Speaking as someone who cannot find much interest or enthusiasm for the currently popular Twilight/Vampire phenonomen, it seems strange that I found myself reading this new novel about a family of vampires by Matt Haig and perhaps stranger still was the fact that I actually enjoyed reading it!

Meet The Radleys

Peter, Helen and their teenage children, Rowan and Clara, live in an English town. They are an everyday family. Averagely dysfunctional and averagely content. But as Rowan and Clara have yet to find out, the Radleys have a devastating secret…

Matt Haig, Vampires

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Above a dingy bar in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a vampire child is born, killing his mother as he fights his way out of her womb. Unaware of the devastation he has caused, that same child, called Nothing, is brought up by non-vampire parents. By the time he is 15, however, he knows that something is missing from his life. He leaves home, aiming to find his favourite group, Lost Souls, to see if they can help him find his way. He is picked up by a strange group of people, the beautiful Zillah, Molochai and Twig, who appear to live life by partying hard. Before long, it becomes clear that Zillah and Nothing have a strong bond. But is it a healthy one? And can his friends Ghost and Christian help him to see the truth before it is too late?

horror, Poppy Z Brite, sex

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Released in time to coincide with the “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” feeding frenzy in 2003, Shadowmancer quickly triggered a lot of media hype and even got itself tipped in some circles as being “hotter than Potter”. In fact, Shadowmancer soon had something of a cult growing around it, with sales outstripping many other children’s books, and first editions fetching as much as £1,000 on the web. The bewildering popularity of this novel has only grown since then, with three other books having been released to make up the Shadowmancer quartet (Wormwood, Tersias and The Shadowmancer Returns), and I understand that a film is also being made of this book by Universal Pictures (which just goes to show really that any of us can make it big with our writing, if you can become a millionaire from writing this stuff).

Shadowmancer is set in the 1700s in the smuggling country that surrounds the Yorkshire coast

GP Taylor

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“The Time Traveler’s Wife” is the story of Henry, a librarian, and Clare, an artist. They have known each other since Clare was 6 and Henry was 30, and were married when Clare was 22 and Henry was 30. At this time Henry had known Clare for two years, but Clare has known Henry for most of her life.
Confused yet?

This scenario sounds impossible, but has come about because Henry is the first person in the World to be diagnosed with a genetic condition called Chrono-Displacement Disorder. In other words, he is a time traveller. Time travel is a premise that has been used before in countless books, usually with the protagonist travelling through large chunks of time, back into the past or into the distant future, through some magical or technological means.

Audrey Niffenegger, romance, time travel

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