Peadar Ó Guilín has reissued his excellent debut Bone World Trilogy, putting the entire trilogy in print in a unified format for the first time.
The trilogy comprises The Inferior (2007), The Deserter (2012) and The Volunteer (2014), and tells the story of a Darwinian struggle for survival between tribesfolk and monsters in a harsh world. As the story develops, it brings in SF ideas and unexpected plot twists that remain fresh and inventive.
Ó Guilín won plaudits for his recent YA dystopian duology, comprising The Call (2016) and The Invasion(2018).
The Bone World Trilogy is available now in ebook via Amazon and Smashwords. Paperbacks will follow in the New Year.
The island of Ireland has been sealed off from the rest of the world by a mystical barrier. Technology cannot penetrate it. The people of Ireland, the division between north and south no longer mattering, are under constant attack. Every teenager is "Called", summoned to another realm where they do battle with the Aes Sidhe, the ancient rulers of Ireland before they were banished in a great war. The Sidhe have a day in their realm (three minutes in ours) to hunt down and kill the child, otherwise the victime escapes. Sometimes the Sidhe spare the victim, to return them home mutilated or "changed" in some horrific fashion. Most of the time, the Sidhe kill the victim.
Nessa has survived her Call, despite her deformed legs. Refusing to believe she could survive without betraying the Nation, Nessa's government imprisons her and subjects her to torture and interrogation. As Nessa tries to find a way of escaping, the last barriers between Ireland and the Grey Land begin to fail, and the invasion begins in earnest...
The Call was one of the genre highlights of 2016, a striking mash-up of Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies and the TV series Skins, but elevated by O'Guilin's signature dark wit and his sure grasp of Irish mythology. The Invasion (formerly entitled The Cauldron) is the continuation of this story.
Picking up quickly where The Call left off, the concluding part of the tale (this is a duology with the overall title The Grey Land; no trilogies here) follows three separate narratives: Nessa's misadventures in prison as a suspected enemy of the state; Anto as a soldier on the front lines of the invasion itself and Aoife back in the school, helping pick up the pieces in the aftermath of the Sidhe's failed attack. These narratives develop in swift parallel, the relentless pace picking up as each group of characters finds themselves in jeopardy, but also moving towards finding a resolution to the crisis. This results in rapid-fire chapters as we switch between groups (with occasional, brief switches to other characters) and get a more thorough understanding of how the war is proceeding.
The Call was a dark novel, but The Invasion is darker and more gruesome still, despite ostensibly being a YA book. There's also frank discussions of sexuality and a lot of earthy humour. The Invasion gives its young target audience a lot of credit for their maturity and their intelligence.
If there is a complaint, it may be that the book ends a touch abruptly. Things build to a major climax and we get that, with the revelations expanding on what we learned earlier in the novel (or in the preceding one) but the story does feel like it moves from midpoint to endgame in the space of just a chapter or two. Or it might just be that O'Guilin does such a great job of keeping the narrative ticking that it all being over is disappointing. Still, brave to the author for keeping this story constrained and tight rather than expanding things to a trilogy (which, given the first book's success, must have been tempting).
The Invasion (****) is available in the UK and USA now.
Edit: I had a few people ask about this when the first book came out, so will reiterate it here: the term "Aes Sidhe" is the original Irish term ("Aos Si" is a more recent form) for a mythological species of fairies or elves who originally ruled Ireland before being defeated by men. The Book of Conquests (also The Book of Invasions or The Book of the Taking of Ireland) is an account of this conflict, dating back to the 11th Century but based on considerably older oral traditions.
Needless to say, the term massively predates the term "Aes Sedai", which Robert Jordan borrowed from the Irish for his Wheel of Time sequence beginning in 1990. O'Guilin is simply using the original term from Irish mythology.
I reviewed Peadar O Guilin's The Call a few months ago and found it to be one of the best SFF novels I've read in a while. A smart coming-of-age story infused with the darker side of Irish mythology and based on a killer concept (the Sidhe return, imprison Ireland in a magical field and relentlessly hunt every teenage human inside down for sport), it's well worth a read.
The Call is out today in the United States from Scholastic and at the end of the week in the UK and Ireland from David Fickling Books. Reviews are already out in the wild:
Kirkus Reviews: "Where the book excels is in its worldbuilding, which
imagines a realistically multicultural, modern Ireland unified by the Call and
where the Irish language is no longer spoken and Sídhe is replacing English."
The Bookbag: "There are a good many survival game stories about at the moment, but The Call
feels fresh and interesting and powerful. It's beautifully paced,
remorseless and is peopled with characters you can believe in. I
couldn't put it down. I understand a sequel - The Cauldron - will follow, and I'll be first in line to read it."
Mugglenet: "The Call is a stunner of a book. I was taken in immediately,
and was so riveted that I flew through the entire thing in just a
couple of hours...Many readers might immediately draw comparisons to The Hunger Games, but The Call has much more in common with 1999’s Battle Royale
by Koushun Takami...The Call is enchanting, compelling, and utterly horrifying. I loved it."
Queen of Teen Fiction: "It
was gory and twisted, definitely not for the faint-hearted, but it was
hard to turn my eyes away. I was desperate to learn more about these
faeries and their history. Since I’m pretty sure this book is the first
in a series, I’m highly anticipating another trip into this world that
O’Guilin has created, and I’m equally excited to see and dreading what
nightmares await the characters next."
Last Thursday the United Kingdom voted, by a very narrow margin, to leave the European Union. Discussions of the socio-economic and political consequences of that will go on for many years. Although it will not have been at the forefront of many voters' minds, the departure also has a bearing on the European SFF fandom scene. It was only two years ago that huge numbers of fans from across the continent descended on London for Worldcon, and next year will likewise descend on Helsinkin and then on Dublin in 2019. Irish SFF author Peadar O Guilin has a few words to say about the event:
Like all Europeans, Peadar carefully challenges each banana he eats on its curvature to ensure compliance with European Union guidelines. This one is suspect. He ate it anyway.
"Brilliant!" I thought -- this was three and a half years ago, you
understand. These days I'm more likely to use the word "awesome". But I
digress...
I had received an invite to a Science Fiction
convention in Luxembourg. I was expecting a relaxing weekend, sitting in
an empty room. You see, everybody knows Luxembourg is tiny, and since
they never had a convention before this, the organisers were doomed to
struggle for numbers. They might get twenty people, I thought. Thirty
tops...
I've never been so wrong in my life. The place was
swarming with people. In fact, it was the largest Con I had ever
attended outside North America. But where the hell did they all come
from?
Europe, of course.
My mistake was to think of
Luxembourg as a country. Well, it is, but that's not what's important
here. What's important, is that it no longer possesses any borders.
People arrived from Paris and Brussels by trains that never even slowed
down when they passed from one state to another. They drove by car from
Germany and only realised they had crossed over from their own country
when they started spotting road signs in French.
Then, they
reached the Con -- thousands of them, overwhelmingly young, buying
wonderful Belgian frites with the same currency they already had in
their pockets.
I sat in the sunshine speaking to people,
sometimes in French, but mostly in an English that many of them had
honed by spending time studying or working in the UK. I admired their
incredibly creative costumes, and more than one person sported a t-shirt
with a Union Jack on it, because in the heart of our continent, among
the youth, Britain was seen as cool; as forward looking; as open.
This was Europe as it was always meant to be. Friendly, vibrant,
thriving. Made possible, not in spite of, but because of decades of
regulations and the harmonisation of national laws. It's what the young
see when they travel. It's their country now, the one they would "want
back" if ever they were to lose it.
I get to experience a little of that here in Ireland too.
I remember the bad old days, growing up in Donegal, and having to pass
over the border. I remember soldiers scarcely older than myself, armed
with big guns, passing down the aisle of the bus while everybody stared
at the back of the seat in front of them.
Yet now, when I attend
my favourite convention -- TitanCon in Belfast -- I just hop into my
car, and keep driving until I reach the hotel. Nobody says "boo" to me. I
don't have to wait in a line of traffic while every fourth car is
searched for contraband or terrorists. It's all so... frictionless.
Sure, the road signs are in miles, rather than kilometres, but that's
actually charming. The only thing I miss, really, is the Euro.
I'm heart-broken over the UK's vote to leave us. I'm terrified that the
lovely European dream I experienced in Luxembourg might soon be at an
end and I'm working hard to stave off bitterness and resentment. I want
the future to be "brilliant" again, the way I thought it was, or at
least, the way it might have been.
- Peadar O Guilin (reprinted with permission)
Both Peadar and myself will be in attendance at TitanCon 2016, which will be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 30 September to 2 October 2016. It's an excellent convention which I strongly urge people to attend. Peadar's new novel The Call is out on 30 August. I strongly suggest you buy it, as it will melt your face off. Not literally.
Niall Alexander has a good post at Tor.com which samples opinions on Brexit from across the UK publishing scene, good and bad.
The island of Ireland has been sealed off from the rest of the world by a mystical barrier. Technology cannot penetrate it. The people of Ireland, the division between north and south no longer mattering, are under constant attack. Every teenager is "Called", summoned to another realm where they do battle with the Aes Sidhe, the ancient rulers of Ireland before they were banished in a great war. The Sidhe have a day in their realm (three minutes in ours) to hunt down and kill the child, otherwise the victime escapes. Sometimes the Sidhe spare the victim, to return them home mutilated or "changed" in some horrific fashion. Most of the time, the Sidhe kill the victim.
Nessa is a teenager at school, but in this age schools do not teach algebra or humanities. Instead they teach each student on how to survive in the Sidhe realm, how to kill the fairies and how to escape back home. Nessa's prospects are dim due to a childhood brush with polio and the resulting weakening of her legs. But Nessa has made a vow to survive, no matter the cost.
It's been nine years since Peadar O'Guilin released his debut novel, The Inferior, an SF story of high-tech and savage, cannibalistic societies coexisting next to each other. Since then, he's made a habit of writing stories that combine mythology, SF and horror, told with verve and intelligence. The Call is an evolution of that storytelling style, and should be a major step forward for his career.
The Call is a rich story mixing horror, survivalism and deep-rooted Irish mythology. "Hey, this sounds a bit like The Hunger Games," some may say, and I suspect the comparison will become a cornerstone of future reviews. However, I would argue that the story is less like The Hunger Games and, at least in spirit and tone, more like that's novel's considerably darker and more adult inspiration, Koushun Takami's Battle Royale. Like that novel The Call channels many of the real issues, challenges and emotional turmoils of being a teenager, given greater resonance by being studied through the lens of an extraordinary situation that transforms the foibles of adolescence into a grim and deadly game of survival.
The result is a mash-up of Battle Royale, Terry Pratchett's Lord and Ladies and an Irish version of Skins, but parsed by O'Guilin's signature dark wit and expert pacing. The book moves like a rollercoaster from the off, but has time to delve into Irish mythology, reflect on teenage angst and sexuality (this is a pretty frank book in that regard) and develop its key characters, not just redoubtable protagonist Nessa but also her friends, the teachers at the school and her sworn enemies. O'Guilin has developed that most enviable knack of dropping us into a character's head for a few moments and establishing them as a full-realised person in just a page or two. He does this so well that it's hard not feel sympathy even for the "bad guys" when they get offed.
It's a short novel at 320 pages, but it moves fast, is extremely bloody-minded and has a body count that might make even George R.R. Martin wince. It's also very smart, with its premise and "rules" interrogated by the characters as much as by the reader, and tremendously adult. It may be marketed as a "YA" book but it does not pander to presupposed juvenile tastes. It treats its audience with respect and credits them with intelligence.
There's not much to say that is negative. It's another one of these books that's the first of a series but the marketing doesn't really mention it (a sequel, The Invasion, will follow in due course). It also feels like the danger of "sleeper agents", people sent back by the Sidhe having apparently survived their Calling but in reality transformed into their slaves, should have been more properly considered by the Irish authorities and protected against. But these are less than minor issues.
The Call (****½) will be published by David Fickling Books in the UK and Ireland on 30 August this year, and in the USA by Scholastic around the same time (no listing yet). I very strongly recommend it.
Edit: I've now had a couple of people ask about this. The term "Aes Sidhe" is the original Irish term ("Aos Si" is a more recent form) for a mythological species of fairies or elves who originally ruled Ireland before being defeated by men. The Book of Conquests (also The Book of Invasions or The Book of the Taking of Ireland) is an account of this conflict, dating back to the 11th Century but based on considerably older oral traditions.
Needless to say, the term massively predates the term "Aes Sedai", which Robert Jordan borrowed from the Irish for his Wheel of Time sequence beginning in 1990. O'Guilin is simply using the original term from Irish mythology.
Last month I attended the fifth TitanCon, a science fiction and fantasy convention in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was the first TitanCon I'd attended, although I had gone to a fan "moot" in 2009 during the filming of the pilot episode of Game of Thrones. Several cast and crewmembers attended that moot, along with George R.R.Martin, and everyone had a great time (reports can be seen here, here and here, and you may recognise some of my photos from memes that have since sprung up online).
TitanCon itself started as a Game of Thrones-oriented event, although it's always had a strong literature track. This year, the international demands of filming for Game of Thrones and the growing expense of attending actors meant that none of the current cast was able to join us. Several crewmembers - most impressively Will Simpson, the show's senior concept artist and visualiser-in-chief - did attend and we were joined by returning actors Miltos Yerolemou (who played Syrio Forel in Season 1) and Aimee Richardson (who played Myrcella Baratheon in the first two seasons). With the GoT participation reduced, the literature track had to step up and it did in style.
The attending authors included Joe Abercrombie (The First Law Trilogy, The Shattered Sea, Best Served Cold), Sarah Pinborough (The Death House, The Dog-Faced Gods, The Nowhere Chronicles), Pat Cadigan (Synners, Fools, Mindplayers and numerous short stories), Peadar Ó Guilín (The Bone World Trilogy, The Call), Laurence Donaghy (The Folk'd Trilogy), Debbie "DJ" McCune (the Death and Co. series), Jo Zebedee (Abendau's Heir) and debut author Zoë Sumra (Sailor to a Siren). On the Friday evening (25 September) the authors read from their new books (or, in Joe's case, from The Heroes). Laurance Donaghy made a notable impact by reading an excellent and witty short story about God making an adoption application, which he'd only written the day before.
The main day of the convention was Saturday 26 September. I moderated a panel on Season 5 with Miltos, Aimee and Will. We discussed fan reactions to the divisive (putting it mildly) season, Will's feelings when the show won its glut of Emmy Awards and the circumstances behind Myrcella being recast (and maximum credit for Aimee handling that potentially awkward discussion with good humour and grace). Will also outlined the process how a sequence such as the Battle of Hardhome started with the script, was then expanded by his concept art and ideas and then turned into a detailed battle-plan on how to film it, before effects are added. He hinted that similar big scenes may lie ahead in Season 6, but was unable to say more.
Season 6 proved to be the main discussion point for a second panel later in the day, hosted by the mighty Peadar Ó Guilín (with myself as a guest). Due to the lack of actors currently on the show this was adjusted on the fly to involve the audience more and there was a lot of entertaining discussion about the divergence between the books and the TV series what plot points the upcoming season might develop further.
On the literature side of things, I attended an amusing panel about sex and how to write and handle it. The highlight of this panel was Joe Abercrombie reading a particularly...vivid sex scene from Morrissey's new novel.
There was also a quiz drawing on 1980s gameshow Blankey Blank pitting, which I did miserably at (although I did win membership of next year's convention as a consolation prize), but was hilarious, mainly for Joe Abercrombie winning a prize of George R.R. Martin's face.
Things wrapped up with a performance show put on by Brutal Ballet and then some karaoke and partying. A great time was had by all.
The Sunday was reserved for a special event: a coach trip around Northern Ireland to visit locations used on Game of Thrones. These included Ballintoy Harbour, where Iron Island scenes were shot for Season 2, and Portstewart Strand, where scenes were filmed for Dorne in Season 5. We also visited Larrybane Quarry, where scenes involving Renly and Stannis meeting in Season 2 were shot. The day was marked by a brutal rivalry between the two coaches, with escalating comments made on Twitter and Facebook. Things were wrapped up at Clandeboye Estate where the travellers on Coach One staged a brutal mock-Red Wedding on their Coach Two comrades. Then it was back to the hotel to watch the lunar eclipse. We took advantage of the coach's intercom system to hold a mobile panel on Aragorn's economic policies against the orcs post the War of the Ring (a topic much-discussed by GRRM recently), which was both random and fun.
There was no programming for the Monday, and with my flight not leaving until late the day was instead spent in the hotel bar with a surprisingly large number of other attendees. Comedy was invoked when an actual wedding party showed up, so one of our attending musicians decided to provide an appropriate soundtrack:
Overall, TitanCon was enormous fun. Belfast is a fun city (and unexpectedly great for burrito restaurants), the surrounding countryside is beautiful and the coach tour was a great way of both seeing the sights and also bonding with fellow attendees, some of whom went on to attend OctoCon in Dublin a couple of weeks later.
This was my first TitanCon but certainly won't be the last. With the chaotic shooting schedule of Game of Thrones likely to continue and the show likely to end in 2018, TitanCon is going to continue its evolution into a more general SFF convention for Northern Ireland, which is a good move. In 2016 it will likely be held earlier in the year (possibly early August) and I will certainly be attending.
Irish SF and fantasy author Peadar Ó Guilín has signed a new two-book deal with Scholastic Books in the United States. The first book released in this deal will be The Call, a novel set in an Enid Blyton-style boarding school but "with massive casualties and a severe lack of ginger pop".
Ó Guilín is a familiar face from Irish SFF fandom, a regular at Octocon and TitanCon, and the author of The Bone World Trilogy, the first of which, The Inferior, I reviewed to some praise a nontrivial number of years ago. Which reminds me that I still need to read the sequels.
David Fickling Books will publish the novel in the UK and Ireland. The Call is expected for release in early 2016.
This will be the fifth TitanCon, which is held every year in Belfast. The convention is primarily dedicated to Game of Thrones, which films its studio scenes in the city at the nearby Paint Hall Studios, but also has a strong track dedicated to literature.
This year will feature authors Joe Abercrombie, Sarah Pinborough, Pat Cadigan, Peadar Ó Guilín, Laurence Donaghy, Debbie "DJ" McCune, Zoë Sumra and Jo Zebedee, as well as appearances by the Medieval Combat Group. Miltos "Syrio Forel" Yerolemou and Aimee "Myrcella Baratheon" Richardson will be representing for Game of Thrones, along with some other castmembers (not confirmed until the day as the filming schedule keeps changing).
There are also workshops on papercraft, claymaking, leather crafting and even waterdancing. Things are rounded off with a quizz and a party (of course!). There's also a coach tour on the Sunday which takes in various filming locations in and around the city.
I haven't been to TitanCon before, but I went to its predecessor, the 2009 Belfast Moot when they were filming the pilot and Kit Harington and Maisie Williams could walk down the street without being mobbed, which was great fun. I will also be moderating the "Season 5 in Review" panel which will be very interesting.
If you're interested in coming, there are still some tickets available and the congoers know how to throw a great event!
Way back in the day I reviewed Peadar Ó Guilín's debut novel, The Inferior, the first book in the Bone World Trilogy. It was an excellent read and one of the highlights of 2007. The second novel, The Deserter, was published in 2011.
Unfortunately, despite excellent reviews, the first two books in the series did not sell as well as expected. As a result, Random House have dropped plans to publish the concluding volume of the trilogy, The Volunteer (which seems a bit short-sighted in these days when so many people wait for a series to be fully published before reading it). Fortunately, the author will still be publishing the book as an ebook in 2014. Random House will also be publishing a new, stand alone dystopian novel from Ó Guilín, Eat the Drink, in May 2015.
The Deserter, the sequel to Peadar Ó Guilín's excellent 2007 debut The Inferior and the second in The Bone World Trilogy, is released today in the UK. I haven't had a chance to get round to it yet, but if it's half as good as the first book, it'll likely be one of the highlights of the year, so it should be well worth a look.
The humans are weak and vulnerable. Soon the beasts that share their stone-age world will kill and eat them. To save his tribe, Stopmouth must make his way to the Roof, the mysterious hi-tech world above the surface.
But the Roof has its own problems. The nano technology that controls everything from the environment to the human body is collapsing. A virus has already destroyed the Upstairs, sending millions of refugees to seek shelter below. And now a rebellion against the Commission, organized by the fanatical Religious, is about to break.
Hunted by the Commission’s Elite Agents through the overcrowded, decaying city of the future, Stopmouth must succeed in a hunt of his own: to find the secret power hidden in the Roof’s computerized brain, and return to his people before it is too late.
Peadar Ó Guilín has followed his extraordinary debut The Inferior with an equally original and pulse-racing sequel in which human primitivism collides with futuristic technology.
Peadar O Guilin has posted the cover for his second novel, The Deserter, to his blog. This is the sequel to his excellent 2007 debut, The Inferior, and the middle volume of The Bone World Trilogy.
The novel has a current, tentative release date of May 2011 and is one of my more eagerly-awaited books for this year.
No, not e-books that are teh suck, but news that Peadar O Guilin's superb 2007 novel The Inferioris now available in e-book form. Very good news, especially for those wishing to join the Bone World series before the second book, The Deserter, is published in May 2011.
Kim Stanley Robinson is in Britain doing a signing tour for his novel Galileo's Dream and has been commenting on a number of issues facing British SF. Today he derided the Booker Prize's continuing failure to recognise modern British speculative fiction, and in his full commentary he also points out the sterling state of British SF at the moment (making the strong contrast to the moribund American SF market all the more notable). Some interesting thoughts there.
Peadar O'Guilin has done an excellent interview with Strange Horizons here. Well worth a read.
The American Emmy Awards were on last night, complete with an unexpected interruption from Doctor Horrible (and Captain Hammer). On the genre side of things Michael Emerson deservedly won the Best Supporting Actor award for his work as Ben Linus on Lost. Meanwhile, the excellent Irish actor Brendan Gleeson was a surprise winner for the Best Actor in a Mini-series Award for his portrayal of Churchill in Into the Storm. Elsewhere, Cherry Jones won the Best Supporting Actress for her role as the President in the borderline-SF 24 and Kristin Chenoweth for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for the cancelled Pushing Daisies.
A tribe of humans lives in a vast, crumbling city in the midst of a forested land. No-one knows who built the city or why. The Tribe survives by hunting hostile species for food, or trading flesh with more neutrally-aligned races. When a hunter becomes too wounded or too elderly to endure, they are expected to Volunteer for the flesh-trade. It is a harsh world of kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, where the strong survive and the weak perish.
Stopmouth is a hunter low in confidence due to his constant stutter, overshadowed by his more heroic, intelligent brother. But the Tribe needs them both to survive, when their rival species form an unprecedented alliance and a strange force falls from the skies which will drastically change Stopmouth's life forever...
The Inferior, Book One of The Bone World Trilogy, is a refreshingly different type of speculative fiction, channelling many of tropes of fantasy but gradually subverting them with SF ideas as the storyline continues to develop. The world of the Tribe is an intriguing one, a savage landscape where different races battle for survival and for flesh and the good of the many comes before the good of the individual. It is also a world where nothing is as it first appears, and later chapters introduce new races, new locations, new ideas and characters which add to the tapestry of the storyline.
The Inferior is being marketed as a Young Adult series, but it's a fairly harsh book, not skimping on the details of cannibalism or the visceral nature of the hunt and combat. I imagine the author had a great time inventing different monsters and species, with the vile Longtongues and Diggers being particularly unpleasent. The characters are likewise an interesting bunch, from our main protagonist Stopmouth through his two-faced brother Wallbreaker, the courageous Rockface and the enigmatic Indrani. However, outside of this main group it could be argued that some of the other characters are only lightly sketched, and the rather late introduction of a villain and foil for Stopmouth doesn't quite work as well as it should. The other key criticisms are that nowhere on the spine, the cover or indeed inside the book is it revealed that this is a trilogy, so some may find the abrupt ending a bit startling. Finally, a major plot revelation is given away by the book's cover blurb, so be very careful about reading it. Note that the last two issues are faults of the publisher, not the author.
The Inferior (****) is an enjoyable debut novel from a clearly talented author. An intriguingly harsh Darwinian story of life struggling to survive in the face of the environment, this book is different enough from a lot of recent SF&F to make a vivid impression on the reader and leave them wanting more.
The book is availble from David Fickling Books, a subsidiary of Random House, in the UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inferior-Peadar-Ó-Guilín/dp/0385610955
A North American publisher has picked up the series. Random House USA will publish the book in May 2008.
The author has a website at this location: http://www.frozenstories.com He can also occasionally be found ruminating on the SF&F scene at the Westeros.org forum.
The Book Swede has a review here: http://thebookswede.blogspot.com/2007/08/inferior.html
The Bookbag has another review here: http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/guilininferior.htm
This month's issues of Death Ray and SFX magazines both have reviews for the book, Death Ray awarding it five stars and stating it wil remind readers of why they got into speculative fiction in the first place. SFX is more restrained, awarding it two-and-a-half stars and stating that the exceptional first half is let down by a more predictable plot route in the second half. I disagree with the latter, mainly as the finale subverts that expected plot development quite nicely and also that the target audience will probably not be familiar enough with the tropes of the genre to find it a problem. However, I am confident that more experienced readers of the genre will likewise enjoy the novel.
An official launch for the book is also being held in Borders Bookstore, Blanchardstown, County Dublin, Republic of Ireland at 7pm on Thursday 13 September.
