2026/039: Piper at the Gates of Dusk — Patrick Ness

The god comes screaming through the trees, shoving them to each side like matchsticks, breaking and burning them as it thrashes its way out of the woods... [opening paragraph]

In the original Chaos Walking trilogy (The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men) Todd was thirteen, dealing with life on an alien planet and the constant phenomenon of Noise -- the constant thoughts and feelings of the men (all the women are dead) in the colony -- and the threat of the alien Spackle. Piper at the Gates of Dusk starts a generation later, and focuses on Max and Ben, the two sons raised by Viola and Todd. Their world is very different to that in the first trilogy: Noise has been 'cured', the Spackle are now known as 'the Land' (except by rude racists), the colony is thriving. But then a burning god comes out of the woods, and the children of the colony start having nightmares, and there's something in the sky which might be an alien spaceship.

Ness explores gender with considerably more nuance than before: there's a trans character, and a range of reactions to that character from 'are you sure? is it just a phase?' to all-out transphobia with a religious flavour. There's also more about the natives, the Land: and, this being Ness who does not pull his punches, there are some truly harrowing scenes. Ness riffs on the legend of the Pied Piper -- who stole all the children save one from Hamelin, leaving one boy behind -- and the ways in which stories shape, and are shaped by, the societies in which they evolve.

I really liked Ben and Max, and wanted to howl at the cliffhanger ending. The political elements (a mayor elected by dubious means, who lies and scapegoats and distracts people from the truth) were a little too relevant to be comfortable. And grown-up Todd and Viola are flawed and human, but devoted to their family. I'm very much looking forward to the next in this new trilogy.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 7th April 2026.

2026/038: Broken April — Ismail Kadare (translator: John Hodgson)

The guest, the bessa, and vengeance are like the machinery of classical tragedy, and once you are caught up in the mechanism, you must face the possibility of tragedy. [Chapter 3]

A tragedy set in Albania. Gjorg Berisha is compelled by the Kanun, the ancient laws of the mountain country, to kill the man who killed his brother. The murder cements his own fate: he'll be killed in turn by one of the men of the Kryeqyqe family, in thirty days' time. (Women are generally excluded from the messy cycle of vengeance.) The feud which Gjorg is part of has been running for seventy years, since a guest -- sacrosant according to the Kanun -- was murdered. Since that murder, hundreds more men have been killed. It's unclear whether there's even a possibility of the feud ending before every adult male in both families has paid the blood-debt.

There's a dark, timeless air to the first chapter, so much so that I was shocked when Gjorg paused to watch an aeroplane fly over! Soon, though, the focus switches to more modern-minded characters: the writer Bessian Vorpsi and his bride Diana, spending their honeymoon in the mountains. Bessian spends hours explaining the Kanun and the blood feud ('at once terrible, absurd, and fatal, like all the really important things') to Diana, who is horrified. She glimpses Gjorg, on his way to pay the blood-tax, and becomes fascinated by him and his fate. Gjorg, too, is enchanted by this beautiful 'foreign' woman from the lowlands, and spends much of his remaining life-span searching the country for another glimpse of her. And Diana breaks custom and does an unspeakable thing in search of Gjorg.

Kadare recounts the story simply and powerfully, without any authorial discussion of the morality of the characters' actions. Bessian and Diana provide a twentieth-century perspective, but Bessian's at pains to insist that this is a legal code that probably predates Christianity. And he does provide an overview of the Kanun's political, agricultural, social and cultural effects. The long history and the persistence of the Kanun is fascinating -- though I was perturbed to learn that blood feuds have become common again since the end of communism. (An Albanian Boy's Life Ruined by Blood Feuds [2014].)

This was a compelling read, though not a cheerful one. I pitied Gjorg but did not especially warm to him. And the sense of each individual's helplessness in the face of tradition, Kanun and honour was deeply depressing.

Each man chose between corn and vengeance. Some, to their shame, chose corn... [chapter 4]

2026/037: Star Shipped — Cat Sebastian

Simon’s been trying to keep things friendly, neutral, light, to act like they didn’t spend two days presenting one another with secrets like outdoor cats gently placing mangled rodents at one another’s feet. [p. 205]

Simon Devereaux is thirty-four, prone to migraines and anxiety attacks, and for seven years one of the two stars of Out There, a sci-fi show described as 'Twin Peaks in space, leaning hard into the camp'. Simon's antisocial tendencies are acknowledged and accepted by the rest of the cast, and he has a comfortable enmity going with his co-star Charlie Blake, who's improbably good-looking and highly gregarious. Now Simon's thinking of leaving the show. Things hit crisis point when his ex, Jamie, moves back into his house and disrupts all of Simon's careful rituals. An opportunity for escape is provided by Charlie, who's worried about his step-dad and invites Simon to accompany him on a road trip to Arizona.

This is a delightful warm bath of a book, a slow-burn romance between two charismatic and likeable characters. Along the way, Simon -- the viewpoint character throughout -- learns to accept his mental health issues and his migraines as a form of disability (and his dachshund Edie as an emotional support animal); reassesses his relationships with co-workers, family and Charlie himself; and develops a taste for romantasy novels with dragons in them. (His favourite book as a kid was Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons.) And sniping at Charlie, of course.

Star Shipped is also a love letter to fandom, from the dedication ("For the people who write the world’s most gorgeous stories about television shows I might have seen one episode of twenty years ago. You’re lifesavers.") to Simon's own background as a fanfic author (LOTR, Sherlock), and his pleasure that fans write fic about his character, and about him. There are snapshots of exchanges on an Out There fandom Discord, where the fans enthuse about public evidence of Simon and Charlie's relationship, and these are affectionate and spot-on, with a sense of the real people behind the pseuds.

I loved this: it was exactly what I needed, cheerful and funny and never demeaning or mocking Simon's mental health issues. And I loved the fandom-friendly energy, and the references to sci-fi tropes such as 'the body-swap episode', the hiding behind ruined alien temples, the interstellar bounty hunters... This felt like reading really good fanfic!

I also decided that it works for the 'a character who does Pilates' challenge prompt (at least unless something more apt comes along), solely on the basis of Simon's complaint that  'Sometimes Jamie makes me do Pilates'.

2026/036: A Great Reckoning — Louise Penny

“Not every mystery is a crime,” said the Commander. “But every crime starts as a mystery." [p. 76]

Gamache has come out of retirement to take the role of Commander at the Sûreté Academy, which has lately been turning out new police officers who are aggressive, brutal and not up to Gamache's standards. He has to root out the source of the corruption, which -- in typical Gamache style -- he does by keeping on some known troublemakers on the staff, and recruiting his old friend-turned-nemesis Michel Brébeuf as another teacher. Of course everything goes swimmingly, until one member of staff is murdered.

The focus shifts to a group of four young cadets, who have been previously tasked to work together on solving the mystery of a century-old map found in the wall of the Three Pines bistro. The map shows Three Pines, but also includes a snowman and a pyramid: and it also appears on a stained-glass window at the chapel, tucked into the rucksack of a young soldier heading off to fight in the Great War. Curiously, one of the cadets has lost her copy of the map ... which turned up in the murder victim's room. And the cadet sans map is Amanda, to whom Gamache seems to have some mysterious connection...

I mostly read these for the characters, and the vignettes of life in Three Pines, and Gamache's essential goodness and gnomic utterances (not to mention his habit of concealing his plans until they come to fruition). There were some lovely scenes in this novel, and some excellent clues, including a reference to a scene in The Deer Hunter. A pleasing, calming, engrossing read that felt like a brief holiday from reality.

2026/035: Cuckoo Song — Frances Hardinge

Trying to cling to the past, to the way things were, pretending nothing has changed. Everything changes and breaks and stops fitting – and we know that, even with our stopped clock. The world is breaking, and changing, and dancing. Always on the move. That’s how it is. That’s how it has to be. [p. 409]

Reread for book club: first read in 2014. I remembered very little except Triss' true nature and the scissors. That said, I find that my Kindle highlights match quotes from that earlier review... And I'm not sure I have much more to say about it, other than that this time around I really sympathised with Violet, who carries the winter with her, and who is definitely kicking against society's decrees about what nice girls do.

The parents' behaviour towards their remaining children -- who they only want to keep safe -- is borderline abusive. Pen is the scapegoat, Triss is the delicate flower, and nobody must ever mention Sebastian or talk about any of the problems within the family. (Sebastian's fate is cruel: I wish we'd had more of his letters. )

Hardinge's prose is deliciously visual, vivid and arresting: a cry 'sounded the way a scar looks'; 'so dark that she seemed to hear the hiss as it sucked light out of the air'; and, when they're pursued, the pursuers are 'cold on their heels'. 

We spent quite a while wondering where Ellchester was. I thought it had a northern feel but the consensus, eventually, was that it might be Bristol-adjacent.

2026/034: The Invention of Essex — Tim Burrows

I started to recognise an intrinsic feeling of accentuation when it came to Essex, between sparseness and density, bucolic abandonment and oncoming modernity, realism and poetry, country and city, rich and poor – buzzing dichotomies that meant that, as hard as I tried to pin Essex’s story down, it always somehow slipped away. [loc. 1151]

Burrows was born in Essex^*, and moved back there from London when he and his wife started a family. He has real affection for the county, but a solid grasp of its socioeconomics, and of the TOWIE-fuelled perception of Essex as 'a land of crass consumerism, populated by perma-tanned chancers and loose women with more front than Clacton-on-Sea'. 

Essex has long been viewed as a classless, uncultured wilderness -- apart, of course, from 'Constable Country', which Burrows describes as 'a shambling pastoral scene assiduously cultivated since the days of [the painter] Constable', and which attracts the kind of tourists who would flinch at the raucous glories of Southend seafront. Dismissed as 'the rubbish dump of London', Essex is the site of multiple, often toxic landfill sites where the majority of London's actual rubbish ended up. It's also where working-class Londoners moved in the hope of a better quality of life. And Essex has long been a hotbed of dissent, individualism (utopians, occultists, political and religious extremists), experiments in new ways of living (from communes to worker-oriented 'new towns) and, of course, crime.

Burrows often writes for the Guardian, and his piece on the Broomway and the stranded Amazon van prompted me to buy this long-wishlisted book. I learnt about plotlands, which I'd somehow been unaware of despite growing up with people who lived in them! And about the ecological impact of the London Gateway megaport, dredging for which has destroyed much of the local fishing industry. Burrows is also good at putting stereotypes such as 'Essex Man' and 'Essex Girl' into context, and he's quietly scathing about the superficial glamour, and the underlying classism and misogyny that informs those stereotypes.

Some weird hyphenation throughout -- Basil-don, South-end, Med-way -- but otherwise immensely readable, informative and well-researched.

^*I was also born in Essex, but nearer the edge of the map: Burrows barely mentions the area where I grew up, though it's less than ten miles from his current home in Southchurch.

2026/033: Mercutio — Kate Heartfield

Mercutio has never been in love. Not unless you count a boy whose face he can barely remember. Not unless you count the world. [loc. 2328]

Mercutio Guertio (yes, that Mercutio) meets Dante Alighieri at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289: they are caught in a freak storm -- where they glimpse spectral armies, and becomes certain that there is a third man with them -- but stumble back to the carnage of the battlefield, and subsequently become friends. Mercurio, though, has been changed: he sees people who are not there, and does not recognise the stars in the night sky. Then Dante, grieving the death of 'his' Beatrice, is pulled into Faerie, where he wanders in a dark wood...

Mercutio does not know the way to Faerie, but he's encountered their Queen, and she tells him that he can rescue Dante if he can find a doorway. Brunetto Latini, Dante's friend and teacher, suggests that Mercutio joins the expedition of the Vivaldi brothers, who want to find a route to Asia by sailing west from Spain. Surely Faerie is on the other side of the world, and thus can be found on the way to Asia?

En route, Mercutio encounters a female pope, sailors from China and Africa, a helpful friar who supplies a medicine made of henbane, and a hermit who claims to be the son of Abelard and Heloise. He's haunted by a silent, mysterious man who people seem to think is his brother: and he's differently haunted by memories of his lost love, a boy who he called Blackbird after mishearing the other's name as 'I fly'.

This is a splendid novel, packed with cosmology, Italian history (Guelphs and Ghibellines), Tarot imagery, and perfidious fae. The fantastical elements blend folk tales, ballads and mythology: to me, Heartfield's Faerie had a distinctly medieval feel, reminiscent of Chaucer and Boccaccio. The novel also provides an origin story for Dante's Divine Comedy: and, of course, Mercutio has to get to Verona and encounter the warring Montecchi and Cappalletti factions... 

But at its heart, Mercutio is the story of the friendship between Mercutio and Dante, and the implacable vengeance of the Faerie Queen. Mercutio is vividly rendered, with a blend of self-doubt, cynicism and joie de vivre that seems fitting for the changes he witnesses in the world around him. I liked him a great deal: and I'll look out for Heartfield's other novels, because her prose is readable and this story full of surprises.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 7th May 2026.