This was advertised on sffchronicles.com and I idly took a closer look as I was intrigued by the title and cover - and was immediately impressed by the opening enough to buy a copy.
What we have here is a fascinating genre mix of Welsh historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. Bourne handles the balance between them deftly, so while there's a good flavour of each in the story, it's never over-whelmed by one particular genre.
I guess that's also a problem for a book like this in that traditional publishers hate this type of genre mixing because they don't know where to market it (Jo Zebedee's Inish Carraig comes immediately to mind), so it's a shame it's had to be self-published. What you do get as a reader though is a tight and well-written adventure, interesting characters (especially Ariadnii!), and some great laugh-out-loud moments as a post-apocalyptic future grapples with the incongruitities of its past.
Criticisms? The only one is that this novel is relatively short, and may or not have benefited from having additional POV scenes from other characters than than the lead, in order to provide more context and perspective, as someone like David Gemmell would have done. On saying that, though, Bourne simply tells the story with no padding and it ends at exactly the right place.
Overall, this is a professional-standard novel with a great premise and an engaging story that's well-worth taking a close look at if you have any kind of interest in fantasy, historical fiction, or post-apocalytpic settings. Although self-published, it easily sits among the better traditionally published books out there, and I'm very much looking forward to reading the sequel.
The Crow Dark Sea by Duncan Bourne is available at Amazon.
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