the disappearance of another, Teddy Cannon is determined to get to the truth. A psychically gifted student at the Whitfield Institute for Law Enforcement Training and Development (which secretly trains psychics), she spends her summer vacation searching for clues to track the group responsible, the Patriot Corps, a group of renegade psychics. When a pendant once belonging to her mother comes into her possession, she and her friends are led to a base in the remote Nevada desert. There, the mystery surrounding the Patriot Corps and what happened to her...

The Ancient Nine by Ian K. Smith ★★★ Intriguing mystery and murder in an all-male club at Harvard University In 1927, Harvard student Erasmus Abbott disappears without a trace while trying to break into the university’s most secret society, the Delphic Club. Flash forward to 1988 and Spenser Collins, a sophomore student and member of the university basketball team, is “punched”, i.e. chosen as a candidate to join the Delphic, the most elite and prestigious of Harvard’s nine all-male clubs. As a young black man from the South Side of Chicago, son of a single mother from a poor background, Spenser is an outsider in the world of white male privilege that is Harvard. Yet upon his entrance into this bastion of brotherhood and heritage, Spenser...

The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox ★★★★ Richly imaginative literary adventure that defies categorisation Sisters Beatrice and Taryn Cornick are avid readers and lovers of libraries, especially the library at Princes Gate, their grandparents’ debt-ridden manor house. When their grandfather James Northover dies, the house and the contents of his library are sold. Among the library’s precious items is an ancient scroll box known as ‘The Fire-starter’, known for having survived several fires in famous libraries, though no one knows for sure whether the box has been sold or if it was hidden during the war in a dry cave system on the estate. When the sisters reach adulthood, tragedy strikes and 20-year-old Taryn shuts down, suppressing all her...