Bernard Jan's Blog - Posts Tagged "novel"

If you want to purchase my latest novel Okrutno ljeto in Croatian, you can do that directly at my publisher's web page here. Feel free to visit my web page to read sample chapters in Croatian and in English. Thanks!

Two of my books in Croatian are now also on Promocave.com.

For those of you who speak Croatian, you can check my novella Potraži me ispod duge (Look For Me Under the Rainbow) here:

a) About Potraži me ispod duge
b) Excerpt from Potraži me ispod duge

or my novel Okrutno ljeto (Cruel Summer) here:

a) About Okrutno ljeto
b) Excerpt from Okrutno ljeto

I also thought of you who do not speak Croatian. On this blog post you will find an excerpt and a link to read more about my novella Look For Me Under the Rainbow, while this blog post will provide you with excerpts in English from my YA adventure/mystery novel Cruel Summer.

Thanks for checking me out!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

Ghost Flight by Bear Grylls

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ever heard of Bear Grylls? I truly hope so, because this former soldier in the British Special Forces, the youngest ever Chief Scout to the UK Scout Association and an honorary Colonel to the Royal Marine Commandos is also an adventurer, writer and television presenter. His Facebook bio says that “Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most recognized faces of survival and outdoor adventure.”

I first heard about Bear Grylls seven years ago when I was on my vacation visiting my friends in Sweden and we watched his Ultimate Survival (also known as Born Survivor/Man vs. Wild) on the Discovery Channel. Needless to say that Bear Grylls captured my attention on the spot, that I wanted to see more of him, making me check for him online immediately after returning home to Croatia.

I loved the concept of his show in which he was left stranded with his crew in an unfamiliar wilderness – rainforests, glaciers, deserts, islands, to name just a few – with only one goal: to survive and find his way back to civilization.

The similar pattern follows his entertaining and exciting thriller Ghost Flight. Packed with action, adventure, beautiful landscapes of the remote Amazon jungle where lies hidden a mysterious WWII warplane, Ghost Flight guarantees to keep even the most demanding fans of this genre glued to its pages. It is so easy to picture Bear Grylls, an ex-soldier and a survivor, as an ex-soldier Will Jaeger, also a leader of a team of former elite warriors in their quest to uncover the mystery of the hidden warplane and the secret of Nazi evil forces (Wir sind die Zukunft) that lie buried in it.

I am a sucker for WWII novels and I am a sucker for Amazon rainforest. When those two are combined, you have an explosive reading before you. You are drinking up a cocktail made of ghosts from not so recent past, to majority of people almost forgotten, but the ghosts which are patiently waiting for their moment of the rise of the new Reich, and a pristine nature beaming with both beautiful and deadly life.

Ghost Flight is a successful debut novel with interesting and well-developed characters, full of action, twists and turns and gripping moments. It is also a very detailed novel which probably might not help us in a fight against the rise of a new Reich if it comes to it, but it could very well serve us as a survival guide in a primeval rainforest if we ever find ourselves in our personal mission under the canopy of magnificent trees where neither evil Nazis nor modern-day humans got to leave their destructive imprint.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Girl of Millennium

The girl with the dragon tattoo. The girl who played with fire. The girl who kicked the hornet's nest.

And the girl in the spider's web.

I love the Millennium series. I love this brutal, raw, dark and violent Swedish saga, cold and ruthless as the Swedish weather. And I love that this story continues.

Even though the first opening pages of The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz stroke me as slow and a bit lulling in building the plot, soon new pages are turned and stick to your fingers like frost sticks to the frozen windows in December Stockholm. The Girl in the Spider's Web sets with vigor and thrill into an action worthy of its literary predecessors, continuing Stieg Larsson's series with dignity and justified trust. Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander continue living, and that is what's most important.

I didn't pick this book by chance to read it during my vacation in Sweden, although I had a few more other books in store to chose from. I took The Girl in the Spider's Web on a flight with me and read it until I reached my final destination; as well as on my way back via Copenhagen and Frankfurt to Zagreb. However, while staying in Växjö I chose to live my own personal Swedish story, a story of hundreds of unwritten pages no one will be able to read but me.

As for Lisbeth and Mikael, they kept me company for ten more days upon my return, making that intoxicating feeling of Sweden linger linger linger and last throughout my whole conscious being.

I look forward to our reunion. We are alive and Sweden is ready and waiting for us.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0 by Eliot Peper

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Once in a while you come upon a book that throws you completely unguarded off your feet. When you buy a book you usually have an idea what to expect to find between the covers and you prepare yourself for a pleasurable journey into a new world unknown. But when you get a free copy of an e-book as a runner up for the review giveaway contest, you do not know much about it, or whom you are going to deal with and spend your Kindle-time with during the next few days or weeks.

Mara Winkle is the heroine of Eliot Peper's Uncommon Stock: Version 1.0. She is a strong female character caught in the bizarre love-business triangle between her boyfriend Craig and her best friend James. Craig and James are not too much fond of each other, which makes Mara's life even more colorful and exciting, pushing her every now and then to express her strong character in both decision-and-relationship making. Beside being strong headed and ready to cut off people seemingly without a second thought or regret, Mara is passionate about mountain biking and especially rock climbing. "Climbing was the most intellectually intense sport Mara had experienced. She had heard it described as physical chess. It was a kind of dynamic athletic geometry and there was a good reason bouldering routes were called problems. Every move was an exercise in balance, a special mixture of intuition and calculation." However, she is not so enthusiastic about studying at the University of Colorado, Boulder, especially when her best friend James asks her to partner with him to start a new software company Mozaik Industries.

This is a decision that changes both James' and Mara's lives. In their new partnership, James focuses himself on "what he does best, technical development to make Mozaik as awesome as it can possibly be" while Mara becomes "the buffer between him and all the rest of the random shit that needs doing" (Peper describes them as sales, investment, legal, and marketing). In short, they split their roles in doing what they are both best at: "programming for James, juggling for Mara." How this decision affects Craig we won't mention here, so as not to reveal too much and thus spoil the thrill of reading!

This is the moment when all the fun starts in Uncommon Stock, placing this novel among the ranks of fast-paced tech startup thrillers. For new entrepreneurs and enthusiasts Uncommon Stock may serve as a greatly informative and educational reading full of useful advice, but also as the warning on the cruel facts of starting your own business. "Founding a company is a fuck-ton of work. The sausage factory reality is far from the glitzy Silicon Valley mythology. It's a grinding slog that can be enormously satisfying and rewarding, but it's also painful, frustrating, and soul-crushing. If you're going to make it you'll have to sink blood, sweat, and tears into the process. And if you're going to make that kind of a commitment, you've got to truly believe in what you're doing. You've got to be such a zealot that other people are magnetically attracted to you and what you're working on. You've got to dream."

Eliot Peper masterfully leads us through a painful startup process, showing us all the traps and hardships we face along the way. No price is too high, every mistake is paid dearly. Before we realize it, we have already accumulated basic knowledge of the craft, ending up much smarter than we were before starting reading this exciting, adventurous, wise and gripping novel of a slightly unusual title.

In between twists and turns, Eliot Peper amazes us with beautifully intelligent descriptions and ingenious eye for a detail. "They people-watched along the way, relishing the familiar oddities of Boulder's unique human condition. Cyclists were out in force. Mara wondered why it was considered cool to wear jerseys plastered with tacky Fortune 500 branding. A shirtless homeless man was loudly touting the spiritual virtues of vegetarianism and handing out handwritten flyers on the evils of meat from a street corner." "The sky was mostly clear with a thin patina of smog and the sun shone down on an endless grid of concrete, steel, asphalt, and cars. An occasional palm tree or soccer field broke up the urban mélange." "Trees occupied a different dimension than humans. Movement was never an option. They were literally rooted in place and experienced the world through a permanently local lens. Seeds blew off in the wind to sprout new trees in places the parents would never see. And entire generations lived in one area."

Or, "The snakes in her stomach had distilled into a cocktail of righteous anger and frustration."

Beautiful!

I don't shun admitting: Eliot Peper bought me with his descriptions, if not only with his page-turning plot. Uncommon Stock is a high-quality intelligent and intriguing writing of a skillful and undoubtedly talented author whose success and a true value cannot be measured only by a number of sold copies, but also by a commitment and professionalism of this indie writer invested into creating the best end-product for his readers, the only ones that matter to him.

I wouldn't be surprised if it also helps a few startup businesses in the process with his motivational and inspirational dialogues, situations and advices, because, as the author himself says in the novel, "there is something ephemeral but infinitely satisfying about starting something yourself."

BJ
www.bernardjan.com

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Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel by Lucas Carlson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel is a new ingenious creation by Lucas Carlson, a fiction and non-fiction author and entrepreneur, who already got my attention and won me over with his first thrilling startup novel The Term Sheet.

Big Data is a maddening ride through our near future where artificial intelligence is incorporated in our lives to the point that people rely on its services more than on their natural instincts, reasoning and decision making. It serves us, it helps us, it cures us, and then it kills us...

This is exactly what happens when Luna Valencia's most-advanced supercomputer in history Ancien starts to refine and improve on its own code which can “solve many problems in the world of artificial intelligence without human assistance, interpretation, or intervention.” It is the holy grail in the world of computers, but it also is the weapon for mass murder in the world of humans.

Luna Valencia's own baby becomes her executor when it falls into the hands of Doug Kensington and Thor Massino, two ill-intentioned ambitious and unscrupulous people. There is no safe place for her or anyone, because suddenly “people are dying. Everybody. Everywhere. People are dying faster all over—in every region of the world—at a higher rate.”

On her quest to uncover the truth about mysterious deaths, Luna not only faces losing her company but is hunted and chased into walking the path covered with bodies and smeared with blood, both of the innocent and guilty ones. Even losing her own life is something she has to deal with in order to stop computers from killing people. The whole world is in grave danger.

In “a weird mash-up” of computers and people, “nobody was deciding who would die. Nor was anyone determining how these people would die. The computer figured out those parts on its own. But (...) it was human beings who created the intention to kill. Not the computer. The one thing nobody seemed to be able to synthesize with computers was the creative intention. The spark of why. More and more, any discrete task could be better accomplished by computers than by humans. But the intention behind the task, the creative force. That was still as mysterious and intractable as the soul.”

Lucas Carlson in this extremely exciting novel also doesn't lose a poetic expression during this fast and crazy artificial intelligence ride for life and death. He barely gives us a moment or two to catch our breath before we are thrown into another life-threatening situation in which someone is programmed to die. The thin line between our near future and actual reality becomes even thinner when we come to realize that technology already today is infused in so many aspects of our lives. We submit ourselves to it, we reap its fruits and we think we control it. Do we, indeed?

Alarm bells are ringing through all 400 pages of Big Data with the warning. We better snap out of our indifference and, as the author says in his afterword, ask ourselves, “how do we prevent bad people from getting their hands on software that could potentially destroy us? The world’s next generation of mega-weapons will be software. Code in machines. Machines that drive our cars, fly our planes, control our homes, run our hospitals, and do something new for us every day. (…) It is time that we, as a global human race, invent and adopt systems of technological checks and balances. Software is infinitely easier to infiltrate and steal than atomic bombs. And if we sit back and do nothing—if we just throw our hands up and ignore the problem—we will have to live with the consequences. (…) And what’s at stake is the very survival of the human race.”

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Big Data: A Startup Thriller NovelLucas Carlson

Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It was love at the first read. It started with Watchers twenty-three years ago and lasted more than seventy books up to this date.

Dean Koontz, like very few authors, managed to keep me expectant, eager, thrilled and enthusiastic about his books. His latest novel Ashley Bell is no exception either. What's more and to be honest, despite being an author myself, I am now lacking words to describe how I really feel about Ashley Bell.

Ashley Bell is a complex novel of more than 700 pages about a remarkable young woman Bibi Blair who is determined to do the impossible and: 1) fight, beat, outsmart and escape death, and 2) find and save someone named Ashley Bell. Both seems rather impossible and destined to failure. But not for Dean Koontz and not for Bibi Blair.

Ashley Bell is a poetic, dark, psychological thriller in which the master of suspense and mystery creates a parallel world with the ease of The Maker. Koontz daringly plays the literary God and takes us into parallel worlds created by his incredible imagination, convincing us to believe and live the impossible. Dean Koontz has already taught as that nothing in his books is impossible, that “impossible” universes, creatures and situations are possible, we only have to imagine them.

His prose is a kaleidoscope of the most vivid colors and darkest shadows. It is a playground sanded with rarely seen scenes of violence and murders, chilled-to-the-bones moments and sentences poetically beautiful as sunsets. Our task is to imagine and bring them into life.

“If we were imagined into existence with a universe of wonders, then the power to form the future with our imagination must be in our bloodline.” – Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Kuća abecede by Jussi Adler-Olsen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Experiments on humans are not a novelty in our humanity-deprived society, but in a psychological thriller The Alphabet House by Jussi Adler-Olsen set in a WW2 Nazi Germany and post-Nazi Europe, to be more precise England and Germany, are as shocking as the war itself and destruction it had left in lives and minds of those who survived it.

The world of two RAF pilots and good friends James and Bryan crashes down with the crash of their plane during a special photo-reconnaissance mission near Dresden. In hope of survival and running from the pursuit of enemy soldiers, they jump aboard a train which was supposed to be their way out to freedom. What they didn't know was that the train had been full of senior SS soldiers wounded on the eastern front and that instead to freedom it would take them deeper into Germany, behind the enemy lines, into the mental hospital the Alphabet House.

In a novel about war and an attempt of life during and after it, which according to its author is not a war novel, human relationships are put on the most challenging trial. Will friendship endure insanity, daily shock treatments, experimental drugs and the madness of one time, will it past the test of the basic instinct for survival which has lead to escape of one of the friends from the torments and captivity in a hellhole and ultimately to betrayal of another?

The Alphabet House is full of razor-sharp twists and turns, situations which border with surreal and almost impossible, acts of brutality and violence that will freeze blood in the veins of the reader. It is a collision and a symbiosis of the world of sanity and madness, where the unthinkable from our present perspective becomes natural in the blurred sight of a tortured mind.

Besides fascinatingly dissecting the behavior of the human mind, Jussi Adler-Olsen in The Alphabet House raises some serious questions about human relationships, how far we can go before we irrevocably damage them and whether a sincere repentance and goodwill are enough to forgive and maybe even forget.

In the particular case of James and Bryan, the real question is can friendship survive the act of Bryan's betrayal and thirty years of James' drugged and lost life? Can Bryan's wealth and money restore their relationship to the days and voices that were resonating from the past, when they were still kids? Or is the gap simply too big, the mind too damaged and the will too broken, just like the white crests of waves crashed by untamable and unforgiving forces of nature under the cliffs of Dover.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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The Alphabet House
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Bernard Jan

The Grid 1: Fall of Justice by Paul Teague

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Grid by Paul Teague is a good example why dystopian literature is at the moment my favorite genre! The Grid 1: Fall of Justice is the first book in The Grid Trilogy and it instantly captured my attention as it was the case with its predecessors: the unforgettable Silo (Wool-Shift-Dust) series, Station Eleven, The Hunger Games trilogy, The Maze Runner series or the Divergent trilogy.

They say it is impossible to survive The Grid. It is the one, only and ultimate way to get justice once you end up among thousands of lawbreakers and detainees confined in the cages of The Soak, a vast and nightmarish underground prison located under a river.

A massive concrete wall separates hundreds of thousands of the privileged ones on Silk Road from almost four million poor residents of The Climbs, who live there in miserable and inhumane conditions with no elevators and with crumbling stairs, after the plague devastated their world many years ago, leaving billions of people dead in its wake.

Their city is the only refuge. But the refuge is where minority flourishes at the expense of many many others, where justice systems is corrupted and full of deceptions and lies, and where the will of the authorities is more important than practically non-existent human rights.

In this world Joe Parsons is trying to find the truth about the death of his suddenly disappeared father. He breaks into the Fortrillium network but before he gets the chance to avenge him, he and a few of his friends find themselves thrown into the The Grid. They are all facing a series of terrified justice challenges in the Gridder Games and only one person has ever survived so far.

The Grid 1: Fall of Justice is a post plague dystopian story. It excellently stages the faith of our society already plagued by the symptoms of greed, inhumanity and fabricated truth, which might lead to life of a few (un)lucky surviving hundreds of thousands, or even millions, in The City of our future while the rest of us will be gone.

Can't wait to read Quest For Vengeance and Catharsis, Part 2 and Part 3 of this very promising trilogy!

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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The Grid 1: Fall of Justice
Paul Teague
Bernard Jan

Lady Justice and the Candidate by Robert Thornhill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Robert Thornhill is the author you cannot ignore, if nothing else than from the reason that he started writing at the age of sixty-six and that he has never learned to type other than with one finger and a thumb! When we add to that the number of 28 (!!) books he has written and published at his late but very prolific age, we are getting a small literary miracle!

Lady Justice and the Candidate is the first of Thornhill's books I had the pleasure of reading. It is a well-balanced mixture of humor, adventure and mystery, which tells us a story about the independent Presidential candidate Benjamin Franklin Foster who appears on the American political scene practicality out of nowhere and wins over the sympathies and hearts of American voters with his simple message of change and honesty with which he is supposed to clean America and restore it to its days of glory.

Mission impossible or not? Not so important, as long as you enjoy reading this book. And if you don't believe me that Lady Justice and the Candidate guarantees you a relaxed and fun time – even when you have to hear about politics over and over again – see for yourself. Then be honest and admit to yourself that indeed you had had a laugh, while secretly cheering for that unusual and extraordinary candidate who at the age of 70 had more vigor and passion than some much younger politicians we all too well knew about.

BJ
www.bernardjan.com



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Bernard Jan