The {Booker} Award
Author Julia Kavan has handed over the {Booker} award – no, not that Booker and not a flaming torch either. This means I have to reveal my five all time favourite novels. I hate doing this, to be honest, as I have more than five. So I’ve picked the five that I might be in the mood to read today from my all time list. Ask me next week and you might get something entirely different. In no particular order:
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist
Published by: Quercus http://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/
One autumn day in 1992, former pop singer Lennart Cederström finds something unexpected in the forest: a baby girl in a plastic bag, partially buried. He gives her the kiss of life, and her first cry astounds him; it is a clear, pure musical note. He takes her to his wife and persuades her that they should keep this remarkable child. But the baby becomes a strange girl, made more unusual by their decision to hide her in their basement to keep her from the prying eyes of government departments. When she reaches puberty, a terrifying scene sees her kill both her parents. When her scheming adopted brother returns to find her over their bodies, he seizes the opportunity and enters her into an X Factor-style talent competition. She quickly becomes famous. In spite of this, she remains very lonely, until she befriends another damaged girl on the internet. They form a powerful bond and soon create a growing gang of other disgruntled girls and, calling themselves the Wolves, they set out to take revenge for all they’ve ever suffered.
You can read my review HERE.
Author: John Ajvide Lindqvist
Published by: Quercus http://www.quercusbooks.co.uk/
Oskar and Eli. In very different ways, they were both victims. Which is why, against the odds, they became friends. And how they came to depend on one another, for life itself. Oskar is a 12 year old boy living with his mother on a dreary housing estate at the city’s edge. He dreams about his absentee father, gets bullied at school, and wets himself when he’s frightened. Eli is the young girl who moves in next door. She doesn’t go to school and never leaves the flat by day. She is a 200 year old vampire, forever frozen in childhood, and condemned to live on a diet of fresh blood. John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel, a huge bestseller in his native Sweden, is a unique and brilliant fusion of social novel and vampire legend. And a deeply moving fable about rejection, friendship and loyalty.
You can read my review HERE.
Author: Sam Eastland
Published by: Faber and Faber
It is the time of the Great Terror. Inspector Pekkala – known as the Emerald Eye – was the most famous detective in all Russia. He was the favourite of the Tsar. Now he is the prisoner of the men he once hunted. Like millions of others, he has been sent to the gulags in Siberia and, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he is as good as dead. But a reprieve comes when he is summoned by Stalin himself to investigate a crime. His mission – to uncover the men who really killed the Tsar and his family, and to locate the Tsar’s treasure. The reward for success will be his freedom and the chance to re-unite with a woman he would have married if the Revolution had not torn them apart. The price of failure – death. Set against the backdrop of the paranoid and brutal country that Russia became under the rule of Stalin, Eye of the Red Tsar introduces a compelling new figure to readers of crime fiction.
Shame I didn’t write a review!
Author: Clive Barker
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Terrifying and forbidding, subversive and insightful, Clive Barker’s groundbreaking stories revolutionized the worlds of horrific and fantastical fiction and established Barker’s dominance over the otherworldly and the all-too-real. Here, as two businessmen encounter beautiful and seductive women and an earnest young woman researches a city slum, Barker maps the boundless vistas of the unfettered imagination — only to uncover a profound sense of terror and overwhelming dread.
Didn’t review this either! Maybe I should?
Author: Dennis Wheatley
Published by: Arrow
Simon Aron fails to turn up for the traditional reunion dinner with the Duke de Richeleau and Rex van Ryn. The answer to the puzzle of his disappearance is more terrible than Rex and the Duke fear and plunges them into a struggle against the
Forces of Darkness.
Okay, it’s old and the prose hasn’t weathered well but this was one of those books that got me hooked on horror. The cover shown is the old Arrow paperback but if you want to read it these days there are various issues out there.
And now my time to curse – sorry, pass on – to others:
Steve Emmett 
Ah Dennis Wheatley. He got me hooked on horror too. And, yes, Steve, it’s never too late to review a book you’ve loved.Thank you for the award!
U2!