The Host by Stephenie Meyer
After reading the Twilight Saga I was tempted to also read The Host by Stephenie Meyer. The only book by Meyer not set in the Twilight universe, I was pleasantly surprised.

The premise is that the world has been colonized by an alien life form that takes over human bodies and minds. The main character of the story, Melanie, is a rebel who fights against the takeover, but she is caught and an alien, Wanda, is inserted into her body. Melanie’s mind however, refuses to give up, driving Wanda to do things that are unnatural for her species.

I like the story, the flow of it and the writing style. It took a while for the story to get going, but when it did it was very good. I also found myself understanding the emotions felt by the main characters. I recommend this book.

Sword of Shame by The Medieval Murderers
I have only recently discovered the writers collectively known as “The Medieval Murderers” even though three writers I really like are part of them, Susanna Gregory, C.J. Sansom and Michael Jecks. Other members are Philip Gooden, Bernard Knight and Ian Morson.

The set-up is a main theme (in this case the Sword of Shame) and each writer writes a chapter, a short story, using the theme and ‘their’ main characters (for example, Sansom writes a story about Matthew Bartholomew, etc.). This works out really well and leads to an entertaining book.

The main theme here is an Anglo-Saxon sword that seems to be involved in all kinds of negative situations, thus making people suspicious. It leads to all kinds of murder cases that our main characters can investigate and solve.

I loved the writing styles, and even though the stories were written by six different writers, in six different time periods (and also in a couple of different countries), they all flowed well together and made for a good book. I highly recommend it!

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
After seeing it in the bookstores everywhere, and having it recommended everywhere to me from LibraryThing to Amazon, I couldn’t keep myself from picking up Company of Liars by Karen Maitland. It promised to be a story in the tradition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales set in the England of the Plague, 1348.

The story describes a journey, or a flight, undertaken by a group of (eventually) nine very different people, thrown together by fate. All nine have a story to tell, and are living a lie, whether they know it or not. Due to the fear of the plague, justice and the past, they have to keep on moving through the desolate landscape of an England that is suffering from bad (or non-existent) harvests due to unrelenting rains, and from the plague. They are being followed and slowly all nine have to face the truth.

The story is very slow to start, and very quick to end. I found this a bit disappointing. For as long as it took me to get to the action, I would have liked it to have lasted longer. The writing is very good, though Maitland uses a trick I absolutely hate. Numerous times during the story she let’s the storyteller say that “it would turn out to be grave error”, “that would not prove to be safe” etc. I would like to discover this myself as the story moves along, and this way it almost feels like a spoiler of some sort.

The book shows some of how hard life was during the plague and famine of 1348, and how people tried to survive, however, this is all background to the main story.

I would recommend this book to anybody with an interest in story telling, medieval England and daily life during the great mortality.