Review by Jon Wilkins of "Cities on Fire" by C. H. Wilkins

Cities on Fire is a genre-bending mash-up of the superhero and spy genres, with a creeping and sinister dose of horror.

Spoiler Alert, as we say, the author is my son.

Even so, having followed his writing career for quite a while and read his earlier self-published novels, I approached this as I always do with eyes wide open and ready to critique if indeed critique is needed.

Cities on Fire, to quote the author, is '… a superhero conspiracy thriller, inspired by the comics I grew up with, and the answer to "what if you crossed the Avengers with The X-Files?"' And that’s exactly what you get. As we currently store over 11,000 of our son’s graphic novels in our attic, I can see the influences that weigh upon him and our bedroom ceiling. They are reflected in no small measure in his writing which at times echoes the visceral nature of the modern graphic novels, but still keep a sense of humour.

Whilst based on no particular super hero, the writer's characters maintain the usual features that we can expect from them, indeed his characterisation is one of the many highlights of this intriguing novel. The writer sets out his stall in the very first chapter when an attempt on the president's daughter causes mayhem and Madison is only able to overcome her adversary by sticking her hand into … No perhaps I’d best save you that image.

Cities on Fire takes place on new recruit Madison Myer's first day with the ALEPH organisation, when all hell breaks loose across the world. A rogue nation declares war! A long-dead supervillain hijacks the airwaves! A mysterious enemy targets key figures in ALEPH's leadership! Madison didn't think she'd have it easy, but she never thought it'd get this hard, and soon she's thrust onto the frontlines of a conspiracy with repercussions for the wider world.

While this is taking place, new evidence comes out suggesting that The Shrike, a disgraced superhero imprisoned for ten long, painful, years for a series of brutal murders, might not have been as guilty as everybody thought. How can you re-enter a world that turned its back on you, and what does it mean for the people you left behind? Or better yet, those who left you behind?

Wilkins doffs his blood-splattered cap to the history and legacy of comic books and skilfully transfers it to the written world. I find that his writing conveys the same magic of the comic book that we read in childhood and beyond into adulthood.  It will be up to you, the reader, to make what you wish of his various nods to comic book royalty. That alone is a pleasure in this blood-curdling, rip-roaring novel.  

The novel defies convention, defies reality as we know it, defies any attempt to pigeon hole it into a particular genre. It is a mash-up of all that we know from the super-hero world and more as Wilkins delves into the world of music and pop culture, of dystopian horror, villains and heroes, of murder and mayhem whilst maintaining a cohesive story line that will force you to the next page and the next. 

To call this a rollercoaster ride would be an understatement. Nothing is straightforward, we can only wish Madison Myer good luck for the next adventure that confronts her and hope that C. H. Wilkins delivers the sequel in good time.

About the reviewer

Jon Wilkins is 67. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot! 

Review by Jon Wilkins of "The Christie Affair" by Nina de Gramont

I don’t know how many people are familiar with the great event of December 1926 when Agatha Christie disappeared, feared kidnapped or worse, dead, only to be found days later in a spa hotel in Harrogate.

Many convincing explanations of the affair have been played out; that she had a nervous breakdown after learning of her husband Archie's affair and the recent death of her mother, that she was perpetuating a giant publicity stunt or that she had simply lost her memory. Many books have been written about the occasion, but none as fascinating as this,

The Christie Affair is a wonderfully written novel with so many layers interwoven into it that it is a joy to read. The main thread, an unrelentingly painful love affair, dominates, but with consequences that we could never imagine or in truth, understand.

The sights and sounds of 1920s London, Torquay and Harrogate are described evocatively and one can get lost in the descriptions as the hunt wears on. The police were desperate and it became the greatest manhunt ever known in the UK. 

Now I’ve finished I wish I had read it more slowly but that would have been impossible as the various plot lines encourage the reader to turn page after page enthralled by the journey they are taken on. The author cleverly intermingles fact with fiction, but who would have guessed that her imagination would have taken her from the battlefields of World War I to the strict convents in Ireland and to the machinations of the police, the press and the woefully inadequate Archie Christie, who comes out of the story very badly.

There is a large cast of characters; each plays their part in a tale of murder and revenge that is so plausible, each given just enough space on the page to see them with credibility, not as some extra with a small role. Each character is vital to the plot and all is concisely explained at the denouement. 

The story is beautifully written. We are taken hold of and gripped until the very end. We know what we want the outcome to be and are then shocked when the writer's truth is told. The writer: is it her words or did this happen? It is described as a piece of fiction, but then … who knows? Perhaps it is true.

Do read this and make your own mind up. I think I will read it again, just to make sure.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is 67. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot! 

You can read more about Utrecht Snow on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Neil Fulwood of "ColdHarbour" by Kathryn Daszkiewicz

Kathryn Daszkiewicz is a poet of understatement and almost scalpel-like precision. Her poems have the impact of a moment of silence in a grand symphony, the hint of a memory or an idea stirring unreachably at the back of the mind. 

She is a forensically observational poet of the natural world as ‘Misletoe’ and ‘Four Seasons of Haunting,’ towards the beginning of the collection, demonstrate in fine style. The theme threads through ColdHarbour, culminating in the brilliantly sustained and imaginative sequence ‘The Greenwood Speaks: Twelve Trees of Ogham’ and the elegiac ‘Woods Seen from a Train.’

Elsewhere, there are poems on family, relationships, landscapes, the passing of time and the canvases of Edward Coley Burne-Jones. Throughout it all, Daszkiewicz’s voice is plaintive, her poetics subtle and her command of form and lineation and the use of negative space (particularly in ‘Harm and the Man’) are controlled and assured.

An enviable facility, evident in many of the pieces here, is the poem as a single sentence, unspooling down the page in perfect cadence, finely nuanced and as delicately balanced as a house of cards. Which is why I have chosen, in this review, to forego the inclusion of quotes. Trying to represent Daszkiewicz’s artistry by means of a handful of snipped out lines here are there would be a reductive and pointless exercise. 

Take ‘Visiting Time,’ for example. A poem about ageing, the trickery of memory and the traumas of war, it is constructed in two sections that play off each other, it deals in the accumulation of minutiae and it delivers its hammerblow denouement no louder than a whisper. To isolate five or six lines from it would tell you nothing. To read the whole piece is to quietly experience heartbreak. It is the kind of poem that doesn’t need a critic to talk it up or take it apart; it just needs a reader.

On which note, consider my work here done: ColdHarbour is an aesthetically and emotionally satisfying collection by a writer at the height of her powers. Seek out a copy. Make time to lose yourself in it and return to it. It really is that good.

About the reviewer
Neil Fulwood lives and works in Nottingham. He has published three full poetry collections with Shoestring Press, No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere and Service Cancelled, and a volume of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Sing me down from the dark" by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana

How do you describe a ten-year stay in Japan, including two marriages, then a homecoming, and all the problems that cross-cultural relationships can bring? You write a poetry collection called Sing me down from the dark and this is just what Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana has done in an original and beautiful way.

This, however, is more than a mere collection of random thoughts and feelings. It is a complex series of emotions remembered in various poetic forms, each caught to highlight the poet's innermost thoughts and share them with us by laying herself bare to us, the reader. She exposes her own raw emotions and draws us into a period of her life that she has to share, to make sure none of it is forgotten and that every incident had a meaning, had a point in the schematic of her world.

It is a love story in all its forms, as wife, as mother, as woman. The banality of Japanese communal life is shared, with the expectations that come with it and we see how Corrin-Tachibana yearns to conform yet escape the life she finds herself in. What exactly does her life mean? Should she settle for what she has or should she take flight and find freedom from the suffocation she feels? The different forms her poems take seem to show this feeling that she is cornered, at bay, trapped between different cultures. Which should she choose? She tries each form, searching for an answer and by the end of the collection does she actually find what she wants?

There is a clash between East and the West, as Japanese and European cultures clash and merge as all the issues of daily life confront us. We are unsettled by the notion of being at home, and away from home, in love - finding true love in the birth of her son, but is this as totally fulfilling as it should be?

This is a wonderful collection. My eyes were opened to the Japanese culture and the way Corrin-Tachibana has tried to become part of it, while also resisting it as a way of staying true to herself. Enjoy the poems. You won't find anything like them for a long time. The poetic vision is perfect, we can all learn so much if we open up to her words and to her world. Corrin-Tachibana shows we are all the same, but all different. We can search for love but where do we find it? Can we ever find it?

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is 67. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s. Next year he takes up the UEA Crime Fiction Creative Writing MA. The game's afoot!

You can read more about Sing me down from the dark by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Joe Bedford of "We Saw It All Happen" by Julian Bishop

Watching news stories about environmental catastrophe, I feel something like anger, panic, despair, and underneath that something terrible and unfamiliar that leads me to silence. Naming that feeling – that is, finding an emotional vocabulary for what we are witnesses to – may become the dominant preoccupation of poetry in the coming years. Julian Bishop’s collection We Saw It All Happen is a step towards that emotional vocabulary.

Through verse rooted in the natural world, Bishop’s poetry embraces the global and the tiny, the present and the absent. His scope is vast: agriculture, climate, ethics, extinction, plastics, pollution, technology, waste. At times, Bishop’s feelings are drawn delicately in verse that is alive with sardonic humour, lamenting with the world’s insects for his own ‘addiction to squish, for its satisfying / half-rhyme with delicious.’ Elsewhere, his frustration subverts the poetic form in the same way anger chokes our ability to talk, raging on a ‘gob of atoll / slice of paradise / diced / into scum and phlegm / coughed up by firestorm / froth of surge / churned to a fury.’ At the heart of this frustration are the human behaviours that in some ways may live at the heart of our emotional confusion. With pithy clarity, he relates that ‘to protect the world from a threatened cat / the marksman only took one shot / to protect the threatened cat from the world / we only had one shot.’

But as Bishop declares from his preface, his intent is not fatalist. Rather, it is a cry for change. This is the call that prevents our currents of contradictory emotion from lowering us into paralysis. We may find that in expressing these contradictions, as Bishop achieves in We Saw It All Happen, we create a structure of feeling wherein those emotions no longer silence us, but call us to speak.

About the reviewer

Joe Bedford is a writer from Doncaster, UK. His short stories have been published widely and are available to read here. His debut novel A Bad Decade for Good People will be published by Parthian Books in Summer 2023.

You can read more about We Saw It All Happen by Julian Bishop on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Favourite Reads of 2022

At the end of every year, we ask readers to submit a micro-review of a favourite book from the last twelve months. The book can be from any time or genre - the only qualification is that it has to be a book the reader found particularly memorable, striking or enjoyable during the previous year. Here are the responses for 2022. Everybody's Reviewing wishes all its readers a happy new year of reading in 2023!

Kirsten Arcadio

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: "A novel after my own heart, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin takes us through the story of Sam and Sadie, a pair of gamers and later, hugely successful tech creatives. Tomorrow is a kind of love story, the writing  as fluid and flexible as the series of games created by the protagonists that string each scene of the novel together. More than that, it’s a reflection on the human condition and its transit through many reincarnations, both real and virtual. I’m left with a sense that there’s always a Tomorrow, a chance to walk away from Game Over and start afresh." 

Joe Bedford

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: "At 268 pages, Olga Tokarczuk's lyrical yet brutal Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) must be the longest novel I've read in a single sitting. The Nobel Prize-winner's exploration of animal ethics and Blakean spirituality within a classic whodunit structure is a masterclass in how novelists can interrogate the very depths of the human condition while still delivering an inescapable page-turner."

Kathleen Bell

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead: "It's been a great year for books, largely thanks to public libraries and their wonderful librarians. I would never have bought Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead in hardback, however much I wanted to read it, but the library loaned me a copy almost as soon as it came out - and once I'd started on the first page I couldn't put it down. I don't suppose I'll ever know how she achieved such a compelling voice in this reworking of David Copperfield but it was vital to the way the novel as a whole undermines some of the most deeply embedded class assumptions in the USA. Read it! Had it not been for Demon Copperhead I would probably have chosen the non-fiction book by Thomas Harding, White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain's Legacy of Slavery or opted for a tie between two of the poetry collections I'm currently reading: A Little Resurrection by Selina Nwulu and Manorism by Yomi Sode. All these are well worth reading."

Laura Besley

 

Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations: "Migrations is a cli-fi novel about Franny Stone, a woman in her mid-thirties who decides to track the last remaining Arctic terns on their pole-to-pole migration. Offsetting the harshness of the setting and circumstances is McConaghy’s lyrical evocative language. This is a beautiful and engaging read."  

Laurie Cusack

John Fante, Ask the Dust "is a timeless, corking text that’s set in 1930s Los Angeles. It’s a superb portrait of a young budding down-at-heel wordsmith: Arturo Bandini. Young Bandini’s all-consuming ambition and his rites of passage are tough, hilarious and often bittersweet are laid bare in elegant fashion. Shout Fante’s dynamite refrain from every rooftop: 'I am Arturo Bandini.'" 

Andrew Dix

Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks: "I came to this book belatedly, but loved its verbal richness. Macfarlane reads a peat bog or the face of a mountain as sensitively as he does the contours of a text. On, or down, to Macfarlane's Underland in 2023!" 

Charlie Hill

Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha: "Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. I'd never heard of her. This is an absolute joy: lyrical, unsentimental, and very modern."

Joe Joyce

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart: "This book explored Zauner’s grief and life in such a well observed and musical way that I really connected to. She writes about loss so openly and honestly and lets her memories take the main focus."

Isabelle Kenyon

Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers: "Jenga and wife Neni don't have parental approval for their marriage, but they do have a shared dream of moving to New York. They find out the American dream is harsh and the break down of their dreams is moving, as is the outline of the immigration journey. I found it refreshing that the rich family they work for in the end are not demonised - no character is shown as in the right or the wrong absolutely." 

Andrew G. Lockhart

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The City of Mist, translated by Lucia Graves: "This collection of eleven stories recalls the tone and splendour of Zafón’s novels. Dark, atmospheric and macabre, and crossing genre from literary through historical to fantasy, they feature angels, plague, labyrinths and dragons, as well as characters from the author’s earlier books. A wonderful celebration of a great writer taken from the world too soon."

Karen Rust

Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory: "Protagonist, Francis, does some awful things which might not be to everyone's taste, but they are consistent with his character. A fascinating tale of a family who live life differently as they cope with mental illness. I love the freedom Francis has to fill their own time, and the lyrical descriptions of the island and coast. A dark, funny, crazy and, ultimately, human read."

Jonathan Taylor

Naoki Urasawa, Monster: "This was recommended to me by my daughter Miranda. It is a remarkable, disturbing and sophisticated mingling of art, neurology, psychology, political history and adventure story: Death in Venice meets the 1970s TV series Incredible Hulk meets Les Misérables meets The Omen. Brilliant."

Maria Taylor

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle: "In the first instance, this book is only loosely about the man in the high castle and is more about a 'what if' scenario. What if the Nazis had won the war, what terrible things would befall the fate of people across the world and how would America define itself as a 'colonised' state? A gripping and very strange book to read." 

Miranda Taylor (aged 14)

Tatsuya Endo, Spy x Family: "Spy x Family is one of my favourite reads of the year. It is a wholesome story about a spy, assassin and a telepath as their adopted child as they all try and hide their identities from each other. It becomes a cute and heart-warming story about their journey as a fake family."

Rosalind Taylor (aged 14)

Cuttlefish That Loves Diving, Lord of the Mysteries: "Lord of the Mysteries is my favourite read of the year. It is about Klein Moretti who is transmigrated to another world set in Victorian England and it is also about gods. I really enjoyed the book series and the characters."

Paul Taylor-McCartney

John Banville, The Sea: "A short and concise meditation on the fallibility of human memory and its ability to both pollute and shape the present. Beautifully written and expertly structured, a literary masterpiece."

Helen Walsh

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch: "The Goldfinch follows the fortunes of Theo Decker, orphaned by tragedy at 13 and overshadowed by it for the rest of his young adult years. There seems to be no way to go but down for Theo, the only thing bolstering him, the painting he 'accidentally' acquires at the moment of his mother's death. The Goldfinch is certainly epic: gripping, nail-biting, excruciating, thoughtful, heroic, tragic and uplifting all at once. Alongside the page-turning, there are ponderous moments (it's a long book!), but there is a true sense of growth in the characters - and in yourself - by the end."

Harry Whitehead

Jenny Offill, Weather: "Existential despair about climate change has surely never been delivered in so witty and scabrous a fashion. Offill’s librarian/mother/eco-blogger protagonist observes life in hilarious, emotive and poignant short segments that burst with voice and vitality."

Lee Wright

Anna Neima, The Utopians: "The significant story of six previously untried attempts by visionaries ahead of their time, to build near-perfect societies in the aftermath of the First World War. Social dreaming and paradises found and lost."