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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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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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In Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, Balram Halwai claws his way from darkness to light, serving satire as sharp as his entrepreneurial instincts. Adiga’s India is raw, roaring, and unapologetically corrupt – a state of jungle law, where only cunning predators survive. Balram’s journey from teashop boy to businessman is a…
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Summertime is the time to read outdoors, in the park, at the beach, at a café, wherever the sun is shining. Here are 4 books is read this summer! Painting: Today I painted a beach Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include: The Fisherman by John Langan Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico…
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It would be funny if it wasn’t so frightening The question I ask myself is, ‘did I ever think that by starting a book podcast, I would be called a racist behind the curtain?’ The answer is no. And yet it happened. Being intellectually challenged is one thing, but being called racist is another. When…
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In Naked Earth, Eileen Chang peels back the red curtain on Maoist China with shocking irony spanning more than one layer. Love tries to bloom amid slogans, paranoia, and political purges, but ideology has a habit of stomping on sentiment. It’s romance meets revolution – awkwardly. Painting: Today I painted a field Some of the…
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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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