The Bear and the Nightingale is one of those gorgeous nuggets of a book that you simply devour.  As soon as I read the synopsis, I wanted this book, in fact, lets be honest, as soon as I saw the cover – I wanted this book – which might sound fickle, because you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover after all.  However, fickle or not, the inside of this book is more than a match for the outer packaging. This is definitely my sort of book.  The writing is really quite beautiful, the author almost hypnotises you, she lulls you into a false sense of security with a beginning that draws you slowly in with the promise of folklore, myth, icy forests and fairytales retold and then before you know it the temperature has dropped further, menace is in the air and threatening shadows lurk in the darkest corners. As we begin the story we make the acquaintance of the Vladimirovich family.  Pyotr the father, a hard but fair man for the times in which he lives, he is thought well of by the people in the village.  He loves his wife and is devastated when he loses her in…

“The purest surrealist act is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.” – Andrė Breton The Arc de Triomphe secretes urine and the Eiffel tower floats on no grounded support. The mechanical elephant Celebes, once only a famed surrealist art piece, travels in occupied Paris and not alone. Manifestations of surrealist artwork, both famed and unknown, fight the Nazi occupation along with what is left of the resistance. “Liberation was fucked up,’ according to protagonist Thibaut. And that is before the reluctant forces of hell are thrown in. China Miėvelle is always ambitions; as one of the leading names in New Weird his works always live up the genres’ name. His writing will make a reader work and having Wikipedia, the dictionary, and possible a Harvard English professor around wouldn’t hurt when reading. Yet despite the absurdity of the premise, the Easter eggs of surrealist works most have never seen nor heard of, and an author secure in the knowledge that he is the smartest person in the room his works are surprisingly accessible. Last Days of New Paris is no different. A reader doesn’t need to know anything about surrealism to see this…

  One of the perks I’ve found with working with several bloggers is that we can cover more books than we have time to read on our own. So, when it came time to make our Best of 2015 list, I decided to ask each of the contributors to submit a ranked list of their favorite books (yep, I’m mean like that. Choosing favorites can be hard, ranking is even harder). I then used a scaled points system to calculate an over all list. So, the end result features a variety of books that either several of us agreed belong in the top 10, or books that perhaps just one reviewer read, but placed in their high on their ranked choices of the year. With so many great choices we had to expand our collaborative list past just 10 books to 25. Since our blog started late in the year, many of these books do not currently have reviews here. But we do plan on adding them, so keep your eye out. So here it is, Speculative Herald’s list of our absolute favorite books from 2015! And because I like to get straight to the good stuff, I am listing them in order starting with…