-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
‘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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The Book World Tour has taken flight and landed in Afghanistan. In the Patience Stone, Atiq Rahimi gives a voice to women living through circumstances that see them constantly beleaguered by society. A woman nurses her husband who is in a coma in a room surrounded by the ongoing violence of war. But, as the…
-
The 30 best book of the 20th century. A curated list presented over three episodes all comes down to this final piece of the puzzle. The top 10 best books (in my opinion) of the 20th century. A conclusion to a list that will take many shapes throughout my life.. and at the moment, this…
-
Expectation lingers at the peripherals of this tale as the pressure builds with every page. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s novel ‘Stay With Me’ explores the pressures of a society and culture that rest upon the foundation of expectation. The expectation to get married and have kids to further the family name. A pressure that bubbles within the…
-
The Claw of the Conciliator sends the reader deeper into the labyrinth of Gene Wolfe’s imaginative science fantasy novel. Weaving the tale, there is only one way in and one way out. Severian the torturer, tortures us as the reader with a story that raises so many questions in the chaos of the narrative and…
Skip to content
A Novel Review Book Podcast 