16 horses book review

Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan: Publication Day Review

Sixteen horses: synopsis.

Near the dying English seaside town of Ilmarsh, local police detective Alec Nichols discovers sixteen horses’ heads on a farm, each buried with a single eye facing the low winter sun. After forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen travels to the scene, the investigators soon uncover evidence of a chain of crimes in the community – disappearances, arson and mutilations – all culminating in the reveal of something deadly lurking in the ground itself.

In the dark days that follow, the town slips into panic and paranoia. Everything is not as it seems. Anyone could be a suspect. And as Cooper finds herself unable to leave town, Alec is stalked by an unseen threat. The two investigators race to uncover the truth behind these frightening and insidious mysteries – no matter the cost.

Sixteen Horses: Mr Frankowski’s Thoughts

A sudden chill around you makes you shudder, so you check if any of the windows are open. They aren’t. You go to turn up the heating, but the cold you feel doesn’t go away. And this, my Faithful Reader, is when you know you have entered the unknown territory.

“Sixteen Horses” is a brilliant debut from Greg Buchanan that explores several themes which are ordinarily delivered in an easy to digest, almost sanitised way. Death, animal cruelty, depression, fear, anger – Buchanan doses them in their terrifying, graphic glory without being overt or vulgar. Despite being a slow-burn thriller, the tension builds up from the opening paragraphs and doesn’t let go till the very end. It’s like getting a slow drip of adrenaline intravenously; you feel the tension building up, and you wish for the big reveal to happen. You wait for an explosion that doesn’t come. It leaves you in a limbo of emotional disarray until the final act arrives and pulls the rug from under your trembling feet.

The premise of Buchanans first (and judging by the current reception of the book not last) novel is unusual. The characters are not your run-of-the-mill gritty coppers or morally ambiguous ex-military with a ropey past. A DS Alec Nichols is a grief-stricken widower trying to navigate a somewhat complicated relationship with his son, and Dr Cooper Allen, the veterinary surgeon and extremely talented forensic investigator, is drawn into her personal darkness whilst desperatly trying to claw her way out of it.

Sixteen Horses is a fresh, very important voice in the genre. It delivers a compelling story with a literary zest of a seasoned storyteller. Still, most importantly, it encapsulates the high-concept thriller and a lyrically told, utterly captivating story of the human condition. It’s heavily influenced by several philosophical notions that barge into the realms of ethics and morality, but also, the good and the evil. The language used in the book will not be everyone’s cup of tea, though. Sixteen Horses is not a cosy, comforting bedtime read you pick up after a day of running after your kids or Zoom meetings. It gets heavy; it gets fragmented; it gets you by your throat. Buchanan’s writing is rich and detailed and gorgeously wordy. And there’s a lot of darkness.

About Author:

Greg Buchanan was born in 1989 and lives in the Scottish Borders. He studied English at the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD at King’s College London in identification and ethics. He is a graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing MA. SIXTEEN HORSES is his first novel.

A TV adaptation of SIXTEEN HORSES is being produced by Gaumont Television (Narcos, Tin Star) after a bidding war for the rights. The novel has sold in over seventeen international territories.

Twitter: @gregbuchanan

Instagram: @gregbuchananwriter

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Sixteen Horses Is A Chilling Debut

Greg Buchanan’s debut novel begins with an eerie premise: sixteen horse heads, buried in the ground forming a circle are found in the small seaside town of Ilsmarsh. Local detective, Alec, and visiting forensic veterinarian, Cooper, investigate the case and the book is mostly told from their viewpoints as well as a few other locals.

With that first scene, the tone is set perfectly. The town itself is slowly sinking, both physically and metaphorically. The tourists no longer flock to the town, businesses begin to shutter, and residents are beginning to leave. There’s a persistent sense of loneliness and melancholy throughout the novel, especially within the main characters. Detective Alec is still mourning the loss of his wife to cancer and struggling to connect with his teenage son Simon. He knows he should talk to him more but the words stick in his throat. They’re more roommates than a family unit. Cooper seems completely alone in her life and focuses intently on her work with animals. 

The horse autopsies are described in great detail with blunt medical language. The methodical care and attention you would need for such a task are conveyed well. The balance between the previously mentioned loneliness and the unsettling animal deaths is what makes the story special. It never tilts too far into one side to lose your attention. 

Besides the medical sections, the book uses very “plain” language—and I don’t mean that negatively—as it adds to the overall gloomy feel the town of Ilsmarsh and its residents exude. The discovery of the horses that opens the novel, and later incidents, are described in a matter-of-fact way that leaves the worst up to your imagination. It’s a horrible event that doesn’t need extra embellishments. This happened, what do you think about it? How does it make you feel? These, I feel, are the questions Buchanan is asking the reader.

Chapters are extremely short, sometimes less than half a page, each changing viewpoints or scenes. While some might dislike this and prefer long chapters, I found it helped keep a fast pace for a slow-burn crime story. To be honest—it helped keep my attention. If I’m not invested in a book my reading pace will slow to a crawl; with Sixteen Horses, I couldn’t put it down—and when I did, I’d come back to it quite quickly. I’d say I read it (for me) in record time. With a page count of over 400, it flew by.

While much of the book revolves around the investigation, the town itself is fleshed out and we learn its history and decline. I come from a town with much of the same qualities: seaside, loss of the main industry, many leaving for better prospects elsewhere (myself included). Perhaps this helped me connect with Sixteen Horses more than most. Neither Alec nor Cooper are from Ilsmarsh (although Alec has lived there for a few years) so we get a bit of an outsider’s perspective into the general state of the area.

It’s been a while since a book made me upset but Sixteen Horses managed to get me. In addition to the horses, there are several other incidents involving animals; take this as a general content warning. I remember reading a specific passage and having to take a break to chill out (and hug my cats). It’s not graphic but rather tragic and fits in with the rest of the story. The way it’s described (once again with the very straightforward language) is enough to unsettle.

Because this is a crime drama there are plenty of twists and turns. I admit that even with movies I never attempt to “figure out” who the killer is. Whatever part of my brain that makes those connect-the-dots connections switches off and I enjoy the ride for what it is. If you’re the kind who likes to figure it out while you read I think there’s plenty for you here as well, as information is both peppered in and slowly revealed.

You could almost describe Sixteen Horses as dreamlike. Finding that many dead animals arranged in a ritualistic manner feels too fantastical to be real. If you like David Lynch’s films you might understand the dichotomy. When Alec first sees the big, glassy eyes of the horses staring up at the ground he describes it as both disturbing and beautiful—which sums it up nicely.

Something that does fall a bit short is the reveal of the killer, and while I won’t say who I will give this as a mild spoiler warning: the culprit isn’t explicitly named until the epilogue. The “big twist” being told at the very end might come as a disappointment to some, especially those who are fond of crime novels. I see it as the identity not being as important as the lasting impact of the dead horses on the town and its people. We don’t remember the criminal as much as the crime. It’s been a positive trend in recent years that mass shooters do not appear on the news and instead focus on the victims and their lives. Giving them attention and making them famous is a goal in some of the perpetrators’ minds. That may not be what Buchanan intended but it’s what I take out of it, as we all experience stories differently.

Overall I would say Sixteen Horses is my favourite book of 2021 and I’m looking forward to Buchanan’s next work.

A copy of Sixteen Horses was provided by Flatiron Books for review purposes. It will be released on July 20th in America. 

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Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan: an awfully big adventure

When I started reading Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan , I was sort of expecting yer normal detective/thriller book: local detective Alec Nichols finds sixteen horse heads partially buried in a farm field in a town called Ilmarsh. Can Nichols, helped by forensic vet Cooper Allen, find out what the hap is heckening? Couldn’t be easier, surely? But after a little while it became clear that a serious mental gear shift was in order. So I reversed my brain out of the Rebus-ish cul-de-sac I’d constructed for it, and headed down Dread Elegy To Decay Lane, and had a fabulous trip. 

Sixteen Horses is hard to place in the landscape of conventional crime fiction. The further you go the more you realise that it doesn’t actually matter who killed the horses; Ilmarsh isn’t actually going to be helped by the revelation. The deaths of the horses are a symptom of bigger problems. 

Rest assured that you do find out whodunnit in the end, but the reveal carries with it weighty, depressing inevitability, and that point I’d come to think of the main character as death itself, anyway. Sixteen Horses is pregnant with dread, and full of slow death. All sorts of poisonings, literal and metaphorical, crop up in the book, and Ilmarsh begins to feel like a toxic sinkhole that nobody can escape. Like a deep mire sucking at your boots. Everything and everyone is decaying. .

It also confronted me with animal abuse, in the sense that cruelty to animals is the inciting incident (and the titular horses aren’t the only animals to meet a horrible end). It’s not all-consuming in the book, but the instances of it did elicit a very strong response. Which in turn made me think about why I had a worse reaction to that than I did to all the times I’ve read about women being chopped up in other books. In Sixteen Horses itself the death of these animals is of more immediate import to the characters, and gets more of a government response, than the death of an entire town. I’m not saying you shouldn’t give a shit if animals are killed, obviously, but it’s interesting how (and why) we tend to rank these things emotionally, isn’t it?

Sixteen Horses is undeniably a heavy book to sit with. It feels like the sun never shines in Ilmarsh. It has the feel of the modern retelling of a bleak and ancient myth. Hercules’ thirteenth and most unlucky labour. At the same time, Buchanan’s writing has a mesmeric quality to it, and the sections that are most intimately about decay and death are the ones that I found most poetic (in feel if not form), so the act of reading it is almost lulling. 

I’m afraid I’ve made it sound like a bit of an unpleasant read, and that isn’t the case. Like others of my favourite reads this year (including The Lamplighters, my last post) it’s very human . Just, perhaps, the bits of us we don’t like shining a light on that often. And I was left with the idea that it is possible to escape that kind of intergenerational toxicity. To escape your own darkness.

Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan

From its grizzly opening onwards, Greg Buchanan’s debut Sixteen Horses owes much more to the British gothic tradition than to crime fiction. There is, on the surface a crime to be solved, and two investigators. But that investigation, for the most part, is just an excuse to get under the skin of the setting and the cruel and violent secrets that it holds.

The instigation of the action in Sixteen Horses is the grizzly discovery of sixteen horses heads found half buried, each with one eye staring at the sky, together with a knot of tails on a farm outside of the coastal British town of Ilmarsh. The act had taken place on Guy Fawkes Night when the horses from various places around town had been sedated so as not to be spooked by the fireworks and everyone in town was at the pyre. Local detective Alex Nicholls, a man with deep secrets who himself is barely holding things together, is out of his depth and a forensic vet, Cooper Allen, is called in to help with the investigation. But just as it seems they are getting somewhere the story and the narrative takes a wild swerve, the town put in quarantine following the long term consequences of the World War 2 testing of anthrax spores and Alec’s eighteen year old son goes missing. Cooper is asked to stay on to investigate.

Sixteen Horses is all atmosphere with only a thinly wavering plot, centred mostly around Cooper and her investigation. The narrative ranges across a range of character points of view often for no particular reason other than to add to the general feeling of hopelessness and despair. The gothic styling is overt. Set in a failing marshland village, peopled with an array of damaged characters, with both the people and the place itself mired in the sins of the past. There may be no ghosts but the secrets of the landscape haunt the narrative, literally bursting forth to take revenge at one point. But as a crime novel there is something lacking. The investigation never feels central to the narrative and falls away when the anthrax danger emerges only the reappear again in a confusing, unearned and frankly unbelievable finale.

Buchanan digs deep into a dour English tradition of muddy, rainswept locales struggling to deal with lost glory with a cast of characters to match. The narrative itself is confused and confusing, never really sure of what it is trying to be or say. It is full of small, and not so small, digressions that make no sense when read and are never later put into a firm context. The violence, particularly in relation to animals will certainly put some readers off. But the descriptions of the landscape can verge on the poetic and the gothic atmosphere of Ilmarsh is well captured. Which makes Sixteen Horses overall an interesting but not entirely successful debut.

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One Comment

Exhausting to read and doesn’t deserve to be a crime novel. The story was fragmented and the reader is constantly confused because nothing connects. I didn’t particularly like the main characters because there was no character development! Fractured and disjointed from beginning to end. Unsure why Val rated this book as it certainly needed a good editor before it was even published. Very dismal, depressing with lots of animal abuse and the ending was disappointing. Would not recommend this book to anyone especially if you are an avid crime reader.

JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

June 18, 2021

Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan

She thought of the horses, of the eyes in the earth. She thought about that number, sixteen. That strange number . . .

Near the dying English seaside town of Ilmarsh, local police detective Alec Nichols discovers sixteen horses’ heads on a farm, each buried with a single eye facing the low winter sun. After forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen travels to the scene, the investigators soon uncover evidence of a chain of crimes in the community – disappearances, arson and mutilations – all culminating in the reveal of something deadly lurking in the ground itself.

In the dark days that follow, the town slips into panic and paranoia. Everything is not as it seems. Anyone could be a suspect. And as Cooper finds herself unable to leave town, Alec is stalked by an unseen threat. The two investigators race to uncover the truth behind these frightening and insidious mysteries – no matter the cost.

Sixteen Horses is a story of enduring guilt, trauma and punishment, set in a small seaside community the rest of the world has left behind . . .

Greg Buchanan’s debut thriller Sixteen Horses is set in a small English seaside community, and follows the discovery of 16 severed horse heads on a remote farm, partially buried. The mystery soon unravels into much more than just murdered animals, drawing the reader in with secrets and a multi-layered crime.

Everyone holds secrets in the secluded town of Ilmarsh — marriages are fraught, relationships are tested, and there’s a lot for local police detective Alec Nichols to uncover. The initial crime feels quite unique to the genre, and the story takes you on quite a journey as you work to figure out who killed the sixteen horses.

“The killer had secured the horses in the ground by digging holes, dropping the heads within these holes, caking soil around the flesh, then spreading loose dirt to help the skin blend in with the surrounding earth. The purpose was to delay them being found, but not indefinitely. To make the realisation itself a moment of power.”

Similar to other rural crime novels, the strength lies in the setting. The dry, desolate, stretched town where nothing really happens but everyone manages to possess some dark secret.

Stylistically, the book feels quite jagged — stop-and-start. Quotes are scattered throughout, as well as short brief chapters. Each passing day is clearly marked, and some chapters towards the end require a re-read to grasp masked plot — twists you missed or didn’t see coming. Greg’s writing style feels very poetic and lyrical, keeping pace on each page and maintaining intrigue. There’s a dreaded feeling of foreboding as you make your way through the story, which is the sign of a great crime novel.

The ending will satisfy readers.

“The teenage angled away from the rising sun. Her whole face convulsed, forcing a sneeze out onto the damp mossy rock beside her. In the early light, droplets dribbled down into the miscoloured marsh below. The void behind her nose ached. She was alone.”

Admittedly, I did confuse some of the secondary characters with each other. Whilst written in third person, the POV does shift between quite a few different characters and after a while they all start to merge together. Perhaps the number of perspectives could’ve been stripped back?

“The journey took a few hours, enough for the specialist to feel queasy without travel sickness pills. Trains weren’t normally too bad, and driving herself, that was fine, but the carriages heaved at slight angles along the rails. Her body, her mind — they lost their balance. The world sank into nausea.”

Evocative, intelligent and haunting, crime and thriller fans will love Sixteen Horses . For those who loved The Dry and Scrublands . The genre skews towards gothic, and readership skews 20+

Warning: extreme animal abuse.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Sixteen Horses Greg Buchanan June 2021 Pan Macmillan Book Publishers

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Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan – Book Review

24 July 2021 by Dee Young Leave a Comment

Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan is the debut literary thriller from this extraordinary new, gifted author.

Sixteen horses lie buried on a lonely farm near the English seaside town of Ilmarsh, once a haven for holiday makers it is now a ghost of its former self.

The local police detective, Alec Nichols, discovers the bodies, each with a single eye facing the watery winter sun. He is joined by forensic veterinarian, Cooper Allen. They soon uncover gruesome evidence of further mutilations along with unsolved disappearances and arson.

Further investigations of the land surrounding the town reveal a deadly threat concealed there that must not be allowed to escape.

The townsfolk are gripped by fear and begin to suspect each other of dreadful acts and duplicity. 

Everyone is a suspect. No one can be trusted.

 Alec and Cooper are fighting their own demons and, as Cooper finds herself unable to leave the town, Alec is unknowingly in great danger.

Can they discover the awful truth behind the foul and bloody acts that are plaguing the town?

And will they both survive to bring those behind them to justice?

This dark, dark tale twists and turns like an evil black serpent. No one is who they seem in this dying town that is haunted by evil deeds, cruelty and threat.

This is an amazing novel that can’t be put down or forgotten after it’s done. It is a must-read for those who love an edge of the seat, demonic thriller.

Terrifyingly brilliant and a triumphant entrance for this talented author. I look forward to more of his maleficence!

ISBN: 9781529027174

Sixteen Horses is available in hardback, paperback and e-book.

About Greg Buchanan

Greg Buchanan was born in 1989 and lives in the Scottish Borders. He studied English at the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD at King’s College London in identification and ethics. He is a graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing MA. Sixteen Horses is his first novel.

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• Authors & Illustrators

Greg Buchanan

Sixteen horses.

** Featured on BBC Two's Between The Covers ** 'Irresistible' - Val McDermid, author of 1979 'Breathtaking . . . This is crime writing of a striking calibre' - Daily Mail Near the dying English seaside town of Ilmarsh, local police detective Alec Nichols discovers sixteen horses’ heads on a farm, each buried with a single eye facing the low winter sun. After forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen travels to the scene, the investigators soon uncover evidence of a chain of crimes in the community – disappearances, arson and mutilations – all culminating in the reveal of something deadly lurking in the ground itself. In the dark days that follow, the town slips into panic and paranoia. Everything is not as it seems. Anyone could be a suspect. And as Cooper finds herself unable to leave town, Alec is stalked by an unseen threat. The two investigators race to uncover the truth behind these frightening and insidious mysteries – no matter the cost. Sixteen Horses is the debut literary thriller from an extraordinary talent, Greg Buchanan. For fans of Jane Harper’s The Dry . 'Totally gripping' - Alex Michaelides, author of The Silent Patient 'Read it, read it, read it' - B. P. Walter, author of The Dinner Guest 'Original' - Sophie Hannah, author of Haven't They Grown

Unlike anything else you’ll read this year, Sixteen Horses is a deeply disconcerting ride. Irresistible Val McDermid

Dark, visceral and disturbing, this highly suspenseful and beautifully written thriller is totally gripping from start to finish. A hugely impressive debut Alex Michaelides, author of The Silent Patient

Original, beautifully written, terrifying and haunting. I won't forget this novel Sophie Hannah, author of Haven't They Grown

Books by Greg Buchanan

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Sixteen Horses

Greg buchanan. flatiron, $27.99 (464p) isbn 978-1-250-24666-0.

Reviewed on: 04/19/2021

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Paperback - 464 pages - 978-1-250-24668-4

Paperback - 464 pages - 978-1-5290-2718-1

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The historical novel ‘Horse’ sheds light on real-life racism

Pulitzer winner geraldine brooks’s latest book is a sweeping tale that uses the true story of a famous 19th-century racehorse to explore the roots and legacy of enslavement.

In 2019, a PhD student in art history rescues an oil painting of a racehorse from a pile of discarded stuff on a Georgetown sidewalk, and a zoologist finds a skeleton marked “Horse” in a Smithsonian attic. In 1850, an enslaved boy is present at the birth of a foal. These are the ingredients with which Geraldine Brooks begins her new novel, “Horse,” and, goodness, they are just as beguiling as her fluid, masterful storytelling.

From the beginning, the weave of the narrative is clear: It’s no surprise that the horse in the painting is the same animal whose bones are collecting dust in the Smithsonian and the same again as the newborn foal who will find a devoted, lifelong companion in the boy, Jarret. The horse’s name is Lexington, and he was a real-life racehorse who won six of his seven starts and became a legendary thoroughbred sire whose offspring dominated American racing in the late 19th century. Brooks includes other figures from history: Lexington’s various owners; Thomas J. Scott, a Pennsylvania-born animal painter who served in the Union Army during the Civil War; and the modernist art dealer Martha Jackson. But Brooks’s central characters — Jarret; the art historian Theo; and the zoologist Jess — are invented.

Geraldine Brooks reimagines King David’s life in ‘The Secret Chord’

Jarret is the child of Harry Lewis, a horse trainer who was able to buy his own freedom in antebellum Kentucky. Harry’s employer, Dr. Elisha Warfield, offers to give the colt Lexington to Harry in lieu of a year’s wages so that Harry, if he makes the horse a success, might earn enough to purchase his son. This bargain proves too good to be true. Once Lexington wins his first race, Harry’s ownership gives covetous White horsemen the necessary leverage to take the animal from him. It turns out there is a law forbidding Black people from running horses, and so Dr. Warfield is blackmailed into selling both Lexington and Jarret. The young man and the horse are sent south, eventually to the massive racing operation of Richard Ten Broeck in Louisiana. Of course, the abhorrent and absurd truth is that both Lexington and Jarret are considered livestock, resources to be exploited until they die. Ten Broeck recognizes the value of Jarret’s skill with horses and deep rapport with Lexington and, in what could be mistaken for generosity but is actually just canny exploitation, elevates him to the status of deputy trainer, a promotion that gives Jarret responsibility without true authority.

A century and a half later, Theo and Jess are brought together by Lexington’s remnants: his portrait, his bones. Theo, who is Black, is the child of diplomats, a Nigerian mother and an American father. He grew up in British boarding schools and was a polo star at Oxford before the indignities of racism — from which privilege could not insulate him — drove him from the sport. His interest in the horse portrait is casual at first, then sharpens as he homes in on the presence of Black men in similar works from the era — grooms and trainers — likely to have been enslaved. Jess is White, Australian and an odd duck, fascinated since childhood with the bones of living things. The two begin a tentative relationship, their mutual attraction existing uneasily alongside Jess’s tendency toward oblivious microaggression and Theo’s doubts that she is capable of fully understanding his experience as a Black man.

The 23 most unforgettable last sentences in fiction

Jarret’s story is one of individualism. His dogged betterment of himself and his tenacious devotion to Lexington serve as a private rebellion against the erasure that is slavery. Ultimately the war determines his fate, but unpredictably so. Theo and Jess are also at the mercy of their time, but progress is a complicated proposition. The resolution of their story is saturated with the same rot of injustice that was introduced to this country with slavery and has flourished ever since. In “Horse,” Brooks, who is a meticulous researcher and whose previous novels, including “ People of the Book ” “ Caleb’s Crossing ” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “ March ,” have all been concerned with the past, writes about our present in such a way that the tangled roots of history, just beneath the story, are both subtle and undeniable.

The feeling that pervades is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Horses were cruelly used and discarded by the antebellum horse-racing industry; the same is true of modern racing. Enslaved men were regarded as inherently dangerous and were murdered without consequence according to White whims; police officers kill Black men with impunity still today. The artist Thomas J. Scott, initially sympathetic toward Confederate prisoners, eventually gives up talking to them because they were “lost to a narrative untethered to anything he recognized as true. Their mad conception of Mr. Lincoln as some kind of cloven-hoofed devil’s scion, their complete disregard — denial — of the humanity of the enslaved, their fabulous notions of what evils the Federal government intended for them should their cause fail — all of it was ingrained so deep, beyond the reach of reasonable dialogue or evidence.” If that doesn’t sound familiar, you haven’t been on the internet lately.

Maggie Shipstead’s ‘Great Circle’ is a soaring work of historical fiction and a perfect summer novel

I raced through the novel’s first half and then slowed and slowed as I went on, so worried for what might happen to Jarret and Theo and to Lexington that I could hardly bear to find out. “Horse” is not a grim book, but it did sometimes make me very angry, and it did make me cry. “Horse” is a reminder of the simple, primal power an author can summon by creating characters readers care about and telling a story about them — the same power that so terrifies the people so desperately trying to get Toni Morrison banned from their children’s reading lists.

Maggie Shipstead is the author of “Seating Arrangements,” “Astonish Me,” “Great Circle” and “You Have a Friend in 10A.”

By Geraldine Brooks

Viking. 416 pp. $28

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Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra review: A workstation in a thin-and-light chassis

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is a premium system that can do it all, even light gaming.

Back when I was a dewy-eyed, young reviewer, Samsung used to make an impressive premium laptop. Combining glass and aluminum, they were a sight to behold and boasted some of the most powerful specs available at the time. And then, the company’s smartphone, TV and appliance markets started taking off and the laptop line started to decline. It was a sad time for us reviewers.

But I’m happy to say that it seems Samsung is back to form with the latest generation of laptops. The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is a premium laptop made to accommodate just about everyone –– from the mobile professionals and creative professionals to the coders and gamers, and yes, even the content creators. Hidden beneath its stately aluminum chassis lurks a brolic Intel Core Ultra 9 processor with an Nvidia RTX 4070 graphics card. It’s a combination that puts competitors on notice and makes it one of the best laptops I’ve reviewed this year.

About this review: Samsung sent us a review unit of its Ultra Book 4 Ultra. It had no input on the content of this article.

Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is the most powerful laptop in Samsung's premium lineup, featuring Intel Core Ultra processors and up to Nvidia GeForce RT 4070 graphics. It has the same 2.8K OLED display as its smaller siblings, and it's slightly thicker, but it's every bit as good, if not better.

• Superb overall and gaming performance
• Bright, vivid AMOLED touch display
• Excellent audio quality
• Great battery life
• Elegant, lightweight chassis
• Sticky touchpad
• Too many Samsung-branded apps

Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra price, availability, and specs

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is currently available at Samsung and Best Buy starting at $2,400. It’s a bit pricey, but you’re getting a 3.8-GHz Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor with 16GB of RAM with a 1TB SSD, Intel Arc Graphics, a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 GPU with 6GB of VRAM, and a 16-inch, 2880 x 1800 (3K) Dynamic AMOLED touch display.

If that’s not enough oomph for your buck, consider my $2,999 review model which bumps you up to a 2.5-GHz Intel Core Ultra 9 185H CPU, 32GB of RAM, and a Nvidia RTX 4070 with 8GB of video memory. Both systems have Windows 11 Home preinstalled.

For this review, we compared the Galaxy Book 4 against the Dell XPS 16 ($1,699 to start, Dell.com) and the HP Spectre x360 16 ($1,599 on HP.com, $1,799 at Best Buy).

Design and features

Thin, light and elegant.

While I miss the days when laptops rocked glass lids, the Galaxy Book 4 is just as handsome in its all-aluminum chassis. Colored in what Samsung calls Moonstone Gray, the 16-inch stunner would look right at home in your office, in a coffee shop, and of course, your lap. It’s all rounded edges with some subtle chamfering along the undercarriage. Outside of the glossy embedded Samsung logo stamped into the middle left of the lid, there are no other embellishments. You’ll definitely want to keep a microfiber cloth handy as the laptop quickly bore witness to my interactions via a slew of fingerprints.

When you open the notebook, you see that the majority of the gray keyboard deck is occupied by an absolute unit of a touchpad. Directly above is the keyboard, complete with num pad, resting in a slight recess. A long cylindrical hinge connects the deck to the 16-inch display ensconced in a set of relatively slim bezels. A quick tour of the notebook's bottom reveals a quad of black rubber feet, a large vent running the width of the system and a long speaker grille on either side of the system.

Dell XPS 16 (2024) review: The MacBook Pro of Windows

Lover of legacy ports that I am, I appreciate the USB-A 3.2 port on the right of the system as much as I do the pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left. Rounding out the portage, you get a headset jack and microSD card reader on the right and a full HDMI 2.1a port on the left. To cover your connectivity needs, the laptop is equipped with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.

Colored in what Samsung calls Moonstone Gray, the 16-inch stunner would look right at home in your office, in a coffee shop, and of course, your lap.

At 4.1 pounds with a thickness of 0.65 inches, the Galaxy Book 4 is on a par with other premium 16-inch laptops. The Spectre x360 and XPS 16 are slightly heavier at 4.3 and 4.7 pounds, respectively.

I’m typically not a fan of bottom-mounted speakers as they tend to get muffled by my thick thighs (they save lives, or so I’m told). This was not the case as I listened to Beyoncé warn off the titular “Jolene.” The AKG quad speakers working in tandem with the Dolby Atmos software made sure that I heard the steady twang of the guitars accompanied by a spirited banjo with snappy percussion as the singer weaved between alto and a lilting mezzo-soprano. The Atmos software comes with five presets with three custom spots. For my listening tastes, I went with the Music setting on Warm.

Speaking of software, Samsung has far too much of it. And it’s not the typical Windows bloatware. No, this is from Samsung itself, preloading a ridiculous 17 company-branded apps. Some, like Samsung Recovery, Update, Settings, Care+, and Device Care. Others, like Bluetooth Sync, Gallery and Bixby not so much. It’s a rather ham-fisted attempt to integrate your other Samsung devices into the mix. I found some of the apps are redundant. Seriously, you don’t need Bixby and Cortana.

Despite having a 1080p, 30-fps webcam , the images aren’t as sharp or color accurate as I hoped. While it’s easy to see the details on my sweater, my hair looked fuzzy and the wall behind me was blown out. Also, my sweater looked darker than it actually is. I’m also missing a physical shutter to keep the Peeping Toms at bay. If you’re looking for better image quality you’ll want to invest in an external webcam.

The Galaxy Book 4 also has a couple of security features including TPM (Trusted Platform Module) which creates and stores cryptographic keys designed to keep the BIOS and OS secure. You also have the fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button.

Everything's better with AMOLED

If there’s one thing that Samsung is great at, it makes wonderful displays. The Galaxy Book 4 Ultra has a stunning 3K (2880 x 1800) Dynamic AMOLED touch display. It’s colorful, almost to the point of oversaturation, with incredibly sharp detail. I saw this first hand as I watched the trailer for “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” which served up lurid reds, vivid teals and verdant greens. I was captivated by the opening scene where droplets of blood glistened in the sunlight before splashing on the nearby foliage. The crispness of detail allowed me to see the spider-web cracks in actor’s Laya DeLeon Hayes glasses.

The glossy panel is anti-reflective, which significantly cuts down on glare, but it’s plenty bright, averaging 611 nits as measured by my lux meter. In terms of color reproduction, the screen had a result of 100% on the P3 gamut, 94% on Adobe sRBG and 92% on the NTSC gamut.

The touch panel is really agile and responsive, but man, I wish Samsung bundled a pen with this thing, as it’s a shame to muss up such a pretty display with fingerprints.

Keyboard and touchpad

Comfy keyboard, sticky touchpad.

I love it when a laptop sports a num pad . I personally see no use for it, but it’s a nice touch for the number crunchers out there. The Galaxy Book 4 fits a num pad onto its keyboard and doesn’t look or feel cramped for the effort. Plus, you have the Microsoft Copilot button in case you feel like taking AI for a test spin with a few questions. The keyboard even has direction keys, and yet as I typed this review, I never had to adjust my usual typing position to account for smaller keys.

The key spacing is generous and while the keys felt a little mushy to my tastes, I never experienced any bottoming out and had an overall pleasant experience. The keys give off a delicate click when pressed that’s quiet enough not to disturb an office mate.

And while I appreciate the size of the Galaxy Book’s touchpad, I wish it was a little more responsive, at least on the clicking front. I found it hard to get a right click to register unless I pressed it on the right spot. Other than that, the trackpad was fine, performing multitouch gestures with ease. Still, I’d recommend investing in a mouse to bypass that fickle touchpad.

Performance and battery

Knocked it out of the park.

With performance like this, there’s not much the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra can’t do. The Core 9 185H CPU and Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU makes a formidable duo with 32GB of LPDDR RAM and a 1TB M.2. PCIe SSD acts as the sprinkles and cherry on top. The laptop also has a NPU (Neural Processing Unit) for AI tasks.

With performance like this, there’s not much the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra can’t do.

This is a system that can handily switch between heavy productivity, photo and video editing, gaming and just about everything in between. It can definitely hang with the big boys such as the Dell XPS 16 and HP Spectre x360 16. I’d love to see how it hangs against the MacBook Pro.

While it’s somewhat expected, I’m pleasantly surprised to see how well the Galaxy Book 4 fared on our performance tests. On many of our tests, the laptop outperformed its competitors or at least matched them. For instance, the Samsung dominated PCMark 10 scoring 7,609 compared to the XPS 16’s 6,830 and the HP Spectre x360’s 6,668. We saw similar results on the graphics front with the Galaxy Book 4 crushing both the 3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme benchmarks.

Typically, laptops with discrete graphics tend to take a hit in battery life. That’s not so with the Samsung where it lasted 12 hours and 16 minutes on the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test with the display set to approximately 200 nits and the power setting on Balanced. We reran the test with the power settings maxed out and the notebook tapped out after 692 minutes or 11 hours and 32 minutes. I personally squeezed 10 hours and 27 minutes out of the Samsung which was a mix of writing the review, browsing websites, watching a couple of episodes of “3 Body Problem,” and attending a few video meetings.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra?

Hp spectre x360 16 (2024) review: major changes pay off for hp's premium convertible.

You should buy the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra if:

• You don’t want to sacrifice power over portability
• You a content creator or a undercover gamer
• You want a large display
• You want to work a full work day unplugged

You should not buy the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra if:

• You don’t care for superfluous software
• You want a less finicky touchpad
• You want a better webcam

Now this is a premium laptop, one worthy of Samsung’s past laptop greatness. The Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is a beast in a thin-and-light’s chassis. The notebook is easily one of the best 16-inch laptops of the year. First things first, it’s a stately looking system with an eye-catching display. The keyboard, despite packing in a num pad, direction keys, and a Copilot button, is seriously comfortable and the speakers are surprisingly full and balanced.

But don’t sleep, this laptop has just as much brawn as it is beauty. Its beefy Intel Core 9 Ultra processor absolutely dominated the competition and ensures that you can multitask with the best of them. Throw in the discrete Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU and content creation and all the editing that comes with it are fair game as well as gaming at a high frame rate. And despite its powerful specs, it can go the distance with over 11 hours of battery life.

That’s not to say the Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is perfect as there’s a finicky touchpad to contend with and Samsung glut of pre-installed software. But if you can overlook those minor issues, the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra is the notebook du jour for your varied ways of work and play.

The king of 16-inch laptops

The Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra packs a serious amount of power and endurance. The laptop more than capable of handling your needs for work, content creation or even gaming.

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Picture books for children – reviews

Bashful cats and lonely ponies stalk the pages of this month’s choices

W hether slinky and serious or delightfully daft, cats tend to make great picture book stars. They may often excel as witches’ sidekicks, but sometimes simple is best, as with Eva Eland’s Where Is the Cat? (Andersen Press), in which little Suzy goes to visit her Auntie and wants to play with the very reluctant Cat.

An eye-popping palette of neon-pink, green and yellow matches the high energy of Suzy, who greets Auntie on her doorstep, arms flung open, hollering “Where is the cat?”. So begins a familiar yet funny game of hide and seek between the pair – with little readers able to join in too – as Cat tries everything to avoid her: squishing himself pancake-like under chairs, teetering on top of wardrobes and peeking through plants, each page a spotting opportunity. By nap time Suzy is in tears and a sorry-looking Cat gazes on from a shelf looking poised to curl up with her for a doze. But will Suzy get her way?

More laughs come courtesy of Sarah Tagholm’s We Are the Wibbly! (Bloomsbury), a hilarious look at the life cycle of frogs. Narrated by one egg happily enjoying a peaceful life with his friends in “the wibbly” (frogspawn to us humans) until “Oh my crikeys!”, as he puts it, they all start transforming: first it’s tails, then they’re swimming and before long, they’re actual frogs. Jane McGuinness’s charming illustrations evoke a splashy underwater setting for the cute, astonished-looking tadpoles. Language purists may balk at Tagholm’s zany use of words but you’ll be hard pushed to find a more joyfully engaging insight into animal biology for the very young.

Terrible Horses (Walker) considers sibling rivalry from the perspective of a small boy who envies his older sister’s cool friends and belongings. When the pair fight and push each other he retreats into his room to draw terrible horses, galloping and kicking up dust while he stands to the side, portrayed as a lonely pony. Rhythmical text by the poet Raymond Antrobus flows over the pages, sometimes stopping abruptly at single words such as “hurt” and “hide” as the siblings’ clashes come to a climax. Ken Wilson-Max’s illustrations artfully combine depictions of the children in their home alongside the inner world of the young boy’s feelings and imagination, with the horses rendered in brightly coloured pencil marks. Fittingly, the siblings’ moving reconciliation at the end finds them drawing together. The follow-up to Antrobus’s acclaimed picture book debut, Can Bears Ski? , which was inspired by the poet’s own experiences of being deaf, Terrible Horses finds the young boy also wearing hearing aids.

Emotions continue to be a major theme in picture books. Celebrated children’s book creators Lauren Child and Laura Dockrill have teamed up for Grey (Walker, 2 May), which explores feelings through colours, while Storm-Cat by Magenta Fox (Puffin) uses the weather as a metaphor. A handsome hardback book with cut-out pages showcasing Child’s expressive drawings, the narration in Grey flips from that of a young child explaining their grey state (not “sunshine yellow, or balloon orange bright”) to an adult whose narrative voice soothes and reassures the child.

As if to prove the versatility of felines in children’s literature, it’s a kind granny cat in a red waistcoat and yellow wellies who saves her grandson from being overwhelmed by a “storm-cat” of feelings in Fox’s sweet tale. “We can’t choose our weather,” she says, “but we can choose what we make of it.”

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More From Forbes

Forget the new macbook pro, apple has something better.

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Updated April 14: article originally posted April 13.

Apple's latest MacBook Pro models may be the most advanced macOS laptops yet, but with 2024’s digital revolution set for the summer, they look set to be replaced before the end of the year.

Chinese customers look at the new MacBook Pro (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)

Apple reporter Mark Gurman reports on plans to overhaul the MacBook portfolio. Writing for Bloomberg, he notes that Apple is ready to start production of the Apple Silicon M4 chipset for macOS and the MacBook Pro family.

Although Apple updated the MacBook Pro with M3 technology late October 2023, and the MacBook Air in March 2024, the M3 platform is lacking in one vital area… Artificial Intelligence. The current flagship ARM chipsets for smartphones developed by the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTek all ship with dedicated hardware to support the use of LLM and Generative AI, and Qualcomm is presenting the Snapdragon X Elite, an ARM-based chipset for Windows laptops and desktops that should offer the same performance and power benefits as the Apple Silicon driving macOS hardware.

Several Windows manufacturers are expected to release laptops using Qualcomm's X Elite chipset, with Microsoft's new Surface hardware expected to launch exclusively with the ARM-based chipset.

Beyond the usual predictable increases thanks to Moore's Law, AI-focused hardware will be the key improvement in the M4 family, so much so that Apple is expected to upgrade its various MacBook Pro laptops as quickly as possible.

Gurman lists a low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro and high-end 14—and 16-inch MacBook Pros for a winter launch, alongside the desk-bound iMac and macMini. Of note is the lack of a MacBook Air. With the Pro laptops demanding the latest silicon for the M4 chipsets and a number of iPhone 16 models also expected to debut new AI-infused Apple Silicon, it may be that the available supply cannot meet demand if the Air is included in the mix.

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Update: Sunday April 14: Writing for Bloomberg’s Power On newsletter , Mark Gurmn not only confirms Apple’s plans for the M4 MacBook Pro laptops but also offers up a timeframe for the MacBook Airs to be updated and pick up an M4 variant.

Apple will keep the M3 MacBook Air as the leading consumer-focused laptop for another eleven months, with an update “around spring 2025” for the 13-inch and 15-inch models with the base M4 chipset. The MacBook Pro updated pegged as the end of 2024 for the low-end Pro laptop and “end of 2024 and early in 2025” for the premium models.

Gurman also notes that Apple will turnover the entire Mac range to M4 as soon as possible. While this is de rigeur for the iPhone and its Axx chipset, the Mac world has seemingly seen some models skipping generation on a whim. That's not going to be the case for M4, and if it really is about offering AI capabilities at every price point, I can see why Apple is running this process as quickly as possible.

Mac sales fell by 27 percent in the previous financial year, and revenue in the crucial fourth quarter of 2023 was flat. Apple will be hoping that the focus on AI will tempt consumers to both join the macOS platform and upgrade from existing hardware.

June's Worldwide Developer Conference will see Apple present its vision of AI on its mobile platforms, including MacOS. With the Windows ecosystem set to break out its own AI system and an upgraded ARM experience, it makes sense to hold off on any major purchases to compare the approach of Apple and Microsoft and how much better they are over the current standards.

Now read more about the challenge set by Microsoft and ARM on Windows that will face Apple this summer...

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