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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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Two coming of age novels in a fantasy world richly imagined by Ursula K. Le Guin. Ged is a reckless and young mage from Gont, learning through action the consequences he faces form those actions while Tenar is a young girl, stripped of her family, name and made to serve the nameless ones. Both stories
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What is the cost of selling your blood for money? Sanguan is a man who sells his blood but understands that it comes at a price and that the money he makes has to be spent on something meaningful. But through the course of his life, meaning takes many forms and Sanguan discovers that sacrifice
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The Odyssey. That great journey that is now the hallmark for all subsequent journeys, but as we are ferried along this perilous path, we ask the question – can a hero return home both physically and mentally? Stylistically more complex than the Iliad, the Odyssey weaves a tale of myth and fiction as one man
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The Iliad was originally orally comprised making up part of the epic cycle. There was a paradox when it was written down. It went from being a flexible and fluid piece of literature that stretched with the imagination of the bard to a rigid story, captured and chained to the page. But, the paradox is,
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Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple is an epistolary novel that spans the years and distance between two sisters that are trying to survive their respective worlds. Celie is stuck in an abusive relationship, married to a man that views her as his property to do with what he likes. Nettie escapes the doldrums of domestic
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The Citadel of the Autarch is the final in the series Book of the New Sun and it is safe to say it ends how it begins… shrouded in mystery. A climax? I think so… Answers? Possibly… but do I know what actually happened? Ill save that for the second read. A masterpiece of a
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‘Whatever in creation exists in without my knowledge, exists without my consent’ A quote from today’s novel that is equally stark as it is brutal as it is mythic as it is beautiful. Cormac McCarthy’s famed novel, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West weaves a tale that draws from historical narrative. A
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Two men. Achilles and Odysseus. Two central themes across two books. The Iliad and the Odyssey. War and Home. One lives a life of inscincere happiness. The other a life of authentic grief, but is one better than the other? Painting: Today a photo I took while in Israel studying archaeology. It is an elderly
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Two boys and a kite with nothing but life ahead of them. A turn of events sees the world come down faster than a cut kite and suddenly the world and future of the boys’ lives is uncertain. Set against the backdrop of the Coup of the Taliban and spanning as far as the United
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In the Sword of the Lictor, the duty and honour bound Severian continues to wrestle with the moral responsibility he can’t quite escape. The novel passes like an ethereal dreamscape as Severian continues to pass through this world and our pages, and with each turning page, another piece of what Severian holds dear is taken
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