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This starts out very much like a classic fantasy story: a disparate group of adventurers are thrown together on a swords-and-sorcery epic quest to save the world from an unspeakable evil.

But quite quickly you start to realise it's something more than that. The author is a huge AD&D fan and lots of the concepts from that start to appear in the book. After all, every decent D&D campaign also features a fighter, a magic user, a cleric, and an archer.

The world seems loosely based on Celtic Scotland, and the story has the right combination of set battle pieces and world/character building to keep everything moving along nicely. The characters are varied and all have just enough human flaws and failings to be believable.

(Very very mild spoiler warning): There is a plot twist at the end of the story that I'm pretty sure you won't see coming until it comes up and wallops you with the force of Level 10 Cast Fireball spell. At which point you'll be sitting there dazed and amazed and flicking back through the book to look at all the little giveaway signs that you completely failed to notice the first time through!

Without a doubt this is one of my favourite classic-style fantasy books that I've read for quite some time.

I didn't enjoy this as much as I'd hoped to.

The plot is broad in scope and sweeps across a period of a couple of millennia. Although set almost 60,000 years in the future it touches upon (and in some cases dives deeply into) themes that are very relevant in the 21st century, and the writing is generally engaging.

So why didn't I really like it? A couple of things: the structure of the book (three sections each set approx. 1,000 years apart) meant that just as you were starting to really understand some of the characters they were left by the wayside and a whole new set of individuals got introduced. At the end of each section it felt to me that there was still a lot of potential development of both plot and characters, and maybe this book could have worked better if each section was significantly expanded and extended and published as a trilogy.

(minor spoilers below)

I also felt that for a book where the overarching theme seemed to be "small people" fighting back against money-driven capitalist corporations, there was one glaring problem. Namely: if over the next 55,000 years the socio-economic structure of society doesn't really change from the current capitalist one, that's a very depressing message for anyone who would like to see change.

And seeing as the novel is written almost entirely from the POV of characters who WOULD like to see change that strikes me as a very odd way to approach it. Essentially the author seems to be saying "although it would be wonderful to see The System overturned, people have been trying to achieve that for 50,000+ years without success. So it's never going to happen".

This is the third -- and I believe final -- installment in Adrian Tchaikovsky's acclaimed Children of Time series.

The action once again moves on to another alien world but with many of the same characters and species from the earlier two books. And of course we are introduced to additional new intelligences, as you'd expect from the earlier stories' trajectories.

However it took me well over half the book to really get into it. The multiple plots seemed not only hard to keep track of, but self-contradictory at times as well. Eventually everything does fall into place and there are enough plot twists to keep you intrigued right to the end, but there were definitely times when I had to force myself to keep reading as the frustration was starting to get too much.

I'm glad I kept going, though. In the last third of the book many of the earlier confusion gets resolved, and that's what's bumped it up from a three-star to a four-star review.

It is ultimately a good book in the end, although it's definitely more openly philosophical and introspective than the previous two. If you like Tchaikovsky's work and are prepared to stick with it, this is rewarding.

I'm not ususally impressed by self-help books of any kind. But I had this recommended to me by several people and so decided to give it a go.

It's a fairly slim volume, and easy to read. In it the author (who is a surgeon in the USA) discusses how the simple use of checklists can vastly improve correctness and compensate for human fallibility. Starting with the example of example of aircraft safety, he then moves on to large scale construction projects and then the majority of the book examines his attempts to introduce the idea of checklists to surgical operating theatres worldwide.

In essence his argument is that in many lines of work, people need to become ever more specialised in very specific areas. However complex tasks require many specialisms, and so teams of people (who may never have met before) often need to be able to understand each other's thought processes and concerns, often at quite short notice for very critical - sometimes literally life-or-death - scenarios. And the use of a humble checklist can make an enormous difference as to their success rates.

The evidence he presents seems compelling and it has certainly made me think about the multitude of tasks I do at work. I'd recommend it to anyone who has to manage their way through complicated systems, especially if it involves working with other people.

The Dark Ages in England are called that because there is almost no contemporary written evidence about that era. Between the time the Roman legions left this island to attend to matters closer to home, and the rise of Saxon power a few centuries later, almost everything we know has been gleaned from archeological evidence or much later writing.

So you'd think this would be an ideal period for speculative fiction writers to write about, as you could build a vivid and plausibe world based upon the few known facts. But actually very little fiction is set in that period.

Rebecca Stott's novel is one of those that is. Inspired by the hard real-world archeological evidence of a Saxon brooch found in the depths of unoccupied post-Roman Londinium, she conjures up a tale of what life might have been like for people who lived on the banks of the Thames a couple of generations after the Roman legions had left.

Particularly unusually for historical fiction, it features a main cast consisting entirely of women, with most of the men consigned to supporting roles. This allows the author to move away from the more usual warlords-and-their-battles emphasis of this sort of story, and towards a more character-driven plot. The writing is enjoyable and the story zips along at a reasonable rate, so it doesn't take too long to get through the 300-ish pages of the book.

The world that's conjured up feels believable, and the harsh realities of living in the sixth century are not shied away from, although it never gets too gory. There is enough suspense and unpredictability in the plot to keep things interesting. I came across a couple of sections where I felt 21st-century values and beliefs were being expressed a little bit too freely by the 6th-century characters, but on the whole it's an enjoyable and worthwhile read.