Last Minute Stocking Filler Books

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Some books I recently reviewed are well worth considering as Xmas presents. Rob Boffard – Adrift – A space tour bus full of passengers ends up marooned with limited supplies and draining power when a mysterious ship attacks the space station hotel they are visiting and trashes the wormhole they needed for getting home. The attack ship is still in pursuit of them too. A disaster movie format with every chapter presenting a new cliff-hanger. This is a fun read with an absurd amount of action, and likeable characters. Octavia Butler – Kindred Anniversary reprint of the classic time travel story of a young black writer from the 1970’s trapped in a series of time shifts to the heart of pre-Civil War US slavery. Brutally realistic, and one that should be on every school reading list, especially in the current political climate. Rob Grant – The Quanderhorn Xperimentations – Very funny spoof of the Quatermass stories by the Red Dwarf writer – more like a series of interlinked sketches than a linear text but often hilarious. Ahmed Saadawi – Frankenstein In Baghdad – An Iraqi comedy horror novel that is sheer genius. The Frankenstein isn’t trying to create life. He pieces together body parts from the bits left behind after the corpses of the Gulf-War and occupation are taken away to make a full body so the parts won’t feel lonely. Unfortunately, the composite corpse is hijacked by the ghost of an innocent man literally atomized in a suicide bombing attack and goes off on its own murderous walkabout. The events are investigated by a kind of Iraq X-Files division in a land populated by people whose lives are as much a fragmented ragged mess as the confused monster pursued. Really superb writing here. Arthur Chappell