Simon Williamson

In The Rope Dancer, Rob Leach sets himself the ambitious task of using Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a template for an impassioned meditation on mountaineering, authoring one’s life and owning one’s injuries. It seems like formidably brainy material, and the novel can certainly be excavated for its philosophical underpinnings. Yet it’s equally possible to disregard them and to simp ... (read more)

Berlin, 1948; the Iron Curtain has slammed shut, bisecting a city still pitted and scarred from the calamities of World War II; the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the subsequent Allied airlift are imminent. Around these tectonic moments in history and politics, first-time novelist Greg Flynn sets his thriller, The Berlin Cross. The novel opens with Captain Beauchamp, a member of the British Royal ... (read more)