Under the Sun by Hanne Marie Svendsen

The questions of what we do with life and what we have to show for it reverberate throughout the novel. The particular life we follow is that of Margrethe Thiede, who lives in a small Danish fishing town. As a child, her head is full of fairy tales, and she views the world through that lens...but she also senses (even if not quite conciously) that reality doesn't necessarily work that way...

The full review appears in Issue 3 of The Small Press Review.

Further links:
Norvik Press

New Writings in the Fantastic, ed. John Grant

I'm a big fan of John Grant's attitude to fantasy, which is that it should not be funnelled into narrow marketing categories, only to be diluted in the process; but should instead be let free to do whatever it wants and generally be, well, imaginative. I'm all for that, so naturally I was interested in reading a big anthology (41 stories in 360 pages of small, close-set type) edited by Grant and intended to embody those very principles...

The full review is available online at Serendipity.

Further links:
John Grant
Geoffrey Maloney
E. Sedia
Kim Sheard
Naomi Alderman
Gary McMahon
Edd Vick
Vera Nazarian
Derek J. Goodman
Greg Beatty
Andrew Hook
Paul Pinn
Pendragon Press

Cynnador by Patrick Welch

The first 40 pages comprise a prologue and thirteen "preludes" before the main story starts. These preludes are a series of vignettes introducing Cynnador and its people: some are more directly related to the main story than others; some characters in the vignettes appear later in the book, others don't, and some characters in the main tale are only referred to in the preludes. What emerges is a picture of a mysterious city that somehow looks after itself, a place in which magic is difficult to cast, but that has some magic of its own...

The full review is available online at SF Site.

Further links:
Patrick Welch
Twilight Times Books