Oh boy, this was such an utter delight. Right from the start, we've got a protagonist to root for: Mrs. Muriel McAuley, a plucky elderly lady fighting alongside her neighbours against the rapacious real estate developers encroaching into the rural Scottish fishing village of Witchaven.

Muriel soon finds an unexpected ally in a sea creature — not monster, the distinction is important! — and together, they'll lay waste to anyone who dares seize her home.

This is a short read, clocking in at a tight 200 pages or so, and it wastes no time in getting right into the action. With tender, domestic moments tucked alongside sheer fury and gore (good for her!), this genre-defying novel blends body horror with cozy romance for a thoroughly satisfying ending where the villains are defeated and the protagonists ride off into the sunset.

I was hooked right from the start and would definitely recommend this for anyone who's looking for a unique take on cozy horror.

Three women, separated by centuries, bound together by a single thread. With decadent prose and compelling characters, V.E. Schwab takes on magical realism with a lush, sapphic journey from 16th-century Spain to modern Boston.

To call this merely a vampire novel would be doing it a disservice — it is part love letter to Romanticism, to desire and hunger and rebellion, to dreaming and yearning and ironically, living. Yet, underneath this freedom rages the kind of profound hurt and control that can only be wielded by those who know each other so intimately — and who better to destroy than the creator herself?

This was a deeply atmospheric and immersive read, one that I devoured (no pun intended!) in a single sitting. While I found the first half of the novel significantly more compelling than the second half — a protracted abusive relationship spanning well over a century became repetitive — I thought it all came together satisfyingly at the end.

"What music, what tasteless art, what wild breaks and sense of humour: people flying 2,000 miles for a one-week holiday; buildings that touched the cloud base; razing ancient forests to make paper to wipe their backsides. But they also spelled out the human genome, invented the internet, made a start on AI and placed a beautiful golden telescope a million miles out in space."

This was a hard one for me to review. It reads like two separate novels, and functionally, it is. The first half is phenomenal and had me hooked from the start with its quiet portrayal of regular life in a world following nuclear and climate disaster. 

In between references to the new global hegemony and topographic change, we narrow in on the quotidien: scholar Thomas Metcalfe pursues his white whale, poet Francis Blundy's lost poem for his wife, "A Corona for Vivian". Metcalfe embodies the obsessive nature of academia, the romanticisation of the past, the nostalgia of a world never lived in. The retrospective on the political, social, and cultural touchstones of the 2010s is equal parts incisive critique and love letter to humanity's contradictions, achievements, foibles. I loved the first half, and forced myself to slow down (yes, this was a page-turner for me!) and relish in the world-building because I didn't want the novel to be over. 

The second half drops off sharply for me. I struggled with what was essentially a pastiche of domestic fiction, the utterly banal ins and outs of a marriage on the rocks and an affair, a woman resigned to playing a supporting role in her husband's life. Perhaps, like Metcalfe, I was chasing an idea, enamoured with the intrigue, with the truth turning out to be merely pedestrian.

Lucy Golden is a cult survivor who did what she did to survive. Having grown up in the shadow of her glamorous photographer mother, she's since built a career in true crime after the success of Rattlesnake, her explosive memoir about her experience in the Oasis. However, when a hotshot director decides to dig into Lucy's past, what will he uncover? 

There were some elements of this novel which I did find compelling: Lucy's interactions with her mother were riveting, a profoundly unhealthy, enmeshed mother-daughter relationship built on a history of betrayals, lies, and secrets. The constant blurring of boundaries, the way mothers are their daughter's first bully. I also appreciated the way the novel parallels the exploitative nature of the fine-art industry with that of true crime, the way subjects are commodified and their bodies, stories, reduced to one moment in time. 

That being said, this novel built up to a whole lot of nothing. The truth about what happened at the cult was frankly quite tame – and her mother's role in the whole situation is just brushed away. At the end of all of this, Lucy doesn't seem to have grown through the events of the novel. In the final chapter, she seems to be still playing a role, and perhaps, for the rest of her life, she will – the survivor, the advocate – whatever mask she needs to put on to further her narrative.