The Silver Wind: Four Stories of Time Disrupted by Nina Allan is not a book I would have come across myself. I read it as a result of it being the subject of one of my favourite podcasts,  The Writer and the Critic , this month (February 2012). And my experience of reading it reinforces my belief in the benefits of stretching my reading circle - it was fantastic.I try not to put spoilers in my reviews, and this review is no exception. However, I would say that reading this book completely fres...

A quartz watch did not tick, and for Owen there was something monstrous in that, in and of itself.—p.28According to Wikipedia, Isaac Newton wrote "that the physical laws he had uncovered revealed the mechanical perfection of the workings of the universe to be akin to a watch, wherein the watchmaker is God." And if you aren't already familiar with that view, or with the term horology, then perhaps The Silver Wind will not be the best book you could read, since Nina Allan's time-travel stories dep...

The Silver Wind is a fascinating read. It loosely fits into the sci fi genre due to some of the plot devices used. But it is not your overt in your face sci fi, it is quite subtle and is used as the vehicle to tell the stories.This book is a collection of connected short stories. They sometimes have the same characters appearing but fulfilling different roles, having different relationships, and being set within different time periods in the UK.The sci fi aspects involve time travel and alternat...

I didn’t enjoy The Silver Wind as much as the other novella by Allan that I’ve read, Spin, but then I kind of expected that — Spin is a take on the story of Arachne, after all, and I really enjoy well-done retellings. The Silver Wind is a bit more of a mystery; sort of a time travel/alternate realities story, I guess. It’s perhaps best experienced for yourself, to see what you make of the plot; it’s well-written, though, and despite the similarities between the stories that make up the narrative...

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of The Silver Wind to consider for review.The Silver Wind feels to me like a key to Allan's writing.Over the past couple of years I have loved her novels The Race, The Rift and most recently, The Dollmaker. In these (mostly) earlier stories loosely following the career of Martin Newland and of a group of characters round him whose histories, identities and lives shift, merge and overlap, I can see foreshadowings of themes and features of those ot...

This is a hard one to pin down. Rather than a conventional novel, The Silver Wind is more like a collection of stories (some with more obvious ties to each other than others) that play with the concept of time, relationships, and how different yet similar alternate realities could be. Some stories were lovely in their own right, while others seemed disjointed and jarringly out of place (making me wonder if I’m missing something or if that was intentional?). I was a little disappointed in the act...

As always with Nina Allan's work, The Silver Wind is an intelligent and genre-breaking work of science fiction, using some of the trappings of the genre (in this case time travel) but treating them with an incisive literary sensibility. While this book might be viewed as a fractured form of the novel, I think it works better as a collection of interconnected stories, sharing the same world and many of the same characters. As such, it's a more challenging read than some of her novels, and slightl...

DNF’d at page 153. It was the incest spice. Could not recover from that. Chapter one was 100 pages long, and it was very confusing. I was hoping for an exciting time travel thriller, and it was just a lot of ick for me. Would not recommend.

3.0 StarsAllan's writing is still very strong but I found each story so disparate from the others that I sorta lost interest until the last story "Ten Days" which was excellent. I really would have liked to have seen more of that style in the book.

This is a brilliant novel that intertwines themes and times as the protagonists relate to one another in ways that contradict then connect, leaving traces of memory with the reader, like hooks that the characters are only vaguely aware of, but which the reader sees through the prism of time travel. The story of Martin Newland will take you into a strange world where time is not linear, but consists of many variables, governed by the movement of watches and clocks.Nina Allan has created a complex...

We read this in my spec fic book club and everyone pretty much unanimously gave this book a hearty "meh." Allan is clearly a talented writer, but pretty much just threw this collection together with stories she had lying around. As a result, they feel a bit half-finished and lacking in a satisfying conclusion. Still, there were enough intriguing ideas in there to make me curious enough to pick up one of her novels next.

The Silver Wind is a novel-in-stories. In some ways it reads like a shorter, less ambitious (though no less engaging) precursor to The Race; a series of narratives which could be enjoyed separately, but reveal their true magic when considered together, becoming more than the sum of their parts. The four main stories (for there is a fifth, though it is identified as an 'afterword') are about Martin Newland. He is 'fascinated by the nature of time', and we meet him at various points in his life –

Crafty and crafted time travel novel... Time travel is an easy thing to mess up in SF, and this does well by leaving the mechanics and details largely off-page, instead generating a subtle feeling of uneasiness and spookiness, and exploring memory and grief. Great sense of place and set dressing, too - I'm generally quite happy with your book if you describe a bunch of stuff on a table. And then if you describe a table as well! Brilliant.

Time travel but very different from any I've encountered before. More realistic, if I could call it that.Ingruing, well written. Good escape. With a little bit of 1984 thrown in.

"Was he mad at the end, do you think?""The man was a genius," Morton said. "There's a fine line between the two. No.This further proves that books should come with trigger warnings for all the themes and topics that you might not want to read about. In this instance, it was incest.Also summaries lie. When the synopsis says "sometimes siblings, sometimes lovers", what it really means is "most of the times lovers, including when they're siblings", and that's just not cool to sprung that on peop

More of a mood than a cohesive story, this collection reads a bit like someone took characters, relationships, elements, and themes and put them all in a hat to draw them out and reconstruct stories. It's disorienting, which I suppose is the point. Definitely an interesting take on time travel, told sort of from the sidelines by people caught up in it. Reminded me of the "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" bit from doctor who. Content warning for some (consensual) incest that kind of comes out of nowher...

Very little is explained and the reader is left to guess most of it for herself. I liked how the same names were used across several different stories, leading to litre moments where you remember a piece of trivia that was mentioned before about a character, but you’re not quite sure if it’s this character or another version from a separate short story in the book with the same name. This seems to mimic the mild state of confusion that Owen Andrews spoke of when crossing between realities.The en...

I must be missing something because what I just read was a bunch of loosely related short stories, mostly with the same cast of characters, except in each story they're related to each other in different ways, and sometimes people travel in time if they come in contact with a little person, or maybe a clock or a watch he made, and then each story sort of fizzles out. Not for me.

I’m sorry....I wanted to like this story but after more than half way through...it just felt like a waste of time..after trying again...then skipping pages....the last effort...aaaaanndd it’s over.