A Novel Review Book Podcast
Hello and welcome to the literature podcast, A Novel Review. My name is Seamus and together we will explore, dissect and discuss the wonderful world of literature and the wonderful world of literature is a vast and dense jungle, so let’s start making our way through, one book at a time.
Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Quest | A Flawed Finale? Book review
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In this episode, I dive into Assassin’s Quest, the final novel in Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy, sharing my thoughts on its tone and payoff. While the journey has moments of depth and beauty, the tonal structure didn’t land for me, and the ending felt like it missed the satisfying conclusion I expected, leaving the trilogy’s resolution more muted than impactful.
Painting: Today I painted a Dragon
Some of the books and authors discussed in this epi...
Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk | An unconventional Crime Novel
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On this episode of our book podcast, I explore Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, the Nobel Prize–winning author. Blending literary mystery, environmental themes, and dark humor, this discussion unpacks the novel’s eccentric narrator, animal rights philosophy, astrology and the haunting Polish landscape, trying to unravel why Tokarczuk’s unconventional thriller continues to fascinate readers worldwide.
Painting: Today I painted a deer
Some of the books and authors discussed in this e...
Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb | Bad Decisions and Bonded Wolves
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Enter the chaotic court of the Six Duchies with Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb, where loyalty is lethal and magic always has a price. In this episode, I unpack Fitz’s disastrous diplomacy, as he navigates love against duty and one very inconvenient wolf bond. Expect political chaos, slow-burn heartbreak, and feelings sharper than a royal blade.
Painting: Today I painted Nighteyes
Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include:
Roy...
One Journey, Two Voices - Huckleberry Finn vs James (Mark Twain & Percival Everett)
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Who gets to tell history? Just because we have a story doesn’t mean we have the truth. History is a woven tapestry of perspectives, one that grows richer and more honest the more voices we allow into it. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn presents a narrative where side characters exist largely to serve Huck’s moral journey. In contrast, Percival Everett’s James reclaims the identity of one of those marginalised figures, shifting the perspective and challenging the reader to reconsider what was...
Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb | Fitz and the cost of identity, duty and honour
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In this episode, I dive into Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb, exploring who FitzChivalry Farseer really is and whether he ever truly knows himself. From isolation and duty to identity and belonging, it is clear that Fitz uncertainty of himself allows others to take advantage and shape him as they see fit.
Painting: Today I painted a deer on a shield
Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include:
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Substa...
East of Eden by John Steinbeck and the identity of our choices | Book review
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Some stories don’t just trace characters arcs - they wrestle with human nature itself. In East of Eden, John Steinbeck explores the nature of good and evil, and the choices that define who we become. Set against the backdrop of the biblical story of Cain and Abel across generations, asking one powerful question: are we bound by our past, or do we have the freedom to choose our own path?
Painting: Today I painted a globe coming out of a book...
Travelling the world through books | A book world tour review
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Substack link: Reflections on a world book tour https://alexanderwoolven.substack.com/p/reflections-on-a-world-book-tour
In 2025 for the podcast, I wanted to try something different to bring meaning to the podcast. Having grown up in a typical Anglo household, my upbringing was surrounded by the normality of Western books. This is in no way a criticism of something that couldn’t be helped, especially because those books are colourful, wonderful and the reason I fell in love with literature.
Pai...
Christmas Novels | Four stories for the festive season
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Curl up with a warm drink for a very Christmassy episode of the podcast! This festive season its books stories that spark reflection, and how reading can inspire us to show up more thoughtfully in society. As the year comes to a close, this time of year encourages empathy, responsibility, and active participation in our communities. From small everyday actions to bigger conversations that matter, because being part of society isn’t just about observing; it’s about engaging, questioning, and caring.
My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin | Female Agency & Coming of Age
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Some seek isolation for its freedom, but for Sybylla Melvyn, the open space of the Australian Outback only serves to drown her. Miles Franklin’s first novel, My Brilliant Career captures the lack of agency young girls and women growing up in rural Australia would have felt towards the turn of the 20th century. A country on the cusp of its own independence still saw half the population oppressed. Dreaming of a brilliant career, Sybylla’s frank attitude, and quick wit often gets her into troub...
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins | Propaganda, Power and the Dark Side of Rebellion
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Support Indie fiction and booksellers: https://radiantpress.ca/?srsltid=AfmBOopCrOHhz5NfAY5DMu-m3Urp8COR7JSSirFvEiRk26RRq1MXmad9
Mockingjay is the final instalment of Suzanne Collins Hunger Games trilogy. A story that delves deeper into the political issues of a rebellion and the true cost of the face of war. Where propaganda is rife and for Katniss Everdeen, it becomes clearer as time passes that children are a political currency both sides are happy to spend.
Painting: Today I painted a Mockingjay p...
Wake in Fright By Kenneth Cook - The paradox of living free from judgement
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Is the isolated outback town of Bundanyabba a paradise of absolute freedom or a living nightmare? This week, Kenneth Cook's novel, Wake in Fright, explores the disturbing duality at the heart of the story and how the lack of judgment in The Yabba can make hell of heaven in a life of excess and indulgence - a dangerous freedom that strips away social constraints. For the locals, this is heaven; a life free from moral scrutiny, for John Grant it is a nightmare he spirals i...
Midnight Blue by Simone van der Vlugt | Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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Midnight Blue by Simone Van Der Vlught unfolds with a swift and unflinching frankness. The story of a widowed woman trying to understand and find her place in this new found world, while also trying to distance herself from her past. Difficult to outrun who you were when it is the path that lead you to where you are.
Painting: Today I painted some blur florals
Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include:
...Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins: Return, Rebellion and the Rise of the Mockingjay | Book Review
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Catching Fire, the burning sequel to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, ignites the spark of rebellion in this near perfect sequel. We are back in Panem and Katniss has survived the Hunger Games. But, in that survival, the seeds of rebellion have been sown as Katniss understands that the real game has only just begun.
Painting: Today I painted Katniss rising to be the Mockingjay
Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include:
<...
The Assault by Harry Mulisch: Consequence, Memory, and the Shadows of War | Book Discussion
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Harry Mulisch’s The Assault is our first Dutch novel for the book world tour that explores guilt, memory, and moral ambiguity in post-World War II Netherlands. Following Anton Steenwijk’s haunting past, the story unravels the devastating consequences of war and silence. Perfect for literature lovers, this summary delves into Mulisch’s masterful storytelling, and psychological depth as Anton learns that trauma ripples out from the initial assault to touch more than just him.
Painting: Today I painted some Dutch buildings
...
Non-Fiction November 2025 | Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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Non-fiction November rolls around and with it, a fresh stack of non-fiction books. No dragons to slay, no murders to solve and detectives to help us. Nothing but truth and fact to guide us as we turn from the usual fiction. From wandering the streets of Italy to the making of the western mind, campaigns through the Middle East and the history of books themselves, this non-fiction November is stacked with hard truths.
Painting: Today I painted a vase in honour of...
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu | Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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Predating Dracula by 25 years, Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is the dark Sapphic vampire novel that kickstarted the blood sucking villain of horror in fiction. The perfect book to sink your teeth into, this bite sized chunk of a novella is ethereal as it is indulged. Laura is a young girl, isolated with her father in the Styrian mountains when the enigmatic Carmilla ends up staying with them. Laura and Carmilla’s friendship develops quickly and descends into something more sinister with every page
<...
Watership Down by Richard Adams | Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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A question I wondered as I started reading Richard Adam’s ‘Watership Down’ was – how affecting will a book about rabbits be?
It turns out that a story, that was originally orally comprised for the entertainment of his children, journeying for a better life across fields can sweep you along a great Odyssean tale of hardship, friendship, endurance and belief. It turns out rabbits can ask deep, fundamental truths to the human experience along their journey to a better life with all the subtlety of a sweepi...
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins | Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – I volunteer as tribute to read these books for you. The duality of power on display amongst the gross pageantry of the upper class exercising their abusive ‘right’ to control the citizens of Panem. Katniss Everdeen volunteers for the the annual Hunger Games. 24 children enter the arena and only 1 will come out… all televised as sport. The real lives of these children, the reality tv show for the rich. May the odds be ever in your favour
Paint...
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald | Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald has all the making of an idyllic dream coming to fruition. A lifelong dream of opening in a quaint English town is something everyone should like. But what happens when not everyone wants a bookshop? Seen as an outsider, Florence and her bookshop don’t quite fit into the puzzle of this small town and so she finds herself as an odd piece, out of place and suddenly in a fight for her dream against the reality of a world she...
The Midnight Project by Christy Climenhage | Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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Christy Climenhage’s ‘The Midnight Project” is a sci-fi exploration of our own humanity. The world on the verge of ecological collapse, A billionaire thinks our survival will come through the mutation of the human species with marine life to live under the ocean. The morals and ethics are as murky as the depths the life would exist as, as gene editing scientists Rainer and Cedric navigate the tenuous situation. The pressure of a billionaire footing the bill against the backdrop of vast ecological collapse – Rainer an...
Solaris by Stanisław Lem | Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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Stanisław Lem’s Solaris is less a tale of interstellar exploration than a cosmic therapy session gone awry. A planet covered by a sentient ocean toys with the psyches of visiting scientists, dredging up their deepest regrets in all-too tangible form. Instead of offering enlightenment, Solaris holds up an alien mirror that no one wants to peer into for long. Lem slyly suggests that humanity’s greatest unknown may not be outer space, but the dark abyss within ourselves
Painting: Today I...
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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Arundhati Roy and her Booker Prize winning novel, ‘The God of Small Things’ is a book where it was the small things I couldn’t make sense of. No matter what I tried, time flipped, names multiplied and the story piled up in a traffic jam that I couldn’t make sense of. This was a DNF for me
Painting: Today I painted a simple view of a field
Some of the books and authors discussed in...
The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin - Fantasy Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin brings and end to the tale of the Archmage Ged wrapping the Earthsea trilogy in quiet finality. Magic fades, and with it, the Archmage himself passes into legend - diminished, yet fulfilled. There’s sorrow in his end, a sense of something beautiful vanishing into the lines of the horizon. The sea stretches on, but Ged’s voyage ends here, in silence, in shadow, in peace.
Painting: Today I painted two island that Ged and Arren sail thro...
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga - Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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In Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger, Balram Halwai claws his way from darkness to light, serving satire as sharp as his entrepreneurial instincts. Adiga's India is raw, roaring, and unapologetically corrupt – a state of jungle law, where only cunning predators survive. Balram’s journey from teashop boy to businessman is a rags-to-riches journey one morally murky decision at a time.
Painting: Today I drew a line drawing of a tiger
Some of the books and auth...
Summer Reads - Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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Summertime is the time to read outdoors, in the park, at the beach, at a café, wherever the sun is shining. Here are 4 books is read this summer!
Painting: Today I painted a beach
Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include:
The Fisherman by John Langan Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq The Moustache by Emmanuel Carrere
Additional segments throughout the podcast include:
Naked Earth by Eileen Chang - Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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In Naked Earth, Eileen Chang peels back the red curtain on Maoist China with shocking irony spanning more than one layer. Love tries to bloom amid slogans, paranoia, and political purges, but ideology has a habit of stomping on sentiment. It’s romance meets revolution - awkwardly.
Painting: Today I painted a field
Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include:
Naked Earth by Eileen Chang Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Yu...
Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin - Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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Two coming of age novels in a fantasy world richly imagined by Ursula K. Le Guin. Ged is a reckless and young mage from Gont, learning through action the consequences he faces form those actions while Tenar is a young girl, stripped of her family, name and made to serve the nameless ones. Both stories are similar in that both Ged and Tenar have to search for their identity within their true selves, though the stories are incredibly varied.
‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ is a...
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Yu Hua - Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
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What is the cost of selling your blood for money? Sanguan is a man who sells his blood but understands that it comes at a price and that the money he makes has to be spent on something meaningful. But through the course of his life, meaning takes many forms and Sanguan discovers that sacrifice takes many forms as he wrestles with his familial identity and understanding of what it means to have a family.
A sweeping yet tightly written novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant...
The Odyssey by Homer
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The Odyssey. That great journey that is now the hallmark for all subsequent journeys, but as we are ferried along this perilous path, we ask the question – can a hero return home both physically and mentally?
Stylistically more complex than the Iliad, the Odyssey weaves a tale of myth and fiction as one man struggles to return to his home, and even if he makes it home after 20 years, what place does he now occupy?
Painting: Today I painted a bo...
The Iliad by Homer
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The Iliad was originally orally comprised making up part of the epic cycle. There was a paradox when it was written down. It went from being a flexible and fluid piece of literature that stretched with the imagination of the bard to a rigid story, captured and chained to the page. But, the paradox is, we are now thankful to have this historical piece of literature in a near original state that reaches across the annals of time to tell us a story that remains as...
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
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Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple is an epistolary novel that spans the years and distance between two sisters that are trying to survive their respective worlds. Celie is stuck in an abusive relationship, married to a man that views her as his property to do with what he likes. Nettie escapes the doldrums of domestic life, becoming a part of a mission in Africa. The duality of their lives is intimately entangled in the social landscape they find themselves in as they struggle through wit...
The Citadel of the Autarch, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun | A Novel Review
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The Citadel of the Autarch is the final in the series Book of the New Sun and it is safe to say it ends how it begins… shrouded in mystery. A climax? I think so… Answers? Possibly… but do I know what actually happened? Ill save that for the second read. A masterpiece of a series that presents itself as something simple but the closer you look, the more confused you are. Severian limps to the end of this story and at the conclusion, you are lef...
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
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‘Whatever in creation exists in without my knowledge, exists without my consent’ A quote from today’s novel that is equally stark as it is brutal as it is mythic as it is beautiful. Cormac McCarthy’s famed novel, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West weaves a tale that draws from historical narrative. A novel with a mythic quality to it, the prose is stripped and yet indulged with a biblical beauty to swallow us as the reader into a world that will shoc...
Achilles and Odysseus: The choice of a lifetime - Book Review & Literary Analysis | A Novel Review
Two men. Achilles and Odysseus. Two central themes across two books. The Iliad and the Odyssey. War and Home. One lives a life of inscincere happiness. The other a life of authentic grief, but is one better than the other? Painting: Today a photo I took while in Israel studying archaeology. It is an elderly couple walking hand in hand through a ruinous city. It is entitled, 'Until the End of Time. Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include: Bibliography: Albacini, F. (c.1825) Wounded Achilles. Marble sculpture. Chatsworth House, Derbyshire. The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced...
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
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Two boys and a kite with nothing but life ahead of them. A turn of events sees the world come down faster than a cut kite and suddenly the world and future of the boys’ lives is uncertain. Set against the backdrop of the Coup of the Taliban and spanning as far as the United States we learn that you can take the boy out of Afghanistan, but does this physical distance equate to an emotional separation and freedom?
The Kite Runn...
The Sword of the Lictor, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun
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In the Sword of the Lictor, the duty and honour bound Severian continues to wrestle with the moral responsibility he can’t quite escape. The novel passes like an ethereal dreamscape as Severian continues to pass through this world and our pages, and with each turning page, another piece of what Severian holds dear is taken from him, shredding his identity down until he is left with nothing but himself.
Painting: Today I painted an ethereal city how I envisioned Dr Talos and Baldanders were oc...
The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi - Book 113
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The Book World Tour has taken flight and landed in Afghanistan. In the Patience Stone, Atiq Rahimi gives a voice to women living through circumstances that see them constantly beleaguered by society. A woman nurses her husband who is in a coma in a room surrounded by the ongoing violence of war. But, as the story evolves, we learn that even in the most austere circumstance, women an find their voice, and in their voice, their freedom.
Painting: Today I painted ci...
10 BEST BOOKS of the 20th century
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The 30 best book of the 20th century. A curated list presented over three episodes all comes down to this final piece of the puzzle. The top 10 best books (in my opinion) of the 20th century. A conclusion to a list that will take many shapes throughout my life.. and at the moment, this is what it looks like.
Painting: Today I painted a book opening up to reveal the magic inside
Some of the books and authors discussed in this episode include:
“Sul...Stay With Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ - Book 111.
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Expectation lingers at the peripherals of this tale as the pressure builds with every page. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s novel ‘Stay With Me’ explores the pressures of a society and culture that rest upon the foundation of expectation. The expectation to get married and have kids to further the family name. A pressure that bubbles within the characters until they break not with a bang, but with a whimper as the cultural milieu sweeps anything real under the rug in a tidy, well-kept home.
P...
"The Claw of the Conciliator" Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun - Book 110
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The Claw of the Conciliator sends the reader deeper into the labyrinth of Gene Wolfe’s imaginative science fantasy novel. Weaving the tale, there is only one way in and one way out. Severian the torturer, tortures us as the reader with a story that raises so many questions in the chaos of the narrative and yet offers us only glimpses into the truth of it all. And above it all is the question, what is really going on?
Painting: Today I painted the distant ci...
