2026/140,141: The Clocktaur War — T Kingfisher

“What? If I wanted a lot of corpses nobody’d miss, I’d start a plague too.”
“Such a crime would be considered monstrous by all known authorities,” said Caliban.
“Yeah, the people generating unstoppable giant killing machines are probably real concerned about that.” [The Wonder Engine, p. 118]

'The Clocktaur War' is a duology -- The Clockwork Boys and The Wonder Engine) about a terrible mechanical army, and the attempts of a ragtag band of anitheroes to combat it. I read The Clocktaur Boys back in, er, 2017, and liked it, but also noted a lot of unanswered questions. (My original review of The Clockwork Boys.) "I'll definitely read the second half of the story," I vowed. But someone spoilt me for an event in the second book, The Wonder Engine, and I never got around to it. Until now... Turns out those unanswered questions are (mostly) answered, though I'd have liked more about Caliban's history. And the event for which I heard unwanted spoilers didn't turn out at all as I'd expected, which was a pleasant surprise.

More about gnole pronouns than I remembered, and a convincing romance between world-weary adults. Kingfisher's fiction is always cheering and I think she's improving as she goes -- or maybe just as she fleshes out the world of the White Rat.

Read because: When I read Daggerbound recently, the author's afterword indicated that one of the protagonists, Edmund, also appears in the Clocktaur War books. I decided it was about time I got around to the second volume of that duology ... and a reread of the first. And yes, a callow Learned Edmund is a major character -- and Learns a lot.

2026/139: International Relations — Zac Hammett

There are going to be lies one way or another, so I might as well go all in with the big one. Difficult as it may be, it’s better than telling people the truth. [loc. 1131]

Max works for the British government in international diplomacy: he has his eye on a position at the British Embassy in Athens, but his boss advises that being single is hurting his chances. Look at Quentin, his rival, and Quentin's sleek, Greek-speaking girlfriend Flora... Max, an inveterate liar, refuses to confess that his maybe-a-date stood him up for a reception at Buckingham Palace: instead, he hires an out-of-work actor to play his boyfriend.

The out-of-work actor -- recruited via the truly delightful Doily, a name-dropping theatrical agent who knows everyone in the business -- is Hunter, a gorgeous American whose visa is due to run out. (And who starred in a gender-switched production of Grease, hence Doily's suggesting him for the role...) Can he persuade Max to marry him? And can the two keep up the pretence for long enough that Max gets the job of his dreams? Or will their very different personalities, goals and approaches to life invite disaster?

Great fun once it got going, though Max's constant lies bothered me. I liked Hunter a great deal, and really appreciated the ways in which each of the protagonists resolved one another's issues without belittling them, or compromising their own goals. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes really poignant (especially Max's relationship with his dad), and with an unexpected but pleasing resolution.

Read because: recommended by a friend, and I fancied a light frothy romcom.

2026/138: The Anonymous Letters of C Forestier — Felicia Davin

I know plenty of people like us—some born in the underworld, some who ended up there by exile or by choice—but it never gets old to meet another. Women with cocks, men with cunts, people who are both or neither, people who have chosen to change themselves with clothes and haircuts and new names, and those like me who use magic. [p. 80]

C Forestier has appeared in the previous two novels in the French Letters series (The Scandalous Letters of V and J and The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q) but only peripherally: he's a resident of the same boarding house as Victor and Julie(n), and his work as a police officer seems to involve him in some of the same occult mysteries as the protagonists of those earlier books. In The Anonymous Letters of C Forestier, he embarks on a correspondence (and more!) with the mysterious, long-lived Isabelle de Tourzin. They seem to be hunting the same man, Malbosc, who has deceived and stolen from them both. And Isabelle and Forestier both have secrets that they'd kill to protect...

We learn rather more about Forestier's past, and their determination to find Malbosc, than about Isabelle's mysterious origins and magical nature: but Isabelle's determination and courage, and Forestier's growing respect and liking for her, are excellently paced. Nice to see how Isabelle is using Delphine's compass, too, and how Victor (who works for, or with, Isabelle) is blossoming in their new role. There are some dark elements in this novel -- kudos to Davin for including a list of trigger warnings! -- but love and diversity conquer all.

Read because: I recently read the second in the series, and then had to go back and reread the first to make sense of it -- so I felt it wise to prioritise this third (and so far final) volume, while the characters and setting were still fresh in my mind.

2026/137: Dinner with King Tut — Sam Kean

... artifacts sitting on a shelf, behind glass, can take us only so far into the minds of other people. To reach them on that deeper level, we need to inhabit their world -- to endure their frustrations and revel in their joys, to touch and smell and taste everything they took for granted.

Subtitled 'How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations', this is an account of human history which emphasises the human experiences of distant times and places. It begins seventy-five thousand years ago in Africa, and explores continents and cultures from Polynesia to Alaska. 

Kean blends archaeological evidence and practical experiments with thoughtfully-reconstructed fictions: a day in the life of a female hunter in the Andes, of a Viking leech, of a Roman slave, of a Polynesian navigator... Each detail in the stories has a sound basis in archaeology, and Kean throws himself into experiments that attempt to recreate the realities of other times. He knaps flint, drinks beer made with ancient Egyptian techniques, tans hide using urine, and collects bruises playing the Aztec ball game. There are in-depth discussions of Roman hairdressing (and concrete), giant sloths and Viking salves.

I am not 100% convinced that this constitutes 'rogue' archaeology, and I was not as surprised as the author seemed to be by some of the discoveries: but this audiobook, read by Derek Sterling (who conveys Kean's enthusiasm for his subject very well) was a delightful listening experience, and I'll likely re-listen at some point. Also, kudos to Kean for featuring so many female characters in his vignettes of ancient life.

Read because: on offer, looked interesting, and I was intrigued by the notion of blending fiction and non-fiction.

2026/136: As We Fall Through Time — Claire North

We are not, in fact, victims of a great pre-written fate. Time -- all of it, all of human history -- is a great big messy conflagration of connectivity, of people making choices and choosing outcomes and all of it just tangling together until what could be coalesces into what is -- but still, people choose. [loc. 4553]

Time travellers exist. Often (always?) there is something indefinite about their birth: Cal, our protagonist, was born, a medieval peasant, 'in a moment of temporal uncertainty', to a mother 'pregnant/not pregnant from an affair with a man who had/had not passed by'. 

Cal is indeterminate in other ways, too: sometimes male, sometimes female. They have a refreshingly cavalier approach to time travel (another time traveller is able to track them down via a cache of discarded asthma inhalers in a 17th-century manor house) and know how to close a rift in time by using an amaranthine, best described as a chronological paradox. And they, like all time travellers, are wary of the ghosts and witches ('fathomless creatures of unlived realities') that threaten those who move through time -- and, perhaps, threaten time itself.

The plot of As We Fall Through Time loops and layers confusingly, but at its heart is a love story (Cal falls in love with a French soldier named Olivier in 1789), a murder mystery (an archivist named Fadimatu causes a major paradox by encountering her own corpse in the Museum of the Unmasked Conspiracy), and a quixotic attempt by a time traveller named Bede to fix the climate catastrophe. The ways in which these three plots knot together is a twisty adventure, told by a mysterious first-person narrator in a resolutely non-linear sequence. It's the literary equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle, if the jigsaw puzzle sometimes made you laugh with delight at a new connection or a plot twist. And it was just as good on second reading: I found whole new angles of plot opening up.

Read because: Claire North has become one of my favourite authors -- from the 'Songs of Penelope' trilogy to the awesome Slow Gods. Obviously I read this as soon as it landed on my Kindle....

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 13th October 2026.

2026/135: The Exorcist — William Peter Blatty

The terror drifted over Georgetown like the sun over a blind man's eyes.

I have not seen, and have no intention of seeing, the film. The novel is another matter. Set in Washington DC, it focuses on Regan O'Neil, who's twelve years old, and her mother Chris, a famous actress. Regan starts playing with a Ouija board, talking to an entity she calls 'Captain Howdy'. Soon, her behaviour changes dramatically. Meanwhile, Chris's director is murdered, and there are instances of desecration at a local church.

Chris seeks the help of Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit who's struggling with the death of his mother and the loss of his own faith. Karras applies rigorous methodology to the task of determining whether Regan is truly possessed. Meanwhile, Detective Kinderman is investigating the murder and the desecration, and suspects Karras himself...

Karras may not be the titular Exorcist -- he's deemed lacking experience, and an older priest, Father Merrin, is brought in to perform the ritual -- but he is the central character of the novel. Trained as a psychiatrist, he's adept at applying the scientific method to matters of religious doctrine. He's also a man who cannot turn aside from someone in need (one can read events at the end of the novel as the story of someone driven mad by lack of sleep) and whose loss of faith has left him profoundly lonely.

Precise, characterful dialogue throughout: Blatty (a professional screenwriter) fleshes out secondary characters such as Chris's housekeeper Karl, and conveys each character's story through their speech and actions rather than description. The scenes featuring early 1970s electronics (for instance the tapes used to record the demon's utterances) gave me a shudder of familiarity. And it is plain, in this novel, that good and evil are real. I found the story compelling, and the characters fascinating: I would happily read more of Blatty's fiction.

Read because: I recently read another novel in which a character reads The Exorcist aloud, to entertain. Coincidentally, this audiobook (read by the author) was on offer...

2026/134: The Old Drift — Namwali Serpell

Trust our biology, it teaches you better. If you grip too tight, you'll lose the fight. If you stay in one place, you'll fester and waste. When young ones grow full, they must drift from the pool, lest it turn to a watery grave.

The Old Drift tells the entwined, tangled stories of three generations of Zambians. It begins in 1902, with 'Percy M. Clark, a wanderer, a brute, a cad, the forefather who started it all.' (When I first acquired this novel in Kindle form, I never got past that section.) The rest of the novel, though, focuses on more intriguing individuals, spanning the years from 1939 to 2023 -- which was, when this was published, The Future.

There are Italian immigrants, one with magic-realist hair; a blind girl who falls for an engineering student without knowing that he's black; the Zambian 'Afronauts'; sex workers, revolutionaries, immigrants, doctors... The novel is split into three sections -- 'The Grandmothers', 'The Mothers' and 'The Children' -- each with three viewpoint characters: this structure made it easier for me to appreciate each section individually, as well as the wider context in which the characters overlapped. The focus is very much on women and girls, though in 'The Children' two of the three protagonists are young men. And throughout the novel there's a strong sense of seizing possibilities, of repurposing and reworking the legacies of colonialism. A swarm of mosquitoes provides a lyrical, omniscient chorus bracketing each section. (They're quoted at the top of this review.)

I was ignorant of Zambia's history, and found this educational as well as immersive. I found myself drawn into stories that I would normally not have wanted to read, and appreciated Serpell's knack of blending historical and cultural facts with well-paced plots. And, on reflection, I think the sense of dissatisfaction I had with the final few chapters was because the time at which they're set (2023) is already in the past: the future depicted in those chapters felt, feels, as though it would be further away, maybe mid-21st century, but of course that wouldn't work with the 'three generations' structure.

Brilliantly narrated by Adjoa Andoh, with Richard E. Grant (doing Percy) and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (doing mosquitos): Andoh produced a myriad of distinct voices for the characters, and made them easy to distinguish.

Namwali Serpell's New Yorker piece on the Afronauts can be found here.

Read because: this novel won the Arthur C Clarke Award ('for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year') in 2020: I purchased a copy as soon as I learnt that it featured, among other narrators, a swarm of mosquitoes... but bounced off the initial 'white male colonist' section. I found the audiobook more accessible.