First reactions to it was that, aside from the character-driven story aside, these books were almost polar opposites. The first took place over a period of time and allowed for character development, but this was a book that promised from the title, and then, the first chapter head, to deliver a story in just a single day.

The 24-Hour Cafe is a book about two friends Hannah and Mona who share a flat together and both work at the same 24-hour cafe near Liverpool Street station. On this particular ‘day’ they are both working double-shifts at the cafe, and so the first half of the book is told largely from Hannah’s perspective, through to when Mona takes over, both in story and narration at 12 noon.

I found myself alternating between loving this book, and pondering how successful it would be. It excels at depicting the character interactions between the waitresses and the customers of the cafe through from the small hours of the night into the bustle of the day, and out the other side, sometimes you were left wanting a bit more of the customers and a little less of the backstories of Hannah and Mona.

But that is where the genius of Libby Page’s engaging storytelling, carefully crafted writing, and character development comes to the fore. She weaves in seemingly irrelevant vignettes of story, both from flashback and the present day, but which later are pulled together either through seeing ‘the other side of the story’ when Mona takes over, or when customers return at the other end of the day.

If The Lido was a book beyond the immediate saving of a swimming pool, but that of a young woman saving an older lady, and an older lady saving at the same time the young woman, then this is a book that speaks of what it is like to have dreams and thwarted artistic promise. What does it feel like to reach your thirties and not be getting the breaks that your contemporaries – or worse – your juniors are. For anyone who is or dreams of success in the creative industry you will feel for Hannah, and understand her completely, whilst also celebrating in Mona’s long worked for success.

The 24-hour Cafe is perfectly orchestrated to a conclusion that at times I didn’t think it would be possible for her to get to. The coda to the piece was a necessary wrap up to the story that leaves you wanting more of Hannah and Mona’s lives.

In 2018 I continued to read poetry where I could, and continued to expand my Edward Ardizzonne collection. Related to my reading I fostered relations with the very best of British bookselling as I began travelling the nation to illustrate The Booklover’s Guide to Bookselling  – but more of that in the months to come. Back to the matter in hand, in strict reading order, this year I have read…

• The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
• A Stranger At Green Knowe by L.M. Boston
• Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman
• Trick or Murder? by Debbie Young
• True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean by David Almond
• Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes by Beatrix Potter
• Paddington Bear by Michael Bond
• Paddington’s Garden by Michael Bond
• The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley
• The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
• Paul, The Hero Of The Fire by Edward Ardizzone
• The Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain by Edward Ardizzone
• Sky Song by Abi Elphinstone
• Time Shifters by Kate Frost
• Murder in the Manger by Debbie Young
• Cuckoo Call by Betty Salthouse
• Kill Land by Dan Holloway
• Murder by the Book by Debbie Young
• Helmingham Hall Gardens by Timothy John Edward Tollemache
• The Lido by Libby Page
• 21st-Century Yokel by Tom Cox
• The Boy Who Grew Dragons by Andy Shepherd
• A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge
• The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr
• Not Quite Lost by Roz Morris
• Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey
• Raising a Forest by Thibaud Herem
• Off the Shelf by Carol Ann Duffy
• Beetle Boy by M.G. Leonard
• The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear
• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
• The Last Hedgehog by Pam Ayres
• Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
• Summer by Melissa Harrison
• The Colour of the Sun by David Almond
• Jack and the Beanstalk by Irana Shepherd
• The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes by Beatrix Potter
• Dennis the Dragon by Vera Hopewell
• Predator’s Gold by Philip Reeve
• Pages & Co by Anna James
• The Storm Keeper’s Island by Catherine Doyle
• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat by Tim Rice
• A Pinch of Magic by Michelle Harrison
• No. More. Plastic. by Martin Dorey
• Pax by Sara Pennypacker
• The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore
• Peacock Pie by Walter de la Mare
• More Prefabulous Animiles by James Reeves
• Paddington’s New Room by Michael Bond
• The Writer’s Map by Huw Lewis-Jones

Stand out books to recommend this year? This year, I have two must-reads for everyone from completely different genres and age-ranges, but both absolutely excellent. Libby Page’s debut novel, The Lido, and Anna James’ Pages & Co. I was also very fortunate read The. Best. Book. Of. Next. Year. in the form of Michelle Harrison’s A Pinch of Magic – put your pre-order for 9 February with your local independent bookseller now! Other books of note, No. More. Plastic. is a book that should be on everyone’s shelves. The Writer’s Map has been my last book I read this year, and was a deliciously anticipated book to enjoy from my Christmas reading.

When I think of cosy/village mysteries I think of the ‘lighter’ Miss Marples, or an episode of Bergerac or Death in Paradise. What all of these mysteries have in common is that all feature a murder (and often several of them). None of them are dark, psychological thrillers, but all of them have death at the heart of them. Even Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Whimsy books have murders attached, and Sophie Sayers, the heroine of Debbie Young’s Sophie Sayers Village Mysteriesis named after those books.

Debbie Young admits herself that she is a reluctant murder (something that her husband and daughter must feel reassured to know!!), and this book, like the previous books in the series are light on murder. Even so, the way that she works plot with the threat of murder shows us that she is a master of story plotting and of weaving intrigue. Murder looks to be around the corner throughout and so you do find yourself approaching the, short, chapters nervous that someone is going to wind up dead by the end of it.

Like it’s predecessors, Murder by the the Book, is more a story of rural village life in the Cotswolds with all of the characters and traditions you would expect to find. This book is all of that, and I think even more of an autobiography of Debbie’s. Set more in Hector’s House bookshop than any of the others, this is the book that deals – alongside the murder and the intrigue – of publishing, bookselling, Indie Author careers, and even, towards the end a wonderfully self-referential plug for the town on which Wendelebury Barrow based, and Debbie Young’s very much real, Hawkesbury Upton Literary Festival.

I won’t say if there is a murder in this book, but suffice it to say that it is a story that keeps you guessing right up until the bitter end.

I approached this book with trepidation because a perceived reputation for it’s sole-destroying depression. Maybe that was a misunderstanding on my part because what Dan Holloway was saying was that it was “lacking redemption”. Either way, I think it’s still being a bit harsh on on him and his novella.

Kill Land is more than prose, but long-form poetry, almost written to be spoken – it’s companion piece in this volume, Stitch, definitely is. This is not surprising, considering that Dan is also a performance poet and activist for many a cause (mainly along the lines of accessibility, and mental health awareness.

I was always going to be attracted to this book as it is set in an ‘other’ Oxford – a bleak, unprepossessing Oxford where the tunnels that were once part of the Bodliean Library are now occupied by other more shadowy forces.

Do not be put off by this story. It is at times bleak. It’s subject matter will hit you hard, and it’s written in such a way that will affect you. Like life, this is a story that is never entirely resolved, but despite what Dan says, it is not without some hope.

Cuckoo Call by Betty Salthouse

Family loyalties, teenage angst, sibling rivalry, murder, attempted suicide. These are powerful, important subjects. Betty Salthouse’s third book Cuckoo Call pulls all the subjects in a story that could easily be about human relationships as it is about a family of blackbirds living with a quite literal cuckoo in the nest.

For anyone who watches BBC’s Springwatch we know how perilous the early days of a family of birds can be. Who doesn’t know what happens when a Cuckoo lays her egg in blackbird nest. When the young family of blackbirds and our hero, Brains, are introduced it is with love and affection, but we know that this can only end one way. From the outset we wonder how this story will play out. Betty Salthouse skillfully crafts an honest tale of what happens in nature that can teach us all a lesson.

Cuckoo Call beautifully written, at times brutal, but heartwarming story. A true classic tale in the making.

If I could rate this book with 6 stars then I would as it an outstanding rollercoaster of read. There was one brief moment near the beginning when I was left thinking why I am supposed to care about Danny as we had had no encounter with him – indeed if I were to pick a weaker character it probably would be him.

The pairing of Maisie and Lizzie – sworn enemies – was superb, as the novel unfolded to bring them together and closer to each other. This is ostensively a ‘timeshift’ novel of old, the likes of that Helen Cresswell, Philippa Pearce, and Penelope Lively used to write. It is a timeshift novel that is grounded firmly in the 21st century … when our heroes are not journeying about in the 15th, 17th, 18th, and 20th century as they try to get home facing threats both of the times they find themselves in and threats that are out of time.

This is a story that never lets up, and keeps you guessing to the end with twist onto twist, but everyone of them perfectly explainable and realistic. The time travel that the Timeshifters use is not that of Back to the Future (although some of the alternative timeline ideas are similar) or Doctor Who, but nor it classic timeshift where they have no control over where they go. It is a story that is uniquely different and entirely original.

It was the Edward Ardizzone illustrations that drew me in compulsively to this book, and they are an absolute delight – full of magic and wonder and joy. From the beginning it’s a book that reveals itself as a sequel to Aladdin and has a real fairytale/pantomine feel to it.

The story has everything, from wicked princes, to thieves, to djins and comedy characters, but it is a very old fashioned fantasy. Creative and delightful it might be but it’s also borderline racist I think (probably more than borderline if you take it out of it’s time and judge it on today’s standards, which for the record I really shouldn’t do.)

It’s still a charming, engaging tale, packed full of Ardizzone’s illustrative wit to accompany the text.

I’ve been a huge fan of David Almond ever since I encountered his debut novel Skellig back when it all began in 1998. He is a prolific author and I always discover after the event that he has produced another. Such was the case with this book – his fifteenth novel – and (as it turns out) his first for adults. His first novel for adults it may be but it is still unmistakably Almond here, and I would recommend it to any of his younger readers.

David Almond’s books have a distinctive style about them. I like to say they are deftly written; sparse but effective language to carry a powerful, often hard-hitting story. This is a story that is probably as powerful and hard-hitting as they come. The title character of the book, the Monster Billy Dean, is anything but a monster. He is a boy born on the same day as a devastating terrorist attack.

The book, is one of two halves with a short epilogue. The first, and best half is almost entirely shut away in the house where Billy lives with his mother, with night-time visits from his father, a priest. It’s a story of child- and domestic-abuse and is unflinching in its portrayal. Billy Dean is illiterate, and as this story is his story, written through his eyes, they are his words. I opened the book up to page one and thought I was reading Chaucer for it is written, not just in phonetic English, but Geordie Phonetic English. I thought that this was going to be a book that was going to be hard-going, but once you get used to it (surprisingly quickly), it is actually really easy to read.

The second half of the book sees Billy coming out in the world, transformed by the bombings and we are introduced to more characters. Here, in this world, Billy is seen as a messiah-like figure to heal people, and the book takes on the nature of religion and faith.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

Whilst Lemony Snicket took the approach that:

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”

Whichever way you look at it, I have always been, and cannot imagine a time when I won’t be, a bookaholic. I live to consume stories. When I was little a book was the first thing I turned to in the morning, and the last thing I went to at night. Whilst with the pressures of the adult, working life, might have pushed out the former, the latter is still a habit that I just can’t live without.

My wife has long since resigned herself to the inevitable fact that we live in a small library – 1,723 books at the last count… But the truth is I love stories, and stories love me.

What was the first novel you read? 

That’s easy. It was Swallows & Amazons – much to my Mum’s disappointment as she was looking forward to reading the next chapter to me but I had already read ahead.

I’ve always read, and making up stories. I wrote my first ‘novel’ aged 9 – The Fantasy World of Ioleme – and I still have it somewhere. When I was younger, and by younger I mean anything pre-30 I think, I wasn’t good at discussing my reading with people. Blogs, online journals, Facebook, and Twitter are great places for that, and for that reason I’ve decided to connect my writing, and my reading, with other people’s reading (that’s any reading, not just the reading of my books!) in the T E Shepherd Reading Café. Why not come along and take part?

This is the second of Debbie Young’s Sophie Sayers Village Mystery series, and as the name suggests the mystery in this book is, as the title suggests, is it a Trick or Murder?

This is no psychological thriller or Nordic Noir, but a cosy mystery and its suitably warm and comforting (even if it is set in the cold, and crisp Autumn days in the run-up to Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night. It’s not so much a whodunnit as a whendunnit, beginning as it does with a flash-forward to a scene near the end of the book that hints at the murder to come, so we are left for the rest of the story watching events, reading characters, and trying to wonder who will be murdered and by whom.

It all starts when the new vicar arrives in town, the delicously evil Reverend Neap. Not since J.K. Rowling’s Professor Umbridge have we had a character of such pure evil. Actually, I think just like in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when I remember thinking, okay yeah, I’ve got it now, she’s evil, so I did at times think that in this book as Debbie Young spooned more Neap evil into the story. He was a character that for this reason I both wanted to have him murder and to last for the rest of the series of the books, being just this side of the law in the way he changes the village life of Wendlebury Barrow.

The counter side of this novel is the burgeoning relationship of Sophie Sayers and Hector Munro. Whilst we all know what will happen, and want it to happen, I cannot be alone can I in wanting it to be a bit more of a slow build. I see Sophie as young and hesitant, damaged by a previous relationship, and Hector as shy and bumbling, and I wanted to enjoy some more will-they, won’t they to their relationship. Meanwhile, Sophie’s character is possibly just a little too precise and structured. I wanted her to be more impetuous than comes across in the writing that is told through her eyes.

Lastly, Carol, in the village… She is Susan from the The Archers, isn’t she? Don’t you think?

Dæmon Voices by Philip Pullman 

I love, love, love Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and his latest first book in the new Book of Dust series, but I have sometimes found sometimes when I’ve heard Philip talk in interviews for him to be a bit too ‘opinionated’ so I approached this book cautiously.

I had had a taste of what it was like though: the essay on ‘Imaginary Friends’ published as a pamphlet for Independent Bookseller’s Day, five of them were serialised for Radio 4’s book of the week, and more importantly I was fortunate enough to hear him talk in person when he visited Oxford Brookes University in November.

This is an outstanding collection of essays (on the theme of storytelling). You will find yourself not always agreeing with Pullman, but he makes very good points and observations and makes you look at your own ideas and beliefs in a new way. You can’t fail to actually admire him. I think that maybe, he doesn’t get the time or the angle to articulate them (even though he articulates very well) those thoughts in more journalistic environments.

You will find yourself copying down, underlining, photographing, or instagramming quotes (however you choose to do it) because it is full of lots of choice quotes to apply elsewhere in life.

I was not sure that I was going to like this book, the fourth in the sextet of Green Knowe books, because from the beginning – indeed for the first 50 or so pages – it is decidedly un-Green Knowe-ish.

The original Children of Green Knowe has been a firm favourite for most of my life, and is still the best of them all with it’s story of Tolly in the strange house by the river with the floods, the storms, and the ghosts. A Stranger at Green Knowe begins in Africa and is almost anthropological in its tale of how Hanno the gorilla comes to be in England. Even after we meet Ping again, re-entering the story from the Mrs Oldknowe-free River at Green Knowe, we are not sure how the story is going to get back to the old house in the Fens…

But the story does return to Green Knowe, and the pace of the story accelerates, building and building to an all too hasty, shocking, and believable end. Be prepared for a rollercoaster and tears.

Note: I first became properly aware of Witch-hazel flowers after reading The Children of Green Knowe, and at this time of year, in the dark days of the new year, when witch-hazel flowers bloom, I always seem to think of that Fenland manor house and the stories it can tell. 

I first read the entire sequence of The Dark Is Rising in the hot sunny conditions of a summer holiday in southern Italy – appropriate maybe for the first in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone but not so much for the second.

The Dark Is Rising takes place in Susan Cooper’s native Buckinghamshire, up into the Chilterns and down along the Thames during the darkest of dark times: Midwinter’s Eve through to Twelfth Night. I reread this now as part of Robert McFarlane’s global #TheDarkIsReading readalong and an interesting experience that was.

From Midwinter’s Eve to Christmas Day (probably a good two thirds of the book) it was an intense experience to match the intensity of the book. Because everyone was reading certain chapters on certain days and making their observations you got to gain so much more from the readalong. It’s also, oddly where the Dark seem to be so much more threatening and dangerous. Maybe it’s because I read this slower than I normally would of because of the way I waited for Eleventh and Twelfth Night before concluding the tale. This also showed up a possible problem that I had not noticed before in that when reading it in this way you don’t feel like almost a week passes in that last third of the book.

The Dark Is Rising is a quest book, to seek out the six signs of the Light and join them. The joined signs are themselves one of four great objects of power, and is based on the old Arthurian legends. I don’t know why but it took until listening to Susan Cooper’s 2017 Tolkien Lecture to realise the similarities between this story and John Masefield’s classic The Box of Delights. This too is a ‘modern’ retelling of the Arthurian myths, and features shifting in time (and place) and protected bubbles from which to rescue people or find out things, and both feature Hern the Hunter in a crucial role. They are distinctly different books.

Another thing I hadn’t noticed before to such an extent as I noticed this time round was how actions by our hero, Will Stanton, himself the seventh son of a seventh son relies on fate. He does things, and has to do things because he was born to do them. During the first gripping chapters he is not bound so much by this and they are so much more effective for that. A book dependent on fate or not, this is still one of my all time favourite books and will remain so, forever I think.

2017 was the year that I read some of John Clare’s poetry, and discovered my new favourite bookshop (and the best bookshop in Oxfordshire by some mile) – Books and Ink in Banbury in case you were wondering. It has also been the year that I reaffirm my love of Edward Ardizzoni’s magical illustrations and decide to seriously start collecting them – well, you know, everyone needs a project! So in strict reading order, this year I have read.

• Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
• Winter Magic by Abi Elphinstone
• White Mountain by Sophe E. Tallis
• Winter by Melissa Harrison
• Boom! by Mark Haddon
• Chilled to the Bone by Quentin Bates
• Dear Reflection by Jessica Bell
• Strange Star by Emma Carroll
• Selected Poetry of John Clare by John Clare
• The Book by Jessica Bell
• The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane
• Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
• Climate Change by Tony Juniper
• Spring by Melissa Harrison
• Silent Voices by Jo Allmond
• The Fossil Hunters by Betty Salthouse
• Bagthorpes Unlimited by Helen Cresswell
• Best Murder in Show by Debbie Young
• Bodleian Library Souvenir Guide by Geoffrey Tyack
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
• Felbrigg Hall, Gardens and Estate by Oliver Garnett
• Coot Club by Arthur Ransome
• The Girl of Ink and Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
• Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
• Keeping On Keeping On by Alan Bennett
• Cogheart by Peter Bunzl
• The Gifts of Reading by Robert Macfarlane
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
• The Forever Ship by Francesca Haig
• Imaginary Friends by Philip Pullman
• Nibble Moves House by Jane Pilgrim
• Poor Mr. Nibble by Jane Pilgrim
• Hannibal And The Pet Show by Ladybird Books
• Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
• The Explorer by Katherine Rundell
• The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce
• The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle by Beatrix Potter
• The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
• Friend Request by Laura Marshall
• Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
• The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
• Lyra’s Oxford by Philip Pullman
• War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
• The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher by Beatrix Potter
• La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
• M. Barrie’s Peter Pan by Eleanor Graham
• Close Encounters of the Furred Kind by Tom Cox
• The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore
• The Church Mice at Christmas by Graham Oakley
• The Little Train by Graham Greene
• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
• The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane
• One Christmas Wish by Katherine Rundell
• Santa Claude by Alex T. Smith
• What To Look For In Autumn by E.L. Grant Watson
• What To Look For In Summer by E.L. Grant Watson

This a spell book of words. It is a book that you have to curl up in the armchair and pour over. It is a book that you can’t just just read, but touch and feel, and trace your fingers over the pages to reveal the hidden words. And when you find the hidden words, there is a poem behind each of them that reveals yet more forgotten words.

It is impossible to just read this book. You have to live this book; read the words out loud to yourself as you touch the letters on the pages and marvel at the beautiful, revealing, illustrations.

From its opening lines, “The circus arrives without warning […] Opens at Nightfall / Closes at Dawn”, this book and the story within it is an enticing prospect. Circuses are magical places in any normal world. Like travelling fairgrounds they arrive over night and leave just as suddenly. For a time, they exist side-by-side real life like a village has just turned up on your doorstep. This is a magical, fairytale tale which does just that; turns up at various locations around the world and then disappear just as suddenly. But it’s our world that this takes place in and you can get the feeling that these things are happening with a magic realism twist.

Celia is an illusionist, and daughter of Propero the magician. Marco is also an illusionist. The two have never met but are set against each other in a ‘challenge’ with either no, or ever-changing/fluid, rules, and with little idea of what will happen.

After the intriguing start that lures you in and takes hold of you, the middle section does meander slowly. It is a a book that is written deftly, with much narrative description, and is very much what I call a ‘quiet novel’. Get past that slow middle section then and you will be rewarded with an end to satisfy you. Throughout it seems that the challenge must only have one victor, but when the competing pair fall in love, how can fate be defeated…?

You can’t read this book, the fourth in the quartet of Tom Cox ‘catoirs’, without feeling a poignant weight of sadness that it is nearing the end for The Bear aka @mySADcat who died almost exactly a year ago. Reading this book is therefore so much more like reading an epitaph to the adventure.

It is also a return to the form of the first two books. After the third book which I felt had lost its way somewhat from the story of a man living in with an uncontrollably increasing number of feline waifs and strays. It’s also a book that closes the saga – Under The Paw saw Tom arrive in Norfolk with his then partner, and this sees him close that chapter in his life as he moves to Devon for new adventures.

It has been a bit of a woeful embarrassment that I’ve never actually read Peter Pan, even more so because I’ve been in possession of this gorgeous volume for 22 years and I found it in a Book Fair in Oxford’s Randolph Hotel when I had first moved to the city.

This is a book packed full of gorgeous, inspirational illustrations by the master of pen and ink illustrations that is Edward Ardizzone. It is not, of course, the words of J.M. Barrie, but that does not matter – it has the story of the play that we know and love.

Having now read the story, I have to say that it is both enchanting and problematic at the same time. The beginning of the book contains some of the finest ideas that there are in children’s fiction; the shadow being sewn back on, the second star to the right and straight on until morning, the playful, instinctive flight. And of course then there is the archipelago of islands and the pirates and lost boys that live there. But there are also problematic moments in it – the way that Wendy’s place is to care and sew and clean for her brother, the Lost Boys, and for Peter. And all of this distracts from the showdown with Captain Hook on the island.

** Caution: this post may contain spoilers **

This is the long-awaited and much anticipated companion to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and after the 17 year wait, I have been apprehensive about the book’s release. I had to buy it on the day of release, and planned how and where I would do so and I timed my reading so that I could begin it on the day of publication. But what if it didn’t deliver?

I was not disappointed. This is a book that from the first page to the last is Philip Pullman at his narrative best. Where at times, The Amber Spyglass could be over-complicated in comparison to the original Northern Lights, this was both dark and starkly relevant to the times that we now live, and a funny and engaging portrait of a world that’s not quite like our own.

The book is split into two halves. The first, mainly hops between opposite banks of the Thames from The Trout Inn to Godstow Nunnery (with occasional visits to nearby Jericho). The second, is an Odyssey-like quest that carries the reader south to London at the speed of a great flood pitching our hero from one danger to another. This is a classic adventure story, but a an adventure story with something to say about our own world.

If I had to make criticism of La Belle Sauvage it would be that at times it doesn’t read like the prequel (that it essentially is) to Northern Lights that it is. When Northern Lights was published in 1995, both it and it’s sequel The Subtle Knifemade it clear that Lyra’s Oxford and our Oxford were closely linked in time and space with just a few small but noticeable differences. They also read very much as contemporary books to the mid-1990s, and so this one, set 10 years before the events of Northern Lights should really be set in the mid-1980s. This book though, I find at least, reads very much like its set in the here and now of Lyra’s Oxford and not a that of a period piece set 30 years in the past.

The flood too, when it comes, is devastating – the worst that Oxford has seen in years – but even so I would expect some parts of the oldest, most central parts to be sitting like an island amongst the flood water. The geography of Oxford though is that is on a surprisingly large hill but no reference is made to this in how the river floods the city. And if it is as devastating as it it seems you would expect people to be talking about it long into the time of Lyra’s childhood in the other books.

These are minor grumbles though in an otherwise excellent book that has been a friend to me for a too short a time, and I can barely wait for the next instalment.

This is the book that concludes Philip Pullman’s epic trilogy, and it is the most complex of the three. In Northern Lights we are introduced to the recognisable but different Oxford of Lyra Belaqua’s world with a self-contained, developed, adventure of the best kind. In The Subtle Knife we discover how Lyra’s Oxford is linked to our own, and to another world that is both as alien to Lyra and Will as it is to ourselves. The Amber Spyglass shows us there are a myriad of worlds out there.

Particularly during the Mary Malone sections, this novel could almost be an introductory reader to anthropology as we learn about other the language and cultures of these other worlds. But this a book that at it’s heart takes on religion and the church head-to-head, and which pits Lyra against her parents too. She must travel between multiple worlds and even face her own death in order to arrive at her bittersweet ending in which both Lyra and Will discover that their own, individual stories are not quite finished yet.

At times I do find this book too complex, too knowing, for its own good. It also falls into the classic failing that fantasy books fall into, in that characters are given the ability to do something purely in order to fulfil a purpose, which once achieved is an ability that is lost to them. One of the finest moments on the original Northern Lights was that Lyra was able to ‘read’ the alethiometer, and I am disappointed to discover that that was a gift that was only ‘given’ to her for the purposes of the three books.

I’m going to get pilloried by the Gaimanites out there, but this book falls a little flat for me. Neil Gaiman has an authoritative voice and clearly knows the stories in and out, but this I fear is actually where the problem lies.

In Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman introduces us to the tales of gods, elves, trolls, and giants, but he does so as an outside from the now, and this removes us from the story.

When Joanne Harris gave us her Runemarks books or Kevin Crossley-Holland of his many retellings, they are told as stories aknew and they involve us in the characters and the settings. Gaiman is accessible enough but doesn’t after anything new or different.

At it’s heart this is a collection of sixteen short stories and like all collections they are of a mixed bag. Whilst few in the over-arching story arc are good, they seem to lose their way in the second half, but the closing couple are back to the fore. If you want an introduction or reader norse mythology, this might be for you.