Tallula Rising by Glen Duncan

Tallula Rising is the middle book in Glen Duncan's werewolf trilogy, the sequel to the critically-acclaimed The Last Werewolf. Tallula is not only the last of the lycanthropes, but pregnant and on the run from both vampires and supernatural-hunting government officials who want her or her future child for equally dangerous purpose. However, these enemies may have underestimated the tenacity of an angry werewolf, even with the odds stacked against her. Tallula's first-person narrative is unapologetically bold, brutal, and thrillingly carnal; precise and bloody detail of her victims' deaths chopped in with darkly humorous observations on her nature and newly explicit world view. 'God is dead, irony rollickingly alive.' She is a brilliantly fierce anti-heroine: murderer, mother, whore and lover all at once. Duncan's sharp, assertive prose drags the reader beside her at pace on her journey and down into immorality, complicit in the crimes and guiltily sympathetic to her nature. Monster she is, but also totally, dynamically alive, free from the inhibitions which hold most of us (thankfully) back. Duncan updates the canon without radicalising it, making this a must for fans of grown-up, realist supernatural writing. Twi-hards will faint from shock. [Alice Sinclair]