The Family Mansion - Anthony C. Winkler

'Hartley Fudges was twenty-three years old. He was neither particularly bright nor especially dumb, neither ugly nor good-looking.'

Our man Hartley Fudges is one of those posh twats from the nineteenth century upper class that are in abundance in historical fiction novels like this one. He's born into money and the only problem with this is that he has an older brother who is stopping him from having all the stuff that he wants. After he is rejected by a young widow because his dick is too big, he makes a bit of a mental plan, which all goes horribly wrong, and long story short he moves to Jamaica.

In Jamaica there is a booming slave trade (because we're in the old days, remember) and Hartley impulse buys a slave. His name is Cuffy. I like him. The rest of the story is about his three years spent in Jamaica with his slave, his weird mate Meredith, his reputation of having a fucking massive cock, and his lover.

I have not read a story like this before. It is historical fiction but it doesn't feel like it is set two-hundred years ago. The characters are modern and interesting and the story is fresh and not really like fiction at all, it kind of reads almost like an autobiography, with lovely little digressions and interjections that tell us things about history, and poets, and fashion, amongst other things.

Highly recommended, especially if you want to read some historical fiction that doesn't feature corset-bound women swooning and jumped-up wankers twatting around on horses and smoking cigars. A refreshing read.

Enjoy.

Nearest Thing to Crazy - Elizabeth Forbes

'Memory can play strange tricks on you, but there are some things I recall so clearly it's like a movie replaying in my mind, like the first time I saw her.'

Cassandra and her husband Dan live alone in their quaint little house in a quaint little village since their daughter fucked off to university. To their friends and acquaintances they look like the perfect couple: solid and very much in love. However, the arrival of writer Ellie shakes things up a bit as parts of the past unravel and show us that what looks beautiful and untouchable on the outside can often be full of hurting and pain from the past on the inside.

I fucking adored this book, even though it did, at times, make me feel like I was going fucking crazy. It's one of those ones that makes you want to grab the characters by the neck and shake them around a bit (note: this is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do from time to time) and scream in their faces things like 'Man the fuck up, you twat', and 'STOP LYING YOU HORRIBLE CUNT', and 'You evil bitch. If you were doing this to me I would fucking piss all over you.'

This book will keep you gripped and guessing and questioning your own assessments of the story and characters all the way through. If you enjoy eyeballing you boyfriend and saying 'Is there anything you want to tell me, eh? Now's the time, I'm feeling pretty fucking mental' then this will be right up your street. Or if you don't fancy doing that, but do like stories about families and pasts and the lengths to which some people will go to fulfill their fantasies whilst protecting themselves at the expense of others (cunts) then read it. A great story and a bit of a headfuck.


Enjoy.


Nearest Thing to Crazy is published 27th June 2013 by Cutting Edge Press.

At The End of a Dull Day - Massimo Carlotto

'At the end of a dull day, the lawyer and, incidentally, parliamentarian of the Italian republic, Sante Brianese strode in with his customary briskness into La Nena.'

Putting Mario Puzo to one side, as far as I can remember, this is my first dip into Italian crime fiction. If you know me you'll know that I like to swagger around like I'm the dog's bollocks humming the theme to The Godfather at weekends, and during the week spend many, many hours at work trying to convince my colleagues that I really am Tony Soprano, so, I was quite excited when I read the blurb to this.

Giorgio Pellegrini has settled down somewhat, after having the kind of lifestyle that you can probably work out for yourself. He owns a restaurant and is a loving husband, and on the surface everything looks like it has calmed down for him. However, when he finds out he's being mugged off then his old instincts for revenge come back in a brutal way.

Now, there's a lot wrong with my head so the parts of this book that I fucking loved were the parts that make other people squirm and feel uncomfortable: his relationship with and control over his wife being the most prominent. This book will probably not be for you if you don't like murder, mental abuse and prostitution, but if you do enjoy mafioso tales and the darker side of life then definitely read this.

I have just discovered that this book comes after Carlotto's The Goodbye Kiss. I did not know that, this reads excellently as a standalone, but I am going to buy The Goodbye Kiss, and then probably a fair amount of Carlotto's backlist. I just fucking love the debauchery.

By Light Alone - Adam Roberts

"There are, after all, two sorts of people in the world. 'It's like the moon,' somebody said, and George, eavesdropping (fiddling with the buckles on his boot), knew what they meant."

We're in the future at some point and humans have become so advanced that they are able to survive on sunlight. Like photosynthesis. Now, the poor can only live on light alone, but the rich, the greedy fuckers, cut their hair short and eat food and twat around even though they don't need to. Statement on society there, innit.

So there's this man named George, he's doing alright but then his daughter goes missing and his wife is a bit of a cunt and he fucks off on his own to sort his shit out and that's when the book goes of so sci-fi. If you don't like sci-fi I'd definitely sack this one off, rather than buy it and then moan at me which some of you continue to insist on doing. FUCK OFF.

It's a bit mental and it's a bit clever. Might be a bit too clever for me, I'm not sure. That would mean reading it again and I probably don't have time for that. But it's good and it's the longer it goes on the more depraved it gets. I fucking love a bit of depravity.

Bye.

My Not-So-Shameful Sex Secrets - Girl on the Net

"Does that make me a slut? Yep. But is a slut a particularly bad thing to be? Nope."

Filth blogger Girl on the Net has written a book. It's a collection of her sexual experiences and stories about what she's done, why she's done it, and why what she's done is good.

Our pervy author takes us through her life, from teenage wanking and trying to make boys touch her tits right through to falling in love, with lots in between. Expect descriptions of sex clubs, anal sex, throat fucking and all of the other delicious and depraved thoughts that make GOTN so excited that, even if you're not sure you're into that kind of sex, will make your cunt wet or cock hard at the thought through the sheer delight that punches through her writing at the memories of such wonderful muck.

GOTN declares herself an unashamed pervert, and unlike a lot of erotic writers who get a bit lazy with the ins and outs (ha), she takes time to describe to us why things make her hot, why they're good, and also why we're all arseholes it's fine. Although being mostly filth, she's kept in the thoughtfulness and intelligence of her excellent blog, which, for me, were welcome interjections to calm myself down after reading accounts of being pinned down and fucked and wondering whether my boy will be into a bit of that. It's a pickle, but I'm a good talker. I'm off over there in a bit, wish me luck.

This is the thinking gentleman/woman's filth, and will equally delight and disgust you. If you are a fan of the blog then this is a must read. As with all of GOTNs writing, it is a frank and honest, which are two of the best qualities for a memoir to be, in my opinion.

Oh, and also, Girl on the Net? The 'only decent chat up line' that you talk about. You say that to me all the time.

She blatantly wants a piece, maybe I'll see you all in volume two.



It's out on Monday as a digital exclusive from Carina Press. You can pre-order it at Amazon, or whatever other ebook retailer takes your fancy.

A Bright Moon For Fools - Jasper Gibson

'Christmas had been handsome in his youth, and though the strong face remained , his many vices had left him corpulent, with disgruntled skin and mottled teeth. Even his nose had grown fat, but Christmas saw only beauty. ...'

Harry Christmas is a cunt. The bad kind of cunt. The kind of fat, drinking, awful, drinking cunt who has been leaving a path of destruction in their wake for some time now. He thinks he is the dog's bollocks, and do you know what? He fucking is.

He is such a dreadful bastard that I couldn't help reading this and thinking that he might be my soulmate: a drunken, cynical fucker, who hates most things and despairs at the state of the world. What a babe. I fell in love.

Anyway.

Harry is going off to do some stuff that will sort his head and his heart out. However, because he's a dreadful old twat he's got someone running after him and wanting to kill him. CLASSIC. DRAMA.

Along the way he meets some lovely mental people and has some proper adventures as well as some quiet and thoughtful times.

I fucking loved this book. It was exciting and weird and I was desperately in love with Harry the more I read and needed to find out how things ended up for him. Also, the book is fucking hilarious. Actually, actually funny. You know. Not fucking ridiculous 'funny', where people chuck the word 'funny' about with reckless abandon and actually it's not funny really, is it? It's just a fucking cat falling off a fucking table or a fucking baby (your baby, isn't it, your baby that no one except you cares about, you twat) gurgling and dribbling into a fucking camera and picking its nose or whatever. For fuck's sake. Some people. I fucking despair.

This one goes straight into my top three of the year so far. Full of belly-laughs and heart. Have a go at it and let me know what you think, and, if Harry Christmas is anything like someone you know then give them my number, yeah?

Enjoy.

Woman Master - Mehrnaz Stars

'Thirty-four years of sharing her body, her soul, her dreams and all of her thoughts. Her marriage had become a religion that held her hand and led her through life.'

I can tell you now that I'm sick to death of stories about struggling Jewish women in the holocaust and the war, and about outspoken black women sassing their way through slavery and so on and so forth. Which is why I am glad to have been sent a book that is about a woman struggling in IRAN. Never read one of them before. It's different, innit.

So this is about our girl Pari. She marries a man who she adores but her family think is not quite good enough for her. (standard) Then give or take a couple of hundred pages she becomes a very well respected lady in the village, and give or take a couple of hundred more, is the mother of basically everyone.

A story about a life and how it affects and is affected by others, this one is a nice page turner with a story based around a culture that I didn't know too much about before. It is interesting, but if you don't like extended stories about women being women in a culture that treats them quite differently then maybe leave it.