Hardback – DaneCobain.com

Title: Nightfall One

Author: Isaac Asimov

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 176

Rating: 3.5/5

This book was unfortunately a little bit of a letdown, which itself is quite surprising. This book is pretty odd because it was published alongside Nightfall Two in paperback, while the hardback just combined the lot of them. I think that might have been the best way to read it.

Perhaps part of the problem here is that the stories are all listed in chronological order, and so Asimov got older as the collections went on. That means that his older stuff comes later, and I personally feel as though he developed as a writer over the years. Not everyone agrees with me.

It’s still worth reading though, if only because everything Asimov wrote is worth reading. I just didn’t get quite as much out of it as I was expecting. Another reason could be that these stories were longer than those in the other book, and Asimov’s great at ideas. Shorter stories means more ideas to consider.

Learn more about Nightfall One.

Louise Candlish – The Other Passenger | Review

Title: The Other Passenger

Author: Louise Candlish

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 411

Rating: 4/5

I was sent a signed copy of this book for free as part of a bookish subscription box that reached out to me, but I don’t think that will influence my review. Still, I guess that’s a disclaimer for you.

The theme of the box that I received was all about the commute and this was pretty much the perfect book for it because it was mostly set on the commuter boats that people take to get into the city. As for the genre, it’s basically as close to generic contemporary thriller as you can get, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We have a lot of the classics tropes here, from an unreliable narrator to tons of twists and turns, complex interpersonal relationships and of course that little technique of jumping backwards and forwards through time to advance what’s happening in the present by bringing up something that happened in the past and which changes the way we look at things.

Other than that, I don’t really want to say too much about the plot, purely because as with most of these, half of the point is being taken by surprise. And I will say that while there were one or two things that I called pretty early on, there were also a couple of twists here and there that I didn’t spot.

It probably also helped that I received quite a nice edition of this, a hardback with the author’s signature in it, and so it was quite an aesthetically pleasing read, too. I can’t say that I’m the biggest fan of thrillers in general, as I tend to prefer either cosy mysteries, private detectives or gritty police procedural novels, but it certainly did the job and was a pleasant enough read, keeping me going until the end to find out the truth about what happened.

And that brings us on to the question of whether I’d recommend it or not, and that really depends upon the type of reader that you are. If you’re really into modern thrillers and you loved Gone Girl and Girl on the Train, you’re probably going to like this one. There are a ton of twists, more than I’ve seen in a novel of this size in quite a long time, and the characters are just warped enough to keep them interesting.

Learn more about The Other Passenger.