3.5 out of 5 stars

Mountains have captivated people for ages for a variety of different reasons. Just look in any bookshop in the travel section and you will find lots of book on mountains from all over the world. People have been climbing them seriously for over 150 years now, but before that, they had a spiritual significance for many cultures.

One of those people who is drawn to mountains is Iain Campbell, in particular, the Himalayas. Another fascination was the Indus River, and he had always dreamed of following its course in a boat as far as he could up to the Tibetan plateau, where it springs from the ‘Lion’s Mouth’ on Mount Kailash. Circumstances meant that this was never to be, so he had to take the next best things and follow it along the banks by bus and train.

Not only would this be a personal journey, but a discovery of the significance of the river to the lives of the people of Pakistan who live alongside it. It would take him four months and he would visit shrines and temples, get bumped around on buses and generally experience the rich culture of the country. He found the people of that country warm, generous and hospitable, very different from what he was expecting from the way that they are portrayed in the western media.

The truth of this journey, as with every other journey, is that it is unrepeatable; the land that we travel through changes, the tools that we use to travel change and we ourselves change.

It is an enjoyable book about a man immersing himself in the place and culture of a region. Campbell writes in a plain and matter of fact way and is prepared to engage with the people that he meets and join in with all that the journey throws at him.

3 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

It seems such a simple experiment, you shine a beam of light at a plate with two slits in it, you’d expect to have two visible patches of light on the surface behind. But it doesn’t work out that way, What you end up with is a series of lines of light on the rear surface similar to this called an interference pattern.

It is something that perplexed scientists since the 1800s after Thomas Young devised the experiment to show how light behaved like a wave. Around 100 years later Einstein then showed that light was a particle. This was the birth of quantum mechanics. But how could light be both a wave and a particle? Does it actually exist before we look at it, and do we change its state in the process of looking at it?

For the non-scientific person, quantum mechanics can be quite incomprehensible really. Though to be fair, it can often be baffling for the scientists that are studying this part of physics too, hence why there are at least three sets of theories that go some way to explaining just what is going on. As well as grappling with this fundamental law of physics, Ananthaswamy has met a number of the people that are involved with studying this and who are trying to tease out an understanding of what thee quantum world behaves in the way that it does.

I liked this book as Ananthaswamy does a really good job of unpicking the story from the science. One of the points that I thought he made that was very interesting was that the gap between Newtonian physics and when Einstein developed the General Relativity was around 300 years. As he says, we should not expect to have all of this solved and understood overnight. He writes really clearly, however, I must admit that I found some of the book utterly baffling. But it is the subject in physics that is trying the keenest minds at the moment.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The scientific process is an iterative one, ask a question, test that hypothesis, understand the result and ask a slightly different question and test again. Slowly an understanding of that specific process will be gained and revealed to the world. But every now and again a scientist will have an idea or revelation that leads to a body of work that fundamentally changes everything that we have understood until that point.

In this book, Marcus Chown takes 10 of the most significant developments and discoveries in physics since 1846. There he begins with Johann Galle looking through a giant brass refractor at the sky calling out the coordinates of the stars to his assistant. He was getting a crick in his neck and getting very cold when he called out the next set of coordinates. HE didn’t hear a response, just moments later the crash of a chair and looked up to see his Heinrich running towards him shouting, ‘The Star is not on the map!’ Using the Newton calculation he had predicted the location of a planet and he had discovered Neptune.

This and other significant discoveries like the discovery of electrical transmission predicted by Maxwell and proven by Hertz. How Friedmann used the latest gravitational theory from Einstein to predict that there was a time before the universe existed and how it took 48 years and several billion pounds before one man’s prediction came true on particles. Finally in September 2015 a new sensor with two laser beams 4 km long detected a shudder in space-time shortly after being turned on. This was the first time a gravitational wave had ever been seen and these had been predicted 99 years before by a certain Mr Einstein.

We have learned so much and yet still know almost nothing about the function of the universe, but each step is a revelation in its own way. I thought that this was a very accessible book on some of the most significant discoveries in physics. Chown has taken some liberties to fictionalise the accounts of these physicists and their breakthroughs, but I thought it worked really well. The stories are rooted in the facts and there is a strong narrative that kept my interest all the way through the book. Highly recommended.

3 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

As the third generation of moneylenders, Miryem should have had a comfortable life. However, her father was very bad at collecting the debts and they had slid into poverty. She decides to take these matters into her own hands and begins reclaiming the monies owed to them. She is very good at it and her reputation for turning silver into gold grows. This reputation does not go unnoticed; the king of the Staryk, a race of fey who revel in the cold and ice, arrives at her door and demands that she turns silver into gold for him.

The almost impossible demand is repeated and she draws on the skills of a craftsman to create beautiful pieces of jewellery for a local lord. This Lord has plans to wed his daughter to a Tsar, and her beautiful silver jewellery dazzles the young man. But this Tsar has a secret, he is possessed by a demon and this threatens the lands of human and Staryk alike.

In some ways, this is a modern adaption on the folk tale of Rumpelstiltskin and his gold changing skills, but Novik has stretched it in ways that you wouldn’t expect. There are several subplots going on here as well as the main thread between the primary characters. The story is told from the different characters point of views, which helps with the insight. However. there was no indication to show that you had changed from one to another, so it often took me a paragraph or two to work out who we were seeing the story from.

She has obviously done her research as the two co-joined worlds feel rooted deep in the European landscape of old and yet her world-building means that this feels magical at the same time. I felt the characters were a little two dimensional, mostly as the plot is the key to this book, but as well as switching characters, for me, this felt a bit long. Novik is a very accomplished writer, but I think I preferred Uprooted.

4 out of 5 stars

Rebecca Stott’s father had been wanting to write a memoir about his family life. For generations, his family had been members of a Christian sect that had steadily got more fundamentalist. He could only brush the surface of the past though as every time he ventured deeper into his memories the mental anguish meant that he could not carry on. When he was dying, he tried to persuade her to help him.

Rebecca had grown up in this Brethren sect too, with its draconian rules about what the members could and mostly couldn’t do, she was constrained in almost every activity that a normal child would have taken part in. They attended school but were not allowed to participate in any activities other than the learning. It was cruel too, with long term members being ‘denounced’ for the most arbitrary of reasons. The sect imploded to a certain extent after a sex scandal involving the American leader of the sect, JT Junior.

Her family dropped out too after this event, but because the cult had been so suffocating the family so much, they all struggled to re-connect with the normal world. The messages and culture that the cult had delivered had permeated her entire being. They began to rebuild their lives in their own way, she rebelled a little, had a child, dabbled in drugs and even managed to go to university, shoplifted and was afraid of the dark, but couldn’t even begin to tell people why this was.

The book is divided into rough thirds, “Before,” “During” and “Aftermath”, which were the piles of files and effects that she sorted through of her fathers at the time. It is pretty horrific reading at times, in particular about the levels of control that were exercised over the members, and the utter trust they had in the leaders of the cult. Just decompressing from the grip of the cult took a staggering amount of effort for them all. It is a deeply personal book, thankfully Stott writes with integrity and doesn’t try to blame anyone for her earlier life. Well worth reading for those that want a very different biography and to get some insight as to when does faith become a cult?

4 out of 5 stars

Losing one family member early to cancer is a tragedy. But losing both parents and a brother to the disease is several levels above that. It is at times like this that looking back over your past for things that were comforting can help. For Edward Parnell, this meant heading back to his bookshelves to look for the stories that he was obsessed with as a boy. This was ghost stories from a raft of favourite authors and the other weird fiction that was generally found nudging up against these books in the library.

To relive some of those stories he wanted to get under the skin of his favourite authors, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood to name a few in the book. That means travelling to the places that the authors placed their stories in. Whilst these places are not specifically haunted, he is not looking for ghosts per se, but seeking the places that have a creepy element about them. Whilst there here he is trying to find just why the authors rooted their stories there.

It is a book that defies categorisation really. It is part memoir, part family saga, part travel book and all centred around the books that he is remising about. I have only heard of a couple of the authors that he mentions and must admit to reading very few of them. Yet after reading this I now have a list of authors whose works I want to try at some point. I hadn’t been to many of the places that he writes about, so it was interesting learning about the context of them with regards to the books. However, I do know two of them really well, as they are close to where I live in Dorset. Badbury Rings is an Iron Age Hill Fort, and I have been on and around it at night and it doesn’t feel that creepy. Knowlton though can be really quite sinister at night…

This is a timely book too, I think that he has tapped into the growing interest in folk horror, that zines like Weird walk and Hellebore are publishing for, and there is that amazing Hookland too if you have the faintest interest the otherworldliness of the British Countryside. Most of all it is touching eulogy to his beloved family members and a fitting memory for them.

2 out of 5 stars

Miles Morland had an unconventional upbringing. Born to a naval father and a mother who was described as the most dangerous woman in India, he was only with them both for a short while before they divorced. He ended up in Iran with his mother and were there until the Shah was overthrown. They ended up in Iraq and ended up leaving there in a rush after a revolution.

Having grown up with deserts he was sent back to the UK to attend boarding school. He somehow survived this and ended up at Oxford where he rowed mostly. After there he ended up in Greece where he took pains to do as little as he could get away with. But the real world beckoned and a city job was forthcoming. In his time he became one of the biggest investors in African markets.

Having seen some of the world when he was younger, he had a yearning to see more of it and he stopped at a motorcycle showroom on the way home and bought a bike. A steep learning curve on riding it, allowed him to indulge himself with trips away and he ended up in South America, Australia and a high-risk trip to the subcontinent of India

To say he had an interesting upbringing would be an understatement, that cannot be many who have been exposed to as many different cultures in the way that he was. It gave him that enthusiasm for life in general and his well-paid work meant that he could indulge himself. I picked this up because of the travel element, but this is such a small element of the book. His writing style is quite pompous too which meant that overall it was a bit disappointing for me.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Until the invention of reliable electric light, we relied on poor quality candles or some form of an oil-based lamp. No at the flick of a switch on my wall, I can have more light output from one lamp than most people had in a home 150 years ago. Whilst this saturation of artificial light may have some positive effects, there are also lots of negative ones too, it affects wildlife and migration, our own natural rhythms including sleep are heavily affected and we have also lost sight of one our fantastic natural displays, the night sky.

Matt Gaw wants to rediscover this lost part of our natural world, but his first night out is walking through the snow under a brooding cloudy sky! It has been a while since he has been out watching the sun drop below the horizon, just for the pure pleasure in doing so. As his eyes adjust to the gloaming, he notices that his other senses sharpen to compensate for the lower resolution of his vision. Night has always been a time to do other things, but for the first time, he realises that it is not a gloomy place but full of subtle experiences for the senses.

Buoyed by the success of his first venture outdoors at night he starts to come up with other plans to discover the other half of our day. Realising that he has never seen a moonrise, he heads to the beach at Covehithe to watch it rise one evening and is slightly staggered by the size of the moon as it sits just above the horizon.

When there is a full moon you will see very few stars as the light reflected from the surface washes them from the sky. There is the same problem in cities and towns because of the light pollution, to see the stars properly you need to head to a place with very little human habitation so his next visit is the Galloway Forest. Back in 2009, this became the UK’s first dark sky park. Now there are 62 of them and they are places where the night sky is protected for its scientific, natural, educational and cultural value. In reality, what this means is that you can fully appreciate the majesty of the night sky and the Milky Way and appreciate just how much light is visible from stars millions of light-years away.

This night has also been considered the time when dark things happen. The absence of light turns things that wouldn’t worry us, into disturbing forms. So Gaw decides that the best place to experience this in its most elemental state is up on Dartmoor. This bleak and often inhospitable moor is full of places that have an otherworldly feeling or haunted atmosphere, or gruesome stories and of course, there is the Wisht Hounds, the inspiration for Hound of the Baskervilles. Half the time though he is not sure if the unease is caused by the nefarious presences or the fear of getting lost…

To understand just how much light pollution there is in a city and to see how pervasive it is, he heads into London with his friend, Shaun. They get off the train at Liverpool Street, which in times past, is a place where the curfew bell was tolled. Curfews were bought in by the Norman invaders and people had to be inside and lights extinguished. There was a safety aspect to this, but it is thought that they were primarily to minimise political rebellion. On the street, though there is light everywhere, it is flooding out the windows of empty offices and from the constant stream of traffic passing. The sky is not visible and the darkest part is the glistening wet road. This pervasive light pollution is slowly starting to change as local authorities assess ways of changing light according to needs.

His final trip takes him back to Scotland and to the designated Dark Sky community on the Island of Coll. He is staggered by the number of stars that he can see and it takes him a little while to re-orientate himself with the constellations. This is the perfect place for him to introduce his children to the wonders of the Milky Way and the night sky.

I am fortunate to live just below Cranborne, which is an area of outstanding natural beauty and has applied to be Dark Sky reserve. I spent many evenings near there when my daughter was studying her Astronomy GCSE and have seen the Milky Way in its full glory. I was really looking forward to this book. This is another well-conceived and well-written book by Gaw. Like his first book, The Pull of the River, I like that he brings almost no personal baggage with him on these journeys. He is driven by his curiosity about a subject and wants to experience and discover for himself all about it. He is doing these things because he can and because he wants to. If you liked the sound of this I can also recommend Dark Skies by Tiffany Frances and Night Walks by Chris Yates.