A wonderful piece of work. With the story taking place in the universe, two different planets with different cultures, attitudes and behaviors cross paths, and the whole book is set in delicious irony. Told in the viewpoint of a highly intelligent intergalactic bomb who tries to find out about th...
I finally finished this damn book. It started off so promising, and that first chapter is absolutely hysterical. Unfortunately it's all downhill from there. The book just drags and drags with boring characters and no real plot, until the very very end where it suddenly comes back together with th...
I finished reading this book a day ahead of my Sci-Fi Fantasy Book Club Meeting (August 12, 2014) to discuss the book. This fiction is a zany exploration into the concept of multiverses and how to use them for fun and profit. It contains very little hard science (which is good; my background is i...
Not my favourite Tom Holt book, but a reasonably enjoyable escapist read nonetheless. Don't want to spoil it for other readers, but I found the ending a bit flat. I do enjoy his zany world of magic and mayhem, but this one didn't quite hang together as well as others. Saying all that, if you want...
This book kinda reminded me of what would happen if Haruki Murakami and Terry Pratchett got together to write a book... then it went a bit wrong. The story was OK if a little boring but I found the characters rather flat. The back of the book described the exact kind of story I enjoy, and I am a ...
See that girl with the cloak and basket? She doesn't need a woodchopper to kill the wolf--she can handle it on her own. And Prince Florizel?--He really doesn't come from around here. He doesn't even know that there's something repulsive about food with a hole in the middle! There's the knight...
This is only my second Holt surprisingly, the first being The Portable Door earlier last year. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I gather he is very popular amongst fans of Terry Pratchett but I think comparisons here are wrong. I find Holt's work far less like Pratchett and perhaps more along the lines o...
This is a follow-on from The Portable Door, but could probably be read on its own. Hapless Brit becomes involved with magic, gods, random heroes and bureaucracy, finds frustration, danger and love. I really should post a couple of the contract provisions for selling your soul to the Devil, which ...
Once upon a time, everything was fine. Humpty Dumpty sat on his wall, Jack and Jill went about their lawful business, the Big Bad Wolf did what big bad wolves do, and the wicked queen plotted murder most foul. But the humans hacked, cried havoc, shut down the wicked queen's system, and corrupted ...
This was my first Tom Holt book, follow ups included a quick read i cant find here but was awesome in its portrayal of a man creeping along a tunnel hunting a monster. Of course this lead me to the second proper book of his i have which is 'you dont have to be evil to work here but it helps' whic...
So what is The Portable Door? Well, you'll have to read a fair bit of this novel before you discover that, encountering mishaps and madness, madcap mayhem and wonderful weirdness along the way. Expect the unexpected. Expect craziness and confusion. You can't be any more muddled than the hero of t...
Having read this book based on its ravenous reviews, I feel cheated and slightly suspicious about the general population's sense of humour. Tom Holt has been compared to Terry Pratchett, but his fantasy creatures set on a contemporary setting could not be any less funny than Pratchett's. The awok...
This omnibus consists of two of Tom Holt's earlier works. I have reviewed each one below.Who's afraid of Beowulf?What are the deeds of heroes, except a few frightened people doing the best they can in the circumstances? (p. 222)What striked me first was how much Tom Holt's writing reminds me of T...
It's been a while since I read anything by Tom Holt, but I enjoyed returning to his weird and wacky world. In this adventure, Jane wants nothing to more than to peacefully commit suicide in a railway station waiting room, but instead is inflicted by the genie of the aspirin bottle, of Kiss, as h...
In 1037, a senior civil servant of the Byzantine empire faces a tedious journey to Greece, escorting the Army payroll. His only companions are a detachment of the Empire's elite Guard, recruited from Viking Scandinavia. When the wagon sheds a wheel, he passes the time talking with two veterans, w...
As everyone knows, when great warriors die, their reward is eternal life in Odin’s bijou little residence known as Valhalla. But Valhalla has just changed. It has grown. It has diversified. Just like any corporation, the Valhalla Group has had to adapt to survive. Unfortunately, not even an omnis...
This book gives a different account of the fate of Vanderdecker, the Flying Dutchman, and his crew from that presented in Wagner's opera and other sources. Instead of being cursed by the Devil, they accidentally drink an elixir created by the alchemist Juan de Montalban, which makes them immortal...
The sun rises late, dirty and so badly in need of a service it's a wonder it gets up at all. The moon's going to be scrapped soon and a new one commisioned - but then, they've been saying that for years... All is not well with the universe, and though there's a hell of a tidying up job to be org...
'Witty, ironic ... and achieves a deeply felt authenticity' NEW YORK TIMES
Written by the author of "Lucia in Wartime", "Lucia Triumphant", "Expecting Someone Taller" and "Whose Afraid of Beowulf?", this is an historical novel set in Greece. Eupolis of Pallene, playwright and satirist, offers new and wicked perspectives on the glory that was Greece.
I'm very surprised that nobody has written a review of this book, yet. In the hopes that this will be useful to someone, here goes.For me, reading Tom Holt's Ye Gods is another attempt to find a funny fantasy writer like Terry Pratchett. The book actually reminded me of some of Pratchett's earl...
Here's a synopsis from fantastic fiction: Wagner got it wrong. The twilight of the gods isn't that cataclysmic. After all, there's a comfy chair, a warm fire and three meals a day at the Sunnyvoyde Residential Home. Passing the time with Aphrodite, who's still quite sprighty with the aid of her Z...
While not as humourous as some of his previous books, Tom Holt still delivers the fun. (Judicious editing will make that as good a blurb as any of Rex Reed's.) I think I missed out on a lot that was going on here because I can't read French and thus was unable to translate the many chansons inclu...
There was something wrong! Just as the boiling water was about to be poured on his head and the man with the red book appeared and his life flashed before his eyes, Akram the Terrible, the most feared thief in Baghdad, knew this had happened before. Many times. And he was damned if he was going t...
The cosmic battle between Good and Evil ... But suppose Evil threw the fight? And suppose Good cheated?Sculptress Bianca Wilson is a living legend. St George is also a legend, but not quite so living. However, when Bianca's sculpture of the patron saint and his scaly chum gets a bit too 'life-lik...
Tom Holt is the English equivalent of Christopher Moore. The big difference is that Mr. Moore puts setup/punchline sets in his chapters, while Mr. Holt is much more subtle and restrained. Douglas Adams is an apt and accurate comparison. Where they are alike is that they both are not shy about set...
Fifteen hundred years have passed and the Holy Grail is still missing, presumed ineffable. The knights have dumped the quest and now deliver pizzas, while the sinister financial services of the lost kingdom of Atlantis threatens the universe with fiscal Armageddon.
It touches all our lives; our triumphs and tragedies, our proudest achievements, our most traumatic disasters. Alloyed of love and fear, death and fire, and the inscrutable acts of the gods, insurance is indeed the force that binds the universe together. Hardly surprising, therefore, that Frank C...
Only human: Something is about to go wrong. Very wrong. But what can you expect when the Supreme Being decides to get away from it all for a few days, leaving his naturally inquisitive son to look after the cosmic balance of things? There's only one hope for mankind. And that's being optimistic....
‘Igor?’ The howl of the wind in the fir trees. The rippling crash of the thunder. The pecking hammer of the rain on the shed roof, like a spectral Fred and Ginger doing the Tap Danse Macabre. ‘Igor, tha daft booger, what’s tha playin’ at?’ The bounty hunter flickered. Imagine a double-sided mirr...
When the concert in question has been billed as the Very Last Ever Farewell Charity Concert, the atmosphere is heightened to such an extent that barometers are brought into the auditorium entirely at their owners’ risk. For the occasion the Galeazzo Brothers had built - over the course of centuri...
‘Where am I going to get my hands on an okapi?’ The men in grey suits looked at each other. ‘Two okapis,’ their spokesman said. ‘What?’ ‘We need two okapis,’ the spokesman explained. ‘One male and one female.’ ‘Do you really?’ The pet-shop owner breathed out through his nose. ‘Look, lads,’ he sai...
Five hundred thousand spectral construction workers laboured night and day to bring into being the most sensational leisure facility in the history of Time and Space. And all because one man dared to dream the impossible nightmare. The man in question sat in the window of the site office, looking...
‘It was around here somewhere,’ said Thought. ‘That’s what you said last time,’ said Memory. His pinions were aching, and he hadn’t eaten for sixteen hours. During that time, he and his colleague had been round the world twenty-four times. Anything the sun could do, it seemed, they could do bette...
He pushed aside the leaf directly above his head, and stared. ‘You,’ the Big repeated. ‘I wonder if you could help me.’ Mother of God, there’s a Big talking to me. They’re not supposed to be able to see us, for Chrissakes! ‘Er,’ said Captain Hat, surprising himself with the level of fluency he wa...
Since Paul had no idea where Mr Wells had been taking them, he couldn’t get a bus or charter a plane and follow them, so there’d be raised eyebrows and pointed questions at the very least when they got back. Also, that was presumably the last he’d ever see of the portable door&m...
He had no idea how many miles of identical paved, surprisingly well-swept tunnel he’d walked down, how many side turnings and cul-de-sacs he’d explored, all to no result. His feet were hurting, he was starving hungry and he needed a pee, and the thought of Perseus and Captain Kirk choking on his ...
This was probably just as well, for the spectacle of Major Benjy with a tarnished silver tray under one arm, a dull-framed portrait on his knees and an enormous porcelain urn clasped to his bosom would have provided men and women of ill-will with great scope for sardonic comment. &nbs...
He had a big axe in one hand and a whetstone in the other.The sun was high, so he was wearing a broad-brimmed hat to keep the bright light out of his eyes.‘It’s all right,’ he said, as he noticed me looking doubtfully at the axe. ‘I was planning to wander up to those trees up there on the skyline...
‘Down twelve points at close of trading, would you believe? All they’ve got to do is shove a pointy stick in the ground and the stuff comes up like a burst pipe, and still they manage to lose money. Nicky, get that useless stockbroker on the phone and tell him to sell the lot.’ Nicky, the Bishop’...