Wow! This was a big surprise. The setting is a town in France where the author himself meets with an old lady. She, it is revealed, was the inspiration of the heroine in his earlier 3 books (and there are 3 earlier books which I’ll now start looking out for). Rosie was a special agent during the war and this story is about her first mission, the one mission the author couldn’t have written about because his source didn’t know about it. Best of all, there is a twist at the end which I’ll not tell you lest I spoil it.

I tend to like books where a history is revealed. In this book we hear not only of Rosie’s struggles to survive as an undercover agent but also of what happened to her after the war, right up to the present day or in this case, right up to the reason she is talking to an author in a small French town, attending a re-union of the few remaining resistance and special operations staff that still survive after 60 years.

Rootie Rating 4 out of 5, time to go and find the other 3 books in this series.

Strangly, I haven’t seen the film. Or at least, I haven’t seen the film all the way through. Part of me has always felt that having seen the film the book is not worth reading. Part of me has always felt that having read the book the film is not worth seeing. I know, that’s wrong, and I’m so glad I picked up this story.

It’s unusual in that it’s made of many short chapters, 47 in all. We follow the story from the discovery on the mood of a ‘monolith’ and the journey to reach a small moon around Jupiter.. or was it Saturn, I’ve always mixed those two planets up. Anyway the journey has some eventful things happen which many of you will already know. The computer, known as HAL behaves in a way that was not predicted by the programmers but quite logical in hindsight.

This book was a very easy read, not difficult to follow. Having read 3001 first didn’t reduce the enjoyment of this book one iota.

Rootie Rating 4 out of 5 – enjoyable epic

Having enjoyed other Brian Aldiss stories I thought I’d give this one a try even though the cover was a bit off putting. I know, you should never judge a book by it’s cover, but the monster on the front, man with cloak, beautiful woman in graceful dress, made for a pretty accurate impression.

This book is a fantasy, set either in the distant imaged future or distant imagined past. We follow an actor as he lives his life within the small city, making ends meet, meeting and seducing attractive women, endeavouring to leave the working classes and become part of the ruling classes. The story is inventive, the description brings the city and strange animals to life in vivid detail. It has a quality of realism that works surprisingly well with the fantasy background.

This isn’t the sort of book I’d normally read but it more than held my attention, I couldn’t wait to turn the next page. Rootie Rating 3 out of 5 – Fantasy is not my thing but the writing style saved it.