Mark Charan Newton

The mighty Adam Roberts has gone to town on – or more specifically to – Villjamur over on his Punkadiddle blog. At its best, though, this novel is doing something really quite interesting, stylistically speaking. Where Fat-Fantasy convention requires clear, kinetic bright-colour satisfactions, he is aiming for something more alienated, snowed-in and bare. Take this [...]

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Between Two Books gives a lovely review of Nights of Villjamur: I don’t want to get into discussing things like New Weird or Old Peculiar, and I’m not going to pretend that I can do a good job at it. All that I know is that Newton has created an amazing story that dances among [...]

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SF Crowsnest magazine this month contains a rather lovely and lengthy review of Nights of Villjamur. It kicks off with: I will now admit that this was great. A great novel, hear that? And ends with: The whole book accomplishes the task of setting up the series in a promising and rewarding way. The characters [...]

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And there’s more Nights of Villjamur year-end-best-of-round-up-awards-quite-liked-of-the-year shenanigans. Sci-Fi London puts Nights in the top ten: Nights of Villjamur is a terrific debut, it starts with a bang and keeps on going, building action upon action with terrific pace and plenty surprises before relenting and letting you catch your breath until it starts up again. [...]

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A little indulgence, if you please. Nights of Villjamur has made it onto a few best-of-the-year lists published so far. Speculative Horizons’ made it a top five read: This was easily one of the most hyped books of the year, which as we all know is not always a good thing – whether or not [...]

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Digging up some old (not that well-formed) notes on a book that I’ve been thinking about recently. — The Fortress of Solitude is a book that’s difficult to catagorise. With brief genre moments, and certainly many nods towards SF / comic book fandom, it describes the lives of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. [...]

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A Fantasy Reader has reviewed Nights of Villjamur, and I’m really happy he got my general aim. Nights of Villjamur is not a full-fledged epic fantasy novel. It’s the story of several disillusioned individuals every so often mixed up together in a grim epic setting, making the most of their life inside a grand city [...]

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Another one in, this time in Total Sci-Fi Online: The characters gracing these pages are filled with a bleak sense of determination – whether it’s for love, life, power or all three. Key in instigating this sentiment is the inescapable threat of the coming freeze, a welcome change of tack in a genre that thrives [...]

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A review on a Russian forum, and Google translate gives us a most entertaining translation into English: Villdzhamur – a huge city in the world, where the dying red sun. People understand that they are ahead of Ice Age. The main character – Brinda Latrea, albino, the commander of an elite squad of Imperial Guards [...]

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I’ve been away for a few days in New York with work. A great city, once I stepped away from the Disneyland-esque Times Square. While I was there, on my final afternoon before I flew back home, I managed to meet up with my US editor at Del Rey, Chris Schluep, who is an absolute [...]

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Yeah, that book I wrote, lots of reviews, you thought I’d stopped talking about it by now, right? Wrong! The Times reviews Nights of Villjamur: Set in a far distant future where several different intelligent species co-exist and remnants of long-lost technologies provide the “magic powers” by which cult leaders impress the masses, this is [...]

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I’m pretty chuffed with Alex Carnegie’s review of Nights of Villjamur, since he really connected with the things I had in mind when writing the book. After the New Weird, traditional Fantasy just doesn’t really do it for me anymore – or rather I don’t see it as a continuing, living genre in which I [...]

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