Lazarus Books - latest reviews
not another online bookshop?
No, we're not. We only review what we think are good, intelligent books, which lean towards the experimental and new. Obviously this is a subjective opinion, and we don't apologise for it!
We don't actually sell you the books - the well-known and trusted online retailers Amazon handle that side of things. We just offer you intelligent reviews, and a special way to find similar books, as well as letting you add comments to the reviews and rate the books yourselves.
So, in a nutshell, we sift through the millions of books and find the real quality stuff for you. No slushy romances, predictable airport blockbusters or tired old plots - these are interesting books which will hopefully enlighten and challenge.
All Tomorrow's Parties
by William Gibson
William Gibson's seventh glossy, neon-lit novel is a stylishly complex sequel to his previous two, Virtual Light and Idoru. From Virtual Light there's the potent image of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge transformed into a vertically stacked shanty-town with its own bohemian autonomy, outside the law. Idoru provides the magical Japanese media idol ('idoru') Rei Toei, a gorgeous lady existing only in software--as yet. Gibson links these worlds with his usual glowing, plausible vision of deadly streetwise realities intersecting with on-line data flow.
read our review of All Tomorrow's Parties
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The Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks
Enter - if you can bear it - the extraordinary world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.
"Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anyone for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through."
read our review of The Wasp Factory
The Cement Garden
by Ian McEwan
In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves.
'Darkly impressive' (The Times).
'An extremely assured, technically adept and compelling piece of work' (The Observer).
read our review of The Cement Garden
Foucault's Pendulum
by Umberto Eco
Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth.
read our review of Foucault's Pendulum
Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
Cayce Pollard is a spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered an assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project than she had expected.
read our review of Pattern Recognition
And the Ass Saw the Angel
by Nick Cave
'And the Ass Saw the Angel' tells the story of Euchrid Eucrow, the product of several generations of inbreeding and raw liquor consumption.
Physically malformed and born dumb, he possesses an unusual sensitivity which he hides underneath engaging bravado.
"The book's style, its parables, metaphors and fetishism, give it a visionary feel - all underpinned by Bible-black humour, and it has enough visitations, portents and religious lunacy to qualify as the second-greatest story ever told". (Elle)
read our review of And the Ass Saw the Angel
Burning Chrome
by William Gibson
William Gibson's first collection of short stories set in the Sprawl, the landscape of 'Neuromancer'. Cybernetics, biotech and the communication web are constant themes throughout.
read our review of Burning Chrome
Junky
by William S Burroughs
William S Burroughs depicts the addict's life: his hallucinations, his ghostly nocturnal wanderings, his strange sexuality, and his hunger for the needle. Following its hero from his Midwestern birthplace to New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City, Junky is a memorable and shocking demonstration of the junk equation: "Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life."
Post Office: A Novel
by Charles Bukowski
Post Office, Charles Bukowski's highly autobiographical first novel which was published in 1971, has sold over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen languages. It is a hilarious, lurid account of the central character Henry Chinaski's hand-to-mouth world of beer, one-night stands and race-tracks, interspersed with grim details of life working for the Post Office. Satre has called Bukowski "the best poet in America".
read our review of Post Office: A Novel
American Psycho
by Brett Easton Ellis
So begins a hellish descent into the world of Patrick Bateman, the novel's protagonist. Bateman is a handsome 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie, who spends his days listening to Whitney Houston and working out which exclusive restaurant to eat in and what clothes to wear in a dizzying parody of 1980s consumerism run mad.
However, Bateman also has a darker side; he is a psychopathic serial killer, with a penchant for torturing and sexually abusing young women before killing them in the most gruesome and explicit fashion.
read our review of American Psycho