Michelle Herbert profile
Place of birth: London
Now living: Camden, London
3 favourite authors
- Terry Pratchett
- Neil Gaiman
- Tad Williams
3 favourite books
- American Gods, Neil Gaiman
- The Passage, Justin Cronin
- The Lonely Werwolf Girl, Martin Millar
3 favourite films
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- The Big Lebowski
- Natural Born Killers
Michelle Herbert's 149 reviews
With Blood Upon the Sand
Bradley Beaulieu
Ceda, now a Blade Maiden in service to the kings of Sharakhai, trains as one of their elite warriors, gleaning secrets even as they send her on covert missions to further thei...
A Conjuring of Light
VE Schwab
The precarious equilibrium among the four Londons has reached its breaking point. Once brimming with the red vivacity of magic, darkness casts a shadow over the Maresh Empire,...
Those Below
Daniel Polansky
For centuries beyond counting, humanity has served the Others, god-like Eternals who rule from their cloud-capped mountain-city, building a civilization of unimagined beauty a...
The White City
Simon Morden
Since escaping London's inferno, Mary and Dalip have fought monsters and won - though in the magical world of Down, the most frightening monsters come from within. Now the...
The Fallen
Tarn Richardson
1915. As the second battle of the Isonzo Front rages on the Italian Austro-Hungarian border, war threatens to engulf the Inquisition and dark forces muster amongst the most fa...
Of Sand and Malice
Bradley Beaulieu
Ceda is the youngest pit fighter in the history of Sharakhai. She’s made her name in the arena as the fearsome White Wolf. None but her closest friends and allies know h...
Gilded Cage
Vic James
A modern Britain. An age-old cruelty. Britain's magically skilled aristocracy compels all commoners to serve them for ten years - and now it's the Hadleys' turn. A...
The Watcher of Dead Time
Edward Cox
Labrys Town, home to a million humans cut off from the rest of the universe, has been invaded. Those who protected it have been deposed. The Relic Guild are scattered across t...
The Damned
Tarn Richardson
1914. The outbreak of war. In the French city of Arras, a priest is brutally murdered. The Catholic Inquisition - still powerful, but now working in the shadows - sends its mo...
This Savage Song
VE Schwab
Kate Harker and August Flynn are the heirs to a divided city, a grisly metropolis where the violence has begun to create real and deadly monsters. All Kate wants is to be as r...
Twelve Kings
Bradley Beaulieu
In the cramped west end of Sharakhai, the Amber Jewel of the Desert, Çeda fights in the pits to scrape a living. She, like so many in the city, pray for the downfall of...
A Gathering of Shadows
VE Schwab
Kell is plagued by his guilt. Restless, and having given up smuggling, he is visited by dreams of ominous magical events, waking only to think of Lila. As Red London prepares ...
Fellside
MR Carey
Fellside is a maximum security prison on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. It's not the kind of place you'd want to end up. But it's where Jess Moulson could be spe...
Those Above
Daniel Polansky
They enslaved humanity three thousand years ago. Tall, strong, perfect, superhuman and near immortal they rule from their glittering palaces in the eternal city in the centre ...
The Girl on the Liar's Throne
Den Patrick
Anea is the Silent Queen and she is struggling to bring change to the ancient society of Landfall. Vested interests and dark magics alike are determined to hold onto power and...
All the Birds in the Sky
Charlie Jane Anders
Childhood friends Patricia Delfine, a witch, and Laurence Armstead, a mad scientist, parted ways under mysterious circumstances during middle school. But as adults they both w...
The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School
Kim Newman
When her mother finds her sleeping on the ceiling, Amy Thomsett is sent to Drearcliff Grange School in Somerset. Although it looks like a regular 1920s boarding school, Amy le...
Hex
Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Whoever is born here, is doomed to stay until death. Whoever comes to stay, never leaves. Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the ...
An Ancient Peace
Tanya Huff
The centuries-long war between the Confederation and The Others, a group of violent alien species, is over. Intergalactic peace is finally restored. Torin Kerr and her crew of...
Down Station
Simon Morden
A small group of commuters and tube workers witness a fiery apocalypse overtaking London. They make their escape through a service tunnel. Reaching a door they step through......
The Cathedral of Known Things
Edward Cox
Divided, hunted and short on resources, the surviving members of the Relic Guild are in real trouble. Their old enemy, the Genii, and their resurrected master have infiltrated...
If Pigs Could Fly
Jonny Nexus
"West Kensington Paranormal Detective Agency. Doctor Ravinder Shah speaking. No case too weird, no problem too bizarre. Strangeness a specialty. How can I help you?"...
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
When Rosemary Harper joins the crew of the Wayfarer, she isn't expecting much. The Wayfarer, a patched-up ship that's seen better days, offers her everything she could...
The House of Shattered Wings
Aliette de Bodard
Paris in the aftermath of the Great Magicians War. Its streets are lined with haunted ruins, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine runs black, thick with ashes and ru...
Spares
Alec McQuay
No-one dies anymore. Ever. In the wake of the virus wars you are either undamaged and whole or a walking corpse, animated by no-one knows what and cobbled together out of odds...
Steeple
Jon Wallace
Kenstibec is a Ficial - a genetically engineered artificial life form; tough, skilled, hard to kill. Or at least he was. He's lost the nanotech that constantly repaired hi...
Dream Stalkers
Tim Waggoner
Shadow Watch agents Audra and Mr. Jinx must investigate a new drug called Shut-eye and stop a wave of Incubi that are possessing people through their dreams....
The Machine Awakes
Adam Christopher
In this far future space opera set in the Spider War universe of The Burning Dark, a government agent uncovers a conspiracy that stretches from the slums of Salt City to the f...
Day Shift
Charlaine Harris
Welcome to Midnight, Texas. It's a quiet little town, perched at the junction between Davy Road and Witch Light Road, and it's easy to miss. With its boarded-up window...
Harrison Squared
Daryl Gregory
Harrison is a lonely teenager, afraid of water ever since a boating accident as a toddler. And he and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place: Dunnsmouth, a Lov...
Shipstar
Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
When a landing party is sent to find out why, the Shipstar is on the same trajectory as a human party, half of the group is captured, the other half must go on the run from th...
A Darker Shade of Magic
VE Schwab
Most people only know one London; but what if there were several? Kell is one of the last Travelers - magicians with a rare ability to travel between parallel Londons. There&r...
The Boy Who Wept Blood
Den Patrick
Ten years have passed since the disappearance of Lucien and his protégé, the young swordsman Dino, is struggling to live up to Lucien's legacy. Sworn to prot...
Sugar Glass
Pip Janssen
A chance encounter in the streets of Corenth reveals that Roan Palion bears the magelight, and opens his eyes to the power and beauty of magic. His only link to his old life i...
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlepig
Tad Williams
Bobby Dollar, Advocate Angel and perpetual thorn in the side of Heaven, is about to save the holidays for a very special someone. Or somewolf. Or maybe even some pig... Bobby ...
The Death House
Sarah Pinborough
Toby's life was perfectly normal... until it was unravelled by something as simple as a blood test. Taken from his family, Toby now lives in the Death House; an out-of-tim...
Gleam
Tom Fletcher
The gargantuan Factory of Gleam is an ancient, hulking edifice of stone, metal and glass ruled over by chaste alchemists and astronomer priests. As millennia have passed, the ...
Breed
KT Davies
After Breed, a Guild Blade of small renown, is chased by a dragon, tricked by a demon, almost killed by a psychopathic gang boss and hunted by a ferocious spider like arrachni...
Omaha Stakes
Mark Everett Stone
Agent Kal Hakala, who has been running the Bureau of Supernatural Investigation as its temporary director, has his hands full. First there was the windigo crisis that threaten...
Bete
Adam Roberts
A man is about to kill a cow. He discusses life and death and his right to kill with the compliant animal. He begins to suspect he may be about to commit murder. But kills any...
Lock In
John Scalzi
Fifteen years from now, a new virus sweeps the globe. 95% of those afflicted experience nothing worse than fever and headaches. 4% suffer acute meningitis, creating the larges...
Afterparty
Daryl Gregory
In a world where God is a drug, one woman has to get sober. Lyda Rose was one of the neuroscientists who helped create Numinous, which produces the illusion of a personal deit...
J
Howard Jacobson
Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. Kevern doesn't know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when...
Broken Monsters
Lauren Beukes
Detective Gabi Versado has hunted down many monsters during her eight years in Homicide. She’s seen stupidity, corruption and just plain badness. But she’s never s...
The Relic Guild
Edward Cox
Magic caused the war. Magic is forbidden. Magic will save us. It was said the Labyrinth had once been the great meeting place, a sprawling city at the heart of an endless...
God is Dead
Hickman Costa and Amorim
Mankind has argued over the existence of gods since the dawn of time. In modern eras it's been fashionable to mock religious believers with taunts of scientific testimony ...
The Killer App
John Writher
The Killer App is set in a future generation where Britain is crippled by an ageing population, and the associated spiralling costs of pension, health and social care. The new...
Bowl of Heaven
Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
The limits of wonder are redrawn once again as a human expedition to another star system is jeopardized by an encounter with an astonishingly immense artifact in interstellar ...
California
Edan Lepucki
The sunshine state lies in darkness. Los Angeles is in ruins, left to the angels now. And the world Cal and Frida have always known is gone. Cal and Frida have left the crumbl...
The Truth of Valour
Tanya Huff
Former Marine Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr is attempting to build a new life with salvage operator Craig Ryder on his ship, the Promise. Turns out civilian life is a lot roughe...
The Serpent of Venice
Christopher Moore
Venice, a long time ago. Three prominent Venetians await their most loathsome and foul dinner guest, the erstwhile envoy from the Queen of Britain: the rascal-Fool Pocket.This...
The Girl with all the Gifts
MR Carey
Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into...
The Three
Sarah Lotz
The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes. ...
Queen of the Dark Things
Robert Cargill
Two boys, spirited away into a dark world of myth and folklore that has lived, grown and changed alongside our world, have grown into men and now make their way. But faerie ha...
Dreams and Shadows
Robert Cargill
The Limestone Kingdom, a parallel universe where whisky-swilling genies and foul-mouthed wizards argue over the state of the metaphysical realm. Having left the spirit world a...
Valour's Trial
Tanya Huff
Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr has finally been allowed to re-join Sh’quo Company and get back to fighting The Others with no politics involved. Before this she spent the p...
Barricade
Jon Wallace
I found Barricade to be a fast-paced action adventure, full of dilemmas that need to be overcome. The book left me with many questions, two of which were: Why is there always ...
The Oversight
Charlie Fletcher
Only five still guard the borders between the worlds. Only five hold back what waits on the other side. Once the Oversight, the secret society that polices the lines between t...
The Very Best of Tad Williams
Tad Williams
Within these pages you will find such delightful and curious things as a strange storytelling vampire, two woefully-overmatched angels, a dragon in cahoots with a knight and a...
First Among Sequels
Jasper Fforde
Thursday Next is back. And this time it's personal… Officially, Literary Detective Thursday Next is off the case. Once a key figure in the BookWorld police force, s...
Midnight Crossroad
Charlaine Harris
So welcome to Midnight where nothing is what it seems and not knowing everything about your neighbours may end up getting you killed. I enjoy this kind of story, a mystery/cri...
The Wild Ways
Tanya Huff
Charlotte Gale is a Wild Power, but there’s nothing wild about the life she is living. When her meddlesome aunts start interfering, Charlie ditches her cousin Allie and ...
The Boy with the Porcelain Blade
Den Patrick
Lucien de Fontein has grown up different. One of the mysterious and misshapen Orfano who appear around the Kingdom of Landfall, he is a talented fighter yet constantly lonely,...
The Man in Two Bodies
Stanley Salmons
Shunned by the scientific establishment, brilliant maverick Rodge Dukas works in a damp basement surrounded by outlandish equipment. His discovery could propel humanity to a n...
The Heart of Valour
Tanya Huff
Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr is a Confederation Marine's marine. Side-lined since her last mission, she jumped at the chance to go to Crucible - the Marine Corps training p...
Easy Go
Michael Crichton
Beneath the sands of the Egyptian desert lies treasure beyond imagining. And when a professor of archaeology finds clues to the location of a Pharaoh's lost tomb in ancien...
The Burning Dark
Adam Christopher
Back in the day, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland had led the Fleet into battle against an implacable machine intelligence capable of devouring entire worlds. But after saving ...
The Enchantment Emporium
Tanya Huff
Alysha Gale is twenty-four, unemployed, and tired of her family meddling in her life personally and magically. So when a letter arrives from her missing grandmother, bequeathi...
Weird Shadows over Innsmouth
Stephen Jones
Respected horror anthologist Stephen Jones edits this collection of twelve stories by some of the worlds most prominent Lovecraftian authors, including H.P Lovecraft himself, ...
The Gospel of Loki
Joanne M Harris
With his notorious reputation for trickery and deception, and an ability to cause as many problems as he solves, Loki is a Norse god like no other. Demon-born, he is viewed wi...
Heroes and Villains
Angela Carter
Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam,...
The Better Part of Valour
Tanya Huff
When Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr makes the mistake of speaking her mind to a superior officer, she finds herself tagged for a special mission to act as protector to a scientific...
Binary
Michael Crichton
Political radical John Wright is plotting an act of mass destruction and federal agent John Graves has him under surveillance. When a government computer is hacked and a high-...
Valour’s Choice
Tanya Huff
In the distant future, two alien collectives vie for survival. When the peaceful Confederation comes under attack from the aggressive Others, humanity is granted membership to...
Vicious
VE Schwab
Victor and Eli, due to a research project gone wrong, become ExtraOrdinaries (referred to as EO's from here on in) with supernatural powers. Ten years later Victor escapes...
The Silvered
Tanya Huff
The Empire has declared war on the small, were-ruled kingdom of Aydori, capturing five women of the Mage-Pack, including the wife of the were Pack-leader. With the Pack off de...
The Rabbit Back Literature Society
Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen
Only very special people are chosen by children's author Laura White to join 'The Society', an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a tenth...
Grave Descend
Michael Crichton
Diver James McGregor is used to exploring sunken ships. But there's something strange about the wreck of the Grave Descend. No one aboard tells quite the same story about ...
Something Rotten
Jasper Fforde
The resourceful literary detective Thursday Next returns to Swindon from the BookWorld accompanied by her son Friday and none other than the dithering Hamlet. But returning to...
Odds On
Michael Crichton
The plan: to rob the Reina, a super-luxury hotel off the coast of Spain. The crew: three seasoned criminals with the skills to pull off the heist of the century. The edge: eve...
Steed and Mrs Peel, Volume 1: A Very Civil Armageddon
Mark Waid
John Steed and Emma Peel are right back to work, and the threats are bigger than ever. After the shocking return of the Hellfire Club, our swinging super spies realize their m...
Chicago: The Windigo City
Mark Everett Stone
Kal Hakala is the Bureau of Supernatural Investigation’s best agent, but even he needs a break after his last case, which brought him a hair’s breadth from death a...
The Well of Lost Plots
Jasper Fforde
Leaving Swindon behind her to hide out in the Well of Lost Plots (the place where all fiction is created), Thursday Next, Literary Detective and soon-to-be one parent family, ...
Lost in a Good Book
Jasper Fforde
Thursday Next, literary detective and newlywed, is back to embark on an adventure that begins, quite literally on her own doorstep. It seems that Landen, her husband of four w...
The Red Mage
Pip Janssen
Nineteen year-old Evie Moon wears red ribbons, and everyone in Verenth knows their meaning. Evie expects nothing more from life than the struggle against hunger, violence, and...
Shades of Grey
Jasper Fforde
Hundreds of years in the future, after the Something that Happened, the world is an alarmingly different place. Life is lived according to The Rulebook and social hierarchy is...
Darkness Visible
Pip Janssen
In an alternate version of London in 1895, a few talented people can travel instantly between locations through Thresholds - tears in the fabric of reality. Lord Henry Lewis i...
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures ...
Zoo City
Lauren Beukes
Zinzi December has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. But when a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last...
In the Devil's Name
Dave Watson
Some of the locals in Ballantrae still tell tales about haunted Bennane Head, the cliffs just up the coast where mythical mass murderer and cannibal Sawney Beane is said to ha...
Ancient Echoes
Robert Holdstock
Chatwin has visions of a parallel world where a couple are fleeing some terrible event pursued by an enemy and are seeking a gate to freedom. Chatwin is the gate, and when onl...
Nights at the Circus
Angela Carter
Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe's capitals, part swan... or all fake? Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinair...
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Moscow, 1929: a city that has lost its way amid corruption and fear, inhabited by people who have abandoned their morals and forsaken spirituality. But when a mysterious stran...
The Dirty Streets of Heaven
Tad Williams
Sure, he takes the occasional trip to Heaven, but his job as an advocate - arguing the fate of the recently deceased - keeps him pretty busy on Earth, and he's more than h...
The Long Earth
Terry Pratchett
1916: the Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where have the mud,...
The Return Man
VM Zito
The outbreak tore the USA in two. The east remains a safe haven. The west has become a ravaged wilderness. They call it the Evacuated States. It is here that Henry Marco makes...
Merlin's Wood
Robert Holdstock
In the depths of Broceliande - an ancient French woodland - Merlin and the enchantress Vivien play out their deadly feud. Meanwhile, a child is born deaf, dumb and blind. His ...
The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly u...
Shadowheart
Tad Williams
Southmarch Castle is about to be caught between two implacable enemies, the ancient, immortal Qar and the insane god-king, the Autarch of Xis. Meanwhile, its two young defende...
Killing Time
Elisa Paige
It wasn't that she feared death. She just despised losing. Genetically engineered warrior Sephti would go to any lengths to destroy the fae that made her their killing mac...
Maelstrom
Elisa Paige
Fae exile Amalie Shepherd takes refuge from her nightmare past by burying herself--and her heart--in operating her Texas horse ranch. That's where the immortal Nick Fletch...
Stealing Time
Elisa Paige
It wasn't that she wanted to live forever. She just didn't want to die. When artist James Wesley realizes Evie Reed is dying, he is so moved by the beautiful reporter&...
The Fallen Herald
Simon P Edwards
Thorn and Alazla are promising students and have little more on their minds than enjoying life, that is, until Thorn witnesses the murder of an Avatar, herald to one of the ni...
Blue Moon
Alyson Noel
Things have changed for Ever since she met her beloved Damen – not least because she's got a whole new set of powers, courtesy of her new Immortal status. Just as sh...
Eve of Darkness
SJ Day
Cursed by God, hunted by demons, desired by Cain and Abel... All in a day's work....
Evermore
Alyson Noel
Seventeen-year-old Ever is the sole survivor of a car crash that killed her entire family. Living with her aunt in Southern California, she's plagued by the ability to hea...
