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Welcome to A Novel Review, the book podcast where every week, Seamus reviews a different book. For 2025 Seamus is doing a ‘Book World Tour’ where every month he ‘travels’ through literature to another country. The rules are simple: Each month he reads two books – one male and one female and the author has
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Harry Mulisch’s The Assault is our first Dutch novel for the book world tour that explores guilt, memory, and moral ambiguity in post-World War II Netherlands. Following Anton Steenwijk’s haunting past, the story unravels the devastating consequences of war and silence. Perfect for literature lovers, this summary delves into Mulisch’s masterful storytelling, and psychological depth
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Non-fiction November rolls around and with it, a fresh stack of non-fiction books. No dragons to slay, no murders to solve and detectives to help us. Nothing but truth and fact to guide us as we turn from the usual fiction. From wandering the streets of Italy to the making of the western mind, campaigns
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Predating Dracula by 25 years, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is the dark Sapphic vampire novel that kickstarted the blood sucking villain of horror in fiction. The perfect book to sink your teeth into, this bite sized chunk of a novella is ethereal as it is indulged. Laura is a young girl, isolated with her father
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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