The Book Plank

Author interview with Mark Lawrence Author bio: Mark Lawrence is married with four children, one of whom is severely disabled. His day job is as a research scientist focused on various rather intractable problems in the field of artificial intelligence. He has held secret level clearance with both US and UK governments. At one point he was qualified to say 'this isn't rocket science ... oh wait, it actually is'. Between work and caring for his disabled child, Mark spends his time writing, playing computer games, tending an allotment, brewing beer, and avoiding DIY.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hi Mark, Welcome over to The Book Plank and for taking your time to answer these few questions! BP: First off, could you give us a short introduction as to who you are? What are your likes and dislikes? What are your hobbies. ML: I could list the hobbies from my dust jackets but the tr...

October has come and gone again so time for the Review Round-up. The past month has been very busy for me, a lot of new things have happened and of course I was gearing up for my one big event this year, the Amsterdam marathon (which I ran in 3h08min), so I had been a bit off of focus in the last weeks and couldn't really read how I usually do it, I had a break after the marathon just to get some rest and actually planned to read quite a lot but just somehow my focus was off, I will be upping the ante for the last two months of the year, want to try to get at least another 40 book through the review pipeline so fingers crossed! And just a note up front, with the holidays around the corner, the blog will be getting a break in the last weeks of December till the first weeks of January. Oh and did I tell you that I ran the marathon in 3hour and 8 minutes? A full post on me experience on running it will be up later this week (I hope). But I will stop blabbering now, here are my picks ...

King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence, The Broken Empire #2 The land burns with the fires of a hundred battles as lords and petty kings fight for the Broken Empire. The long road to avenge the slaughter of his mother and brother has shown Prince Honorous Jorg Ancrath the hidden hands behind this endless war. He saw the game and vowed to sweep the board. First though he must gather his own pieces, learn the rules of play, and discover how to break them. A six nation army, twenty thousand strong, marches toward Jorg's gates, led by a champion beloved of the people. Every decent man prays this shining hero will unite the empire and heal its wounds. Every omen says he will. Every good king knows to bend the knee in the face of overwhelming odds, if only to save their people and their lands. But King Jorg is not a good king. Faced by an enemy many times his strength Jorg knows that he cannot win a fair fight. But playing fair was never part of Jorg’s game plan. ...