By Jenny Colgan

BBC Books, out July 19

An assortment of Jenny Colgan’s Doctor Who stories are compiled from other collections to form a single volume, and proves a great introduction to the author’s work within the Whoniverse.

I’ve always been a fan of Jenny Colgan’s Doctor Who stories, from Dark Horizons and In the Blood, right through to the Target novelisation of The Christmas Invasion. And that’s why it’s a treat to have four and a bit stories collected in this one tome. The fifth story, A Long Way Down, was written for the dust jacket of the print omnibus of the Trip Trips series, and at seven pages it feels more like a pre-credits scene, but it’s a joy nevertheless.

The other stories in the book have been taken from The Legends of Ashildr, The Legends of River Song, Time Trips and The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who, so if you’ve already got all or some of those volumes, be wary that you’re double-dipping to some degree.

The Triple Knife (from The Legends of Ashildr, 2015) takes a reference to the death of the immortal girl’s children in The Woman Who Lived and spins a complete tale in the style of first-person diary entries. Colgan herself in the book’s introduction shares that being a mother of three herself the prospect of losing your children is an awful one, and this really is a fatalistic, tragic tale as child Essie befriends Rose the rat in August 1348 and the Black Death follows. Ashildr has seen so much death in her life and shows great fortitude watching her children pass away – she resolves that it will never happen again.

Picnic at Asgard (from 2016’s The Legends of River Song) references the event mentioned in Silence in the Library and proves to be a trip to a planet-sized Norse Myths theme park. The Doctor is looking forward to watching a monster show with animatronic creatures which won’t require his intervention… and then things go wrong. There’s some witty repartee between the two protagonists, and while it doesn’t quite hit the heights of The Husbands of River Song (it doesn’t have the luxury of that beautiful ending) this is a fun romp that will inevitably leave you grinning.

Into the Nowhere was the second of the 2014 Time Trips ebooks and features the 11th Doctor with Clara. At 60 pages, it’s the longest in the collection and immediately throws us into a planet more perilous than Kembel, as quicksand, spooky woods, a giant snake and a hooded skeleton all do their best to finish of our explorers. It has a real old school Doctor Who feel to it, and one can even imagine the garish accompanying colour illustrations in a late 1970s annual.

All The Empty Towers is on the face of it probably the most unlikely inclusion, having originated in 2015’s The Scientific Secrets of Doctor Who, where short fiction stories were alternated with real-world science; this tale of the 12th Doctor and Clara preceded a chapter on the future of Earth. A visit to Clara’s home town of Blackpool is somewhat ruined when the TARDIS drops the travellers off in 2089 where climate change has led to the coastal resort becoming overgrown. Meghan the donkey is being attacked by flying discs and a half-woman/half-machine landlady is terrorising the Pleasure Beach alongside feral stag parties. It’s all very bonkers with a nod towards Douglas Adams, and the good news is that this future is not a fixed point in time – time to stop producing single-use plastics, kids.

A stunning new cover design by David Wardle completes this pocket-sized book. You might easily rattle through it in one or two sittings, such is the clarity of the prose and propulsive thrust of the stories. It’s a welcome addition to Doctor Who’s Year of the Woman thread.

Verdict: A great collection featuring popular Doctor Who characters, the only caution I’d express is checking whether or not you already have them from the four books that they were originally written for. 8/10

Nick Joy

Click here to order The Triple Knife from Amazon.co.uk