Sections
Bernard Cornwell, the author of the acclaimed The Warlord Chronicles and The Saxon Stories, is known to have a clear predilection for historical fiction since virtually all of his work belongs to this genre. The Archer’s Tale, the first book in the trilogy called Grail Quest is one more novel written in a similar style, with a plot that starts at the beginning of the Hundred Years War. However, more concerned with describing the great battles than with telling a proper story, Cornwell develops a narrative so shallow and uninteresting that the main plot gets even ignored by its own characters.
Thomas, the protagonist, is the son of a priest in the village of Hookton in England. [...]
The Demonologist, written by Andrew Pyper, seeks to mix a horror story with the typical structure of a thriller while building an allegory on depression. The novel may contain a couple of exciting scenes, but its incoherent story is ultimately incapable of sustaining itself.
The novel’s protagonist is David Ullman, a university professor and specialist in the most famous work of the English poet John Milton: the epic poem Paradise Lost. Ullman’s marriage is in ruins, his job doesn’t bring the same satisfaction as before, and his best friend has just discovered she has terminal cancer. It’s to escape [...]
Giordano Bruno, friar, philosopher, and the protagonist of Heresy, was persecuted by the Inquisition at the end of the sixteenth century for preaching the infinity of the universe and its heliocentric model, preceding even the famous Galileo. It is said that his last speech, when he was finally captured by the Inquisition in 1600 and sentenced to death for heresy, was “Perhaps you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it”. His well-documented history serves as the basis for the making of a thriller that, despite having an interesting historical setting, fails to bring together the elements that form its various plotlines.
A society where just a handful of people have control over the transmission of information, where history is being constantly revised to hide the nature of uncomfortable events, where certain gestures and thoughts are subject to severe punishment – not because they’re harmful to other people, but to the status quo -, and where the government doesn’t hesitate to violently suppress any opposition: the universe of Wool, a science fiction novel written by Hugh Howey, can be considered both dystopian and relevant to current times.
The protagonist of Wool is Juliette, a brilliant mechanic who is suddenly, and [...]
If it is said that a reader lives a thousand lives before they die, how about an author? Telling the life story of Julian Carax, a mysterious writer, and that of Daniel Sempere, the 11 years old boy who picks, from the labyrinthine shelves of a forgotten library exactly the last book written by Carax, The Shadow of the Wind is a book about the art of reading and writing.
When Daniel Sempere is led by his father to an enigmatic place in the historical heart of Barcelona, called “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books”, he has the difficult task of deciding, of the thousands of lost volumes before him, which would be the [...]
A Dance with Dragons, the fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, despite being one of the more concise volumes in the series, containing virtually only three main plots – which helps to move the narrative forward –, still suffers from the remnants of the bad planning surrounding the previous book, A Feast for Crows.
A Dance with Dragons follows stories that take place in two main locations: the North of Westeros, especially around the colossal wall of ice, focusing on the characters of Jon Snow and King Stannis; and the continent of Essos, with Queen Daenerys.
The stories of Daenerys and Jon [...]