Small Wars by Sadie Jones

When I read The Outcast, Sadie Jones’s best-selling debut, I was struck by the sense of stifling claustrophobia she created in the village in which her protagonist lived. Jones appears to excel at creating small, insular communities and she does it again in Small Wars, her second novel. It is the story of a soldier [...]

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Romantic Moderns. English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, by Alexandra Harris.

This is a very beautiful book, in many senses. It is a gorgeous piece of book production by Thames and Hudson, its lovely velvety dust jacket with an arrestingly stark yet lovely painting by John Piper of Dungeness. The paper is heavy and creamy, the type is elegantly curvy (after my recent foray into fonts, [...]

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The Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Ben Aaronovitch has a background in screenwriting, most notably for Doctor Who, and has also written some novelisations of the series. Rivers of London is his first non-Whovian novel and although it contains much of the pacing and lateralism of Doctor Who, it’s a very different work. It is also the first in a new [...]

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The Something Week of Somethings

Well, until yesterday the whole week was beginning to look like a rather interesting-looking theme week called “Something Week” – with various people promising to do “something” but not wanting to get too specific about what that “something” might be. Thankfully, everyone came through in the end apart from me, who has promised a slightly [...]

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Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

Dystopian literature for teens is really big just now. Perhaps all this surmising about our future has something to do with the shaky ground we’re on in the present.  Whatever the reason there are a slew of future imperfect novels either on the shelves or heading there soon, predicting the mess we may all be [...]

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Serena by Ron Rash – Macbeth diluted

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive from Boston in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire. Serena is new to the mountains – but she soon shows herself the equal of any worker, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband’s life in the wilderness. Yet she also [...]

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The Bay of Pigs by Howard Jones

As regular readers will know by now, I am given to arguing with myself, especially about history.  This makes me either a bad conversationalist or an entertaining one, depending on your perspective.  It can certainly make writing reviews for VL a complicated business.  Some time ago, I got around this issue by deciding simply to [...]

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The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor

Review by Jamie Mollart Gainesville, Florida 1999. David works in a job he hates; regurgitating the same script over and over again, asking recent hospital patients about their experience. Returning to his identikit condo he tries to lose himself in internet porn groups. Instead he feels his dignity slowly drifting away. Leaving work one night [...]

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Monday Soapbox: Epic Novels

The word ‘epic’ is trendy now. It’s replaced “fab”, “phat” and “awesome” as a description for something superior. But dictionary.com shows the original meaning to be “an episode in the lives of men in which heroic deeds are performed or attempted.” And that’s what I want to talk about today. Epics have been around for [...]

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Coming Up on Vulpes Libris

It’s a full-on mystery week this week, with the Foxes looking closely at epic novels, a modern Macbeth, The Bay of Pigs and … um … mystery. So prepare yourselves for danger, dastardliness and a daring denouement, as who knows how it could all end. STOP PRESS! Further details of the ongoing mystery are revealed [...]

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