I love to read books a little bit quirky, a bit out of the ordinary and after reading the blurb for this book, how could I resist?

"Exit, Pursued by a Bee is driven by a Southern-belle heroine-astronaut, involves a paleolithic mongrel called Kur, Glastonbury Festival chaos, steamy sex in space, a mean-momma loose-cannon journalist and an out-of-control general who'd fix anything by nuking it.... "

The cover has a picture of Glastonbury Tor (somewhere we've always been meaning to get to, but never quite got around to it yet!) with eerie cloud formations around the famous hill that intrigued me even more.

I was hooked from the first page. Major Kallandra Harvard and her long-term partner, Derek, are taking a break at Glastonbury before they both join the first ever manned NASA mission to Mars but their next mission will be a lot closer to home.

Strange things are happening all around the globe; sacred hills and mountains begin to crack, as if struck by earthquakes. Kallandra and Derek are the one of the first people to witness this, being right on Glastonbury Tor when it begins to disintegrate revealing a large metallic sphere.

The spheres are appearing all over the world. What are they? What are they doing? Are they some sort of alien visitor from space? Some new technological warfare? Or something else? Kallandra and Derek are drafted in to help figure things out, despite opposition from bureaucrats and the military. Early cave paintings are discovered which show what appear to be pictures of the spheres. It seems they have been around longer than everyone had thought possible...

The pace is fast moving, but with well-drawn characters that you care about. There are no two-dimensional cut-outs here. And any book that used the word 'boffin' in its proper context gets bonus points from me, being married to one ;)

I have to admit, some of the science in the book went a bit over my head but to be fair you don't need a degree in physics to enjoy this rollicking good story. Kallandra is a feisty heroine who takes no nonsense and you can just go along for the ride as she and Derek try to figure things out. Very enjoyable book.

Glastonbury Festival--and our redneck heroine-astronaut chills out to the strains of the Kaiser Chiefs in the week before her flight to Mars. Then all hell breaks loose--quite literally, it seems. Utterly plausible mayhem ensues. You just know the roads back to Weston-super-Mare are going to be blocked solid with traffic--and so they are!

A motley blend of the terrible and the trivial conveys the unreal and often inappropriate feelings engendered by mass trauma. Worthy of Wyndham at his kraken-waking best, Wyndham's characters never react as compellingly as this.

The humans caper around like circus clowns among the unplanned ruin wrought by the aliens. Up-ending the familiar space-invader theme, the inscrutable spheres have been there all along--and it's their slow-motion departure which is actually doing the mischief. Gradually the bizarre logic of their counter-invasion dawns on the heroine, as she pursues them in a hurriedly-adapted spacecraft on a crazy mission to implore them to come back and put everything right.

A techie earwax-eating fiance, a dishy French lover, a loose-cannon correspondence-course journalist, Keystone-cops secret services and a psychopath general whose cure-all is to nuke it, complete a supporting cast whose antics would be rib-splitting... if things weren't so darn serious.

Stephen King meets Mr Bean--you can't quite decide if it's tragedy or comedy you're watching unfold, horror or slapstick. But whatever it ain't--entertaining it certainly is.