This book made no sense to me at all. It felt nothing like a novel with a central story - it was more like a group of unrelated short stories that each mention the title character in passing, pretty much apropos of nothing. Seriously: some sad person happens to say something like “it reminded him of that one movie starring Ruby Castle” and then back to Sad People Sadding Around Sadly. It’s a fast read but a lingering one? No. The only reason I kept reading was because I hoped there would be some...

Arrêtez tout et précipitez vous sur les livres de Miss Allan ! 5 novellas somptueuses qui vous baladent du New-York des bas quartiers à la Russie de 2040, d'un cirque intinérant à l'Allemagne des années 30. Lisez je vous dis !!

I'm really, really grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of Ruby to consider for review.Nina Allan is one of the authors who, when I see they have a new book coming, make me silently shout "YES!" (or sometimes not so silently). Her blending of the mundane and the fantastical, her referencing whole alternate worlds - sometimes bizarrely alien, sometimes only subtly different from ours - makes her books into wonderful, almost holographic puzzles, where the detail and the big picture contain

This was actually a DNF at 50% but I read enough that I want to count it and provide some thoughts on the stories I managed to get throughFirst story: 3.5 starsVery intriguing and weird with some cool moments, maybe a bit too short?Second Story: 1 starsIt dragged on and on. A lot of my problems stem from personal taste. I hated the main character, I didn't like how it developed and the pacing was all over the place. The end was extremely disappointing. Overall this one felt underdeveloped and ho...

Originally published at Risingshadow.Every once in a while a speculative fiction reviewer finds an author who can immediately be called a quality author. Nina Allan is without a doubt a quality author who stands out as one of the most imaginative and gifted short storytellers of the last decade. She has become one of my favourite speculative fiction authors, because she shows real talent for writing beautiful and fascinatingly weird stories that seem to defy easy categorization. Her stories have...

Many thanks to Jonathan Ball Publishers for #Gifting me a copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. “The problem with having a story is that everyone starts believing they know it by heart.” Is this a short story collection with an interwoven theme or is this a segmented novel?Whichever way you choose to look at it, Ruby is a beautifully written, lyrical piece of work binding characters and information from one story into another into yet another, ultimately threading a f...

Here, for the first time, this revised and updated edition shows Ruby how she is meant to be read...or does it?This is a brilliant, searching book which takes speculative fiction, rips up the rule books and resets the clock with 7 interwoven tales that will absorb and compel you to keep reading to the last word, no matter how late the hour.It takes the perception of the reader, from the cover and the title, and completely tramples on them for Ruby moves through the pages of this novel as a conce...

Thanks to Edelweiss for a free eARC in exchange for an honest review!DNF at 23%No no no. Too scary, too weird, too unnerving, this just wasn't the book for me. Now I'm going to try my best to forget it because I don't want nightmares. Scary is not my thing.

Speculative fiction. Apparently that’s what you call this genre. Extremely captivating. A half dozen or so ‘independent ‘ tales yet all linked by in some way, usually very minor and insignificant, to Ruby. These links, often as not not based in what the majority of us would call reality, add together to give the reader a brief outline of Ruby’s history. All this leads to the ultimate tale where Ruby herself is featured. As I read I found myself continuously flipping back to previous chapters, re...

Some of the interconnected stories in Ruby were definitely better than others. I find it hard to rate because some parts of the book were 4 to 5 star while other parts really seemed to drag.

*Disclaimer: I was kindly gifted a copy of this book by Jonathan Ball Publishers in exchange for an honest review.♠ PUBLISHED: January 2021 ♠ PAGES: 354 ♠ GENRE: Science Fiction, Horror Fiction, Fantasy Fiction ♠ Paperback ♠Ruby written by Nina Allan immediately had my attention. I found the cover and synopsis so captivating that I just couldn't leave it on my TBR. This book consists of 7 short stories circling the character of Ruby Castle. We get to know Ruby as a circus performer who later bec...

DNF. I decided to let this one go, I guess I didn't really "get" it and I wasn't having enough fun to keep trying to push my way through it. Plus there kept being icky creepy sexual elements to the stories and I was over it.

Ruby is the latest in Titan Books’ reissues of Nina Allan’s earlier work. It was formerly known as Stardust: The Ruby Castle Stories, published as a limited edition hardback by PS Publishing in 2013. As with The Silver Wind, I’ve already written an exhaustive review of the original edition and don’t intend to write in detail about every story all over again. But, in brief: the seven stories loosely (sometimes very loosely) circle the character of Ruby Castle, a circus performer who becomes famou...

2.75 I enjoyed a number of the stories. A number of others I found myself to be disinterested in.

C'est toujours aussi bien écrit mais autant "Complications" m'a emmené dans un tourbillon émotionnel, autant ce livre-ci m'a semblé plus esthétique qu'autre chose. C'est beau mais j'ai regardé ça de loin sans me sentir réellement impliquée.

As a fan of Nina Allan's work, I picked this book up with high expectations. Though it was enjoyable enough, I didn't feel like it was quite as good as either The Rift or The Race.The book is a loosely-based collection of short stories, strung together by the recurring element of Ruby Castle, an actress who routinely shows up in small bit parts or gets mentioned by the narrator while they go about their own lives and adventures. None of the stories were outright bad, but I strongly preferred som...

Maybe it's just me but books that defy categorisation by straddling the line between novel and short story collection have become increasingly popular in the past few years. I enjoy Nina Allan's approach because she really stretches the conceit to its limits. Indeed, the inattentive reader could well miss some of the links between the pieces as connective thread becomes very fine at times. Despite that, the cumulative effect is impressive and by the end it's difficult to think of it as anything

3.5! not at all what i was anticipating (a patchwork epistolary novel like the blurb kind of leads you believe it is) but a neat little collection of interconnected short stories that i would mostly classify as horror mixed w a classic english banality

As a book of short stories, quite excellent; as the novel it is presented and advertised as, wildly disjointed and disappointing.

This really is an exceptional collection of short stories, richly layered and dense with portent. Characters are immaculately defined and engaging, and the stories themselves are perfectly formed. What I love about Nina's work is that she pulls no punches with genuine emotions - these characters live and breathe and initially appear to be living in a world recognisable to us, but then there is a 'tilt' and our expectations and the characters lives are so subtly subverted as to be almost nothing