Ancillary Justice – Ann Leckie

"The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it." I've been hearing amazing things about this book and its sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, for quite some time now. Me being me, it takes me a while to get 'round to things - but I'm rather glad I finally …

Bryony and Roses – T Kingfisher

"She was going to die because of the rutabagas." Bryony may just have found herself trapped in a magical manor house with a surprisingly eloquent Beast, but if there's one thing she's not it's a 'beauty'. She is, however, a gardener, and as things in the House take ever darker turns it might just turn …

Rivers of London – Ben Aaronovitch

"It started at one thirty on a cold Tuesday morning in January when Martin Turner, street performer and, in his own words, apprentice gigolo, tripped over a body in front of the West Portico of St Paul's at Covent Garden." I think it's fair to say I'm always on the hunt for a 'new Dresden Files', …

Heart of Granite – James Barclay

"Max was woken by an insistent nagging at the back of his mind. It probably wasn't important." The Heart of Granite is a behemoth: a kilometres-long lizard bio-engineered with alien DNA, genetically modified to allow thousands of people and smaller lizard species to live within its body (although all the mentions of seeping fluids make it a bit less appealing …

A Gathering of Shadows – V.E. Schwab

"Delilah Bard had a way of finding trouble." *warning* purely by talking about certain characters in book 2, this contains vague spoilers for book 1, the very excellent A Darker Shade of Magic, so go read that first!   Picking up some four months after the events of ADSoM, AGoS finds our heroes still dealing with …

Strange Library – Haruki Murakami

I'm a sucker for books about libraries and/or books, and this has the added appeal of being styled to look like a library book, with old-fashioned check-out card and stamped borrowing dates. When I discovered this was so short I simply sat down and read the whole lot in one sitting! Strange Library is an odd, …