2025/176: Everything I Need I Get From You — Kaitlyn Tiffany

...fans are connecting based on affinity and instinct and participating in hyperconnected networks that they built for one purpose but can use for many others. [p. 270]

The subtitle, 'How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It', is somewhat misleading. The Archive of Our Own -- built by (mostly female) fans, currently hosting over 16 million fanworks, proudly cost-free and independent since 2007 -- gets a single sentence. In contrast Tumblr (owned by a succession of big tech companies) is repeatedly lauded as an archive as well as a medium for sharing and communicating. 

The book's focus is very much on One Direction (1D) fandom, and the author's personal experience is part of the story. She explores how fandom can be a coping mechanism, a creative outlet, a way of life: and she doesn't shy away from some of the more troubling aspects of fandom, such as outspoken fannish certainty that (for instance) two members of One Direction were in a committed relationship. The prevalence of this notion affected the band, as well as the multitude of believers.

Tiffany discusses 'affirmational' vs 'transformational' fandom (terms she attributes to a Dreamwidth post from 2008): affirmational fandom celebrates the source for what it is, transformational fandom transforms it. She describes how fans use and abuse the internet and associated technology to connect and communicate, to celebrate, but also to protest and organise. The Black Lives Matter activism on various high-profile blogs is one instance of the latter: Tiffany also cites the ways in which fans use technology to circumvent local restrictions, for example spoofing IP addresses to upvote a band's singles for the Billboard charts. (Guess which band?)

My vague sense of disconnection with this book clarified on page 126, when the author says 'My mother was born in 1965'. Aha! Tiffany is very much part of a younger generation of fandom than mine: digital natives, people who grew up with the internet and with internet fan communities.

And, the excesses of 1D fandom aside (there is a thorough exegesis of the Harry Styles Vomit Shrine), I think that quite a lot of the themes discussed in this book also apply to old-school SF fandom. At the start of the book, Tiffany says 'Before most people were using the internet for anything, fans were using it for everything' [p.7]. Like many of my readers, my initial reasons for getting online included the urge to connect with other people who liked the same books. And in those long-ago days of Yahoo Groups (closed, apparently, in 2020) and that newfangled thing called LiveJournal, I discovered my tribe.

Hello, tribe.

2025/175: Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. [loc. 1023]

Love in the Time of Cholera is the long and rambling love (or 'love') story of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza. They fall for one another as teenagers, and have a romantic correspondence by letter and telegram -- but never a conversation. When Fermina sees Florentino again after an absence, she realises she feels nothing for him, and rejects him. Instead she marries Doctor Juvenal Urbino, a young doctor determined to eradicate cholera, and they make a life together.

Meanwhile Florentino embarks on a life of promiscuity. Six hundred and twenty two affairs, plus casual (and not always consensual) liaisons too numerous and nameless to count. His worst conquest is saved for last: his young ward América Vicuña, who's a teenager when Florentino is in his seventies. "...he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse". [loc. 4548]

Still, he has to pass the time somehow until Fermina's husband dies: then he will 'have' Fermina. (The thought that she won't 'have' him never seems to enter his daydreams.) Between affairs, he becomes President of the Caribbean Riverboat Company, which destroys the ecology of the local river system in its insatiable greed for firewood to stoke the boilers. A metaphor, you say?

Though this is not a long novel in terms of page count, it felt interminable. Fifty years of Fermina's marriage (culminating in Dr Urbino's death while trying to catch his pet parrot): fifty years of Florentino's sexual predation. It's a sweeping saga that explores love in its many forms, and how an individual's definition of and perception of love changes as they grow older. But it also 'explores' racism, promiscuity, paedophilia, murder and suicide, misogyny, illness... 

If we knew nothing of Florentino's story -- only that he reappears after Dr Urbino's death, and helps the widowed Fermina come to terms with her grief -- it would be a glorious romance. Sadly, I can't stop trying and failing to balance that romance with América Vicuña's fate.

I have never quite got around to reading Marquez, and I wonder if I would have appreciated this book more in the 1980s, when it was published. But surely even then I would have found the behaviour toxic? I will read One Hundred Years of Solitude at some point: I'm told there's more magical realism and less sleaze. Not yet, though. It'll wait.

“Love is the only thing that interests me,” he said.
“The trouble,” his uncle said to him, “is that without river navigation there is no love.” [loc. 2768]

2025/174: My Name Isn't Paul — Drew Huff

I don't want to be a sentient empathy-filament-abomination, so I only eat human food. [loc. 65]

Paul Cattaneo is dead: to begin with. He's been replaced by a Mirror Person who wears a 'skinsuit' replica of Paul Cattaneo's body. His friend 'John O'Malley' (formerly Noonie) is another Mirror Person. 'We are forty-something blue-collar human men. We aren't fuckin' bugs.' Unfortunately, (a) they are bugs and (b) they will soon go into heat, which involves fornicating with another Mirror Person, finding a human in whom to deposit the eggs, and watch the larvae feed. So, yes, fuckin' bugs.

This is the story of 'Paul', a.k.a. Uxon, who's consumed by self-loathing, mourning a friend's suicide, and trying to deny his own nature. It's about being a person as well as being an eldritch abomination: about Paul's relationship with Paul Cattaneo's wife (who spotted the change in the man who was pretending to be her husband, because he no longer beat her) and about how the other Mirror People -- refugees from another dimension, probably -- rally round to support him when he goes off the rails. It's about living in the 'wrong' body and rejecting the biology of that body.

It's a neat idea, but perhaps would have worked better as a novel than a novella. Some truly icky scenes (there are content warnings at the start of the book, hurrah!) and multiple viewpoints. For me, this was interesting rather than engaging, but your mileage may vary.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 18th November 2025.

2025/173: Slow Gods — Claire North

They like to make sure I am observed. When no one is looking, that's when I forget to be ... acceptable. Normal. Part of this world. [loc. 1116]

This is the first-person account of Mawukana Respected na-Vdnaze ('Maw'), who's born into poverty and debt in an uber-capitalist civilisation known as the Shine. When the Slow -- a huge, ancient construct that is something like a god -- sends a message warning of a future supernova that will destroy all life within a radius 100 light years, the Shine suppresses the warning. People are afraid, and furious: there is civil unrest: Maw is imprisoned, sentenced to what's effectively slave labour, and then forced to become a Pilot.

Pilots are necessary to interface with machine navigation in order for spaceships to travel through 'arc-space', where the darkness seems alive and aware, where people are haunted by hallucinations and the sense of presence. ('Various words are ascribed to the 'otherness', the unknowable 'thing' waiting in the dark. Common ones are: uncanny, malign, sinister, slippery, clawing, cruel, malevolent, mischievous...' [loc. 1686]) Most Pilots go mad or die after a few trips. Maw dies, it seems, on his first trip: but it isn't permanent. The darkness has somehow got inside him.

But he is useful. Other worlds are taking the supernova warning seriously: organising the mass evacuation of hundreds of worlds; reacting to the certain deaths of the billions who can't be saved; racing to preserve cultural treasures. Maw, the Pilot who's lasted longer than any other, is at the heart of it all.

I read Maw as being on the autism spectrum even before his first death: he talks about 'always doing something a little bit wrong', about not really having emotions but picking up on the feelings of others, about not getting the hang of smalltalk. Whatever happens to him in the dark changes a great deal about him, but at heart he is still an imperfect person -- or an imperfect copy of one.

This book has a plethora of pronouns: he and him, she and her -- but also, in the Shine, hé and hím, shé and hér, for individuals who exemplify the current concept of 'man' or 'woman' (the Shine does not accept other gender identities); qe and qim for AI individuals; xe and xer, te and ter, and more. There's an amusing interlude about pronouns and about how different cultures assign them differently and for differing periods. "So... the important thing is your genitals?" blurts one character when this is explained.

There are, to be fair, a lot of infodumps, signposted as Interludes: this is a huge and cosmopolitan universe, with many civilisations and many inhabited planets. Most of the non-AI characters are more or less humanoid, but there are aquatic and avian sentient species too. There are also sentient, organic, plant-based spaceships, like the splendid Pride of Emni. The universe-building is a delight: each culture, each society, distinct and idiosyncratic. I was reminded, at times, of Iain M. Banks' Culture: at other times, of Ursula Le Guin's gift for depicting a society.

I loved Slow Gods, even through the misery and cruelty of the first few chapters. I like Maw as a character, though I can see why he needs constant supervision so as not to become 'dysregulated'. I like his quan (AI) companions, especially Rencki, and his gentle let's-not-call-it-love affair with a curator (whose gender is never specified, because irrelevant). I like that Maw gardens, and that he learns to accept himself. I love Claire North's writing: every new project of hers is a surprise, with a different flavour and a different focus. (See Ithaca and the rest of the 'Songs of Penelope' trilogy; The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Touch, The Sudden Appearance of Hope.) And I am quietly joyful that, amid the genocide and murder, the slavery and war, this is a novel about life as a miracle and love as its guiding principle.

I don't know how you're meant to be this small in a universe this big, this insignificant in a galaxy where every decision matters, where every life is precious. I don't know how to feel so huge and so loud inside, and so small and quiet before the dark. [loc. 4061]

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 18th November 2025.

2025/170-172: Whiskeyjack, Blackcurrant Fool, Love-in-a-Mist — Victoria Goddard

Perhaps it was not the blind malignancy of fate making my life so complicated. Perhaps it was me. [Whiskeyjack, loc. 4159]

Rereads to sustain me through a bad cold and the aftermath of my birthday celebrations: I can think of few better remedies.

Whiskeyjack (original review here) introduces layers of complication, curses, several people who are not who they say they are, and Mr Dart's magic becoming more obvious to those around him. After reading Olive and the Dragon, Jemis' mother's letter has new poignancy.

Blackcurrant Fool (original review here) is the one where they all go to Tara: there are highwaymen, kittens, dens of iniquity, and Jemis' toxic ex-girlfriend. Also a devastating denouement, and some healthy post-colonialism. In some respects this is my least favourite of the novels, though it can't be because of the setting...

Love-in-a-Mist (original review here) is a country-house murder mystery, with a unicorn, the revelation of the Hunter in Green's identity, coded messages in the personal ads, and a missing heiress. I think this might be my favourite so far.

Even just rereading my old reviews is making me want to plunge on to the currently-final novel, and the novellas... but I will save those for especially awful days between now and Bubble and Squeak.

2025/169: Careless People — Sarah Wynn-Williams

...the board gets into a conversation about what other companies or industries have navigated similar challenges, where they have to change a narrative that says that they’re a danger to society, extracting large profits, pushing all the negative externalities onto society and not giving back. ... Elliot finally says out loud the one I think everyone’s already thinking about (but not saying): tobacco. That shuts down the conversation. [loc. 3242]

The subtitle is 'A Story of Where I Used to Work', but it's being sold under the strapline 'The explosive memoir that Meta doesn't want you to read' -- with good reason, as this article indicates: "Meta has served a gagging order on Sarah and is attempting to fine her $50,000 for every breach of that order.". I quit Facebook a while back (though I did miss it in the first year of the pandemic, when so much of everyone's social life was online) but if I hadn't, I would have deleted my account well before I'd finished reading this book.

Wynn-Williams survived a shark attack when she was a teenager: there's probably a metaphor about working for Facebook here, but instead it made her want to do something with her life, to make a difference. After working for the New Zealand government's diplomatic service, she identified Facebook as a powerful political force, pitched a global policy role, and was hired. Six years later, she was fired for toxicity and poor performance. Or so say Facebook. The book says something rather different, about a company with a toxic culture, a lack of accountability and a determination to grow at any cost.

I engaged with Careless People on two levels: firstly, as someone who's worked in an environment where unreasonable demands were a daily occurence; secondly, as someone who had suspected Facebook of unethical behaviour, but hadn't realised its extent. I recognise that desire to change things from the inside, the desperate hope that things will improve. I recognise a culture where the employee's personal life is regarded as something less important than work. One horrific passage about the birth of the author's first child:

Dr. Veca reaches over and gently closes my laptop. She says, “It’s a very special thing to give birth to your first child. I don’t think you should be working through it. Sheryl will understand.”
“She won’t,” I say. “Please let me push Send.” [loc. 1457]

To make it worse, 'Sheryl' is COO Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which encourages women to assert themselves at home and at work -- though apparently not to any extent that might inconvenience Sandberg personally. Sandberg strikes me as a hellish boss, and Wynn-William's other superiors aren't much better. After the author's second pregnancy, there's a surreally negative performance review on her return from maternity leave, where she's told that colleagues found her 'challenging to engage with': “I mean, you know, I was in hospital, in a coma and near death, but I accept that this did make it hard to engage with me at times.” [loc. 3540].

It may sound as though I care more about the author's personal experiences than about the incredible damage Facebook has done to global culture and politics. Yes and no. I found Wynn-Williams' narrative easy to relate to, though magnitudes worse than anything I have experienced myself. And Facebook's crimes have been documented extensively: supporting the junta in Myanmar (while having one (1) employee -- actually a contractor in Ireland -- who was fluent in Burmese); funding and supporting Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election; supporting the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum; providing data allowing cosmetics advertisers to target girls between 13 and 17 who've posted and then deleted a selfie; misleading Congress about the extent of its (illegal) operations in China; supporting right-wing governments, viewed as less likely to impose restrictions on Facebook's operations in their countries...

Careless People is a gripping read about a company whose actions affect billions of people. It provides an insider's view of Mark Zuckerberg and his singleminded (blinkered?) drive to make his company more and more powerful. That it's also an engaging and often humorous account of one woman's loss of faith in her employer is a bonus. (And yes, she could have left: there's only so long you can keep telling yourself that you have more power to change things from the inside. But given her medical issues and the cost of US healthcare, her desire to keep her health insurance is relateable.) I suspect Wynn-Williams will not be called for interview at any tech company any time soon: but I look forward to the biopic.

...working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money... [loc. 131]

2025/168: Stargazy Pie — Victoria Goddard

“—- This is all very civilized and delightful,” Mrs. Etaris burst in, rushing back at us like a dark blue sheepdog herding her flock, “but I’m afraid we really should be going inside if we don’t want our friends and neighbours to be sacrificed to the Dark Kings." [p. 345]

First in the Greenwing and Dart series: reread, to remind myself just how miserable, unwell and generally detached Jemis was when he first returned to Ragnor Bella (the dullest town in Northwest Oriole) after the debacle of his final term at Morrowlea. Original review here... 

This time around I appreciate Mrs Etaris much more (and wonder whatever became of her previous assistant, 'a quite lovely young man'). I'm also fascinated by the offhand mentions of life before the Fall. ('Whistle a few notes and anyone could call light into a dark room, mage or no, before the Empire fell' (p. 144)).

Anyway! A fish pie (and the Honourable Rag eating herring eyes); aphrodisiacs and a Decadent dinner party; the mysterious Miss 'Redshank'; Jemis as apprentice bookseller; and all manner of delicious references to life in Ragnor Bella.

I may now need to read another one...

2025/167: Book of Cats — Ursula Le Guin

He sent his life forth as the crippled tree
puts forth white flowers in April every year
upon the dying branch. He knew the way.[loc. 93]

A birthday gift from a dear friend: it comprises Le Guin's 1982 'The Art of Bunditsu' (a “tabbist” meditation on the arranging of cats, with Le Guin's sketches of her cat Lorenzo); two sets of poems, some of which brought tears to my eyes as they dealt with the deaths of beloved cats; and various cat-letters, anecdotes and blog posts. Even in these small pieces her prose is perfect and precise: I share her love of cats and her preference for treating them as individuals. Beautiful.

2025/166: Death of the Author — Nnedi Okorafor

The rusted robots in the story were a metaphor for wisdom, patina, acceptance, embracing that which was you, scars, pain, malfunctions, needed replacements, mistakes. What you were given. The finite. Rusted robots did not die in the way that humans did, but they celebrated mortality. [loc. 989]

Nigerian-American Zelu, at the start of the novel, is thirty two years old, paraplegic after falling out of a tree twenty years ago, a creative writing tutor, a novelist, and single At her sister's destination wedding, the last three of these change: she loses her job, her latest litfic novel is rejected, and she hooks up with Msizi. And, sitting on the beach in tears, smoking weed, she decides to write a novel about 'a world that she’d like to play in when things got to be too much, but which didn’t exist yet'. This novel -- extracts from which are intercut with the Zelu-focussed narrative -- is called Rusted Robots: it's a story of AIs ('NoBodies') and humanoid robots ('Humes') in Nigeria after the extinction of humanity, and it is wildly successful.

Not that her family believe her when she tells them she's scored a million-dollar book deal. Instead, they accuse her of being high (accurate, but not the point). Though they've protected and supported her since her accident, they also harbour very traditional Nigerian attitudes to disability: 'more interested in who was to blame than they were in how she lived her life.' They infantilise her, patronise her, try to prevent her from making choices about her own body. It's hardly surprising that Zelu is angry with everyone -- family, fans, random strangers -- though her anger does sometimes make her difficult to like.

This is a novel about family and culture, storytelling and identity, technology and how we use it. There's plenty about the publishing industry and the film industry: Zelu is horrified by and furious at the movie's Americanisation (Ankara and Ijele, her protagonists, become Yankee and Dot) and thoroughly fed up of all the fans clamouring for the sequel. There's also a strong theme of how humans use technology, and whether a 'mechanism' can truly create. And it's a novel about disability and how it shapes self-image, as well as how others behave. Having read Okorafor's account of her own disability (Broken Places and Outer Spaces) it was interesting to see how she fictionalised aspects of her experience.

Death of the Author is suffused with Nigerian, and Nigamerican, culture (including the nightmarish masquerades). Okorafor doesn't rose-tint Zelu's visit to Nigeria, which is quite a different sort of nightmare. It's clear that Zelu's success gives her a lot of options that others, especially of her background, don't have: and she is refreshingly selfish about her ability to make her own choices.

A slow novel, and one which, rather than having a dramatic denouement, simply ... ends. I really liked the different character voices -- there are excerpts from interviews with Zelu's family members, as well as from Rusted Robots -- though I wasn't wholly convinced that Zelu's novel would be that successful. (But who understands popular taste, eh?) I'm looking forward to discussing this for book club: there's a lot to think about here.

I have come to understand that author, art, and audience all adore one another. They create a tissue, a web, a network. No death is required for this form of life. [loc. 6522]

2025/165: Bee Sting Cake — Victoria Goddard

The heart of culture is taking the time to do the unnecessary in the most picturesque manner possible. [p. 204]

Reread, after reading Olive and the Dragon... my original review from the 2023 Nine Worlds rabbithole is here. This is a delightful novel with mystical bees, a baking competition, and a dragon (which may or may not be the same dragon met by Jemis Greenwing's mother Olive). There is also an inheritance, an Imperial Duke, and Jemis beginning to relax.

After this I obviously needed to reread the first in the series, Stargazy Pie... especially as there is a new Greenwing and Dart novel, Bubble and Squeak, coming in the next few months! (Also, these cosy fantasy mysteries are perfect for autumn... though they always make me want to eat cake.)

2025/164: The Atlas Complex — Olivie Blake

The point is there are no villains in this story, or maybe there are no heroes. [p. 11]

Concluding the trilogy which began with The Atlas Six (which I liked a lot) and continued with The Atlas Paradox (which I liked less). Sadly the trend has continued. Having tried and failed to read The Atlas Complex last year, I have screwed my courage to the sticking point (= reread the first two novels) and got to the end.

Lots happens, including a great deal of philosophising, some daring escapes, a plethora of melodrama and some entertaining interpersonal friction. Some people have happy endings. Some people get together romantically and / or sexually. Some people have changed dramatically (though not necessarily credibly) since the first book. Some people die -- or perhaps they don't. If a death happens off-page is it real? If a death happens on-page is it real? 

There is an ending. And then another. The Atlas Complex feels as though it can't commit: as though it needed at least one more edit to chip away the loops and possibilities and reveal something definite and climactic.

NB: 'Rhodesian', used here to mean 'like Libby Rhodes', is a word that will jar anyone old enough to remember the previous name of Zimbabwe.

I wish this had been the finale that the first novel promised. But I will keep reading Olivie Blake's work, because when it's good it's fabulous.

"How many god complexes does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“Six. Five to agree on one to die,” said Tristan. [p. 251]

2025/163: The God of the Woods — Liz Moore

“But also,” said Barbara, “if he hadn’t disappeared.” She did not finish the sentence.
“Then what?” said Tracy.
“Then I wouldn’t have been born,” said Barbara. “That would have been better, I think.” [loc. 4153]

Told from multiple viewpoints in two timelines, this is the story of the Van Laar family and their children: Bear, who goes missing aged eight in 1961, and Barbara, who goes missing aged thirteen in 1975. Are the disappearances linked? Were the children abducted? Murdered? Did they run away? One could make a good case for the latter: the family, though extremely wealthy (they own the woods, and the neighbouring campsite from which Barbara vanishes) is riddled with secrets and dysfunction. Barbara has been 'acting up', using makeup and painting a wild mural on her bedroom wall: her mother Alice is addicted to Valium and alcohol, and still doesn't quite believe that her son Bear is dead. Peter, father to Barbara and Bear, has high standards and little time for his wife.

This is a complex thriller, with themes of misogyny, class and scapegoating. I liked female cop Judyta (who's very much belittled because of being a woman, but who is key to solving the mystery) and TJ, who runs the summer camp and is distinctly queer-coded. Louise, the counselor who first notices Barbara's absence, is a working-class girl with a rich fiance and a history of abuse. Tracy, who's 12, is befriended by Barbara and asked to keep her secrets... Each of these women, as well as Alice, and Maryanne Stoddard whose husband died of a heart attack during the search for Bear and was subsequently blamed for the boy's disappearance, has to deal with sexism, powerlessness and injustice.

It's also a very interesting comparison of parenting values: between the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as between working class and upper class families. (There's a really chilling line in Alice's narrative about 'part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic'. This resonates...)

Ultimately, while I was caught up in the story and its complex relationships, I didn't find the resolution wholly satisfactory. Barbara's conclusion just wasn't credible, even for 1975. But the ways in which blame is apportioned and withheld, the ways in which gossip and bias affect everyone in the story, were very well done: and the multitude of narrators, in two different timeframes and out of sequence, maintained their individual voices and never became confusing.

I'm still thinking of the title, The God of the Woods, which refers to Pan and thus to panic. Though there are scenes of panic, it's not a defining characteristic of the novel. But a lot of people do lose their way, mostly metaphorically: and not all of them find the right path again.

2025/162: Magic Lessons — Alice Hoffman

A streak of independence and a curious mind meant trouble. In Martha’s opinion, a woman who spent her time reading was no better than a witch. [loc. 3165]

Prequel to Practical Magic (which I haven't read since the last millennium), The Rules of Magic and The Book of Magic (which I don't think I've read at all), this novel explores the roots of the curse on the Owens women.

The novel begins in Essex, England ('Essex County', hmm) in 1664. Maria is found as a baby, abandoned in the snow, with a crow keeping her company. She's taken in by spinster and wisewoman Hannah Owens, who teaches her the 'Unnamed Arts' -- herbalism, midwifery, and the importance of loving someone who will love you back. These are troubled times, though, and solitary women are suspect: Hannah is labelled 'witch' and killed. Maria, grieving, finally meets her birth father, who promptly sells her as an indentured servant. Maria (and her faithful crow Cadin) are off to Dutch Curaçao, there to work for five years before she can gain her freedom. 

Sadly, she forgets the important lesson about love and -- despite Cadin's best efforts -- falls in love with, and pregnant by, a man who hastily sets sail for New England. Maria journeys from Curacao to New York, and then to Salem: she's imprisoned, her daughter lost, and she lays the family curse: 'To any man who ever loves an Owens... let your fate lead to disaster, let you be broken in body and soul, and may it be that you never recover.' 

The meat of the novel explores Maria's pain and grief, her growing powers, the hard lessons she has to learn, and how she finds her way to a happy ending. Another thread of the story concerns Maria's daughter Grace, denied her heritage and discovering it for herself in ways that disturb those around her.

I found this a rather slow read. Maria is not always a likeable protagonist -- though those she helps adore her, even naming their daughters after her -- and I didn't engage with Faith. I mourned a bird more than a human character. The recipes and notes about magic were fascinating, though: and the underlying philosophy, of love and openmindedness and honesty, appeals to me.

These are the lessons to be learned. Drink chamomile tea to calm the spirit. Feed a cold and starve a fever. Read as many books as you can. Always choose courage. Never watch another woman burn. Know that love is the only answer. [loc. 5059]

2025/161: Bliss and Blunder — Victoria Gosling

Sometimes he’ll be mopping the floor and listening to a couple of the regulars, and he knows it’s not from now. It’s from before. What’s more, time is supposed to be sequential, right? One thing happening after another. Things further back receding, more recent things feeling, well, more recent. Not for Wayne. [loc. 1637]

The Matter of Britain meets Jilly Cooper! The setting is the medieval town of Abury, in Wiltshire: the characters drink at the Green Knight, where Vern the landlord has an odd agreement -- 'anything you gain you give to me' -- with Wayne the barman. Arthur is a tech billionaire, Lance is a veteran with PTSD, Gwen is an influencer, Mo was adopted from a Bangalore roadside, Morgan is ... vengeful. 

The novel opens with the celebration of Arthur's fortieth birthday, a grand gala where several old friends appear unexpectedly. Gwen can't concentrate on the festivities: she's being blackmailed. Could it be the Invisible Knight again? There are flashbacks to when they were all teenagers together in the 1990s: alliances forged and broken, grudges taking root, Arthur already making his mark as a tech genius, Morgan the target of the bullies on the school bus. And then forward again, to 'Right Here, Right Now', and an attempt on Arthur's life, the reconsideration of an old murder, the risk of a computer virus that'd wipe out civilisation.

I loved this: the resonances with Arthurian myth, the surprising but thoroughly credible identity of old John who props up the bar, the way the characters' opinions and perceptions evolve as they mature. The focus was on the women as much as the men: Morgan bemoans the fact that there are 'no epic poems, no legends, no bardic songs, no Romeo and Juliet, that exist to explain it to her. The record is nigh empty, as though women never adored each other, never went into battle, never fought the monster, never wept and bled, killed and died for each other, who separated, didn’t feel the other’s absence like a missing limb.' [loc. 1037] For me, her relationship with Gwen felt like the core of the novel. And it is a novel about how women -- whores or saints, quest objects or evil sorceresses -- behave, are expected to behave, are punished for not conforming.

I liked the love poem (or is it a confession?) hidden in the comments of a piece of code ('/* Until I found, beneath her fairness/Putrefaction. [she] died choking on roses/Embracing the lover she earned, Death*/' [loc. 2367]) and the nomenclature of the viruses and worms Arthur creates/defeats: Wasteland, the Black Prince...True, there were a couple of false notes: 'pay a ten-pound bill with a hundred-pound note' (sorry, not in this universe); 'the comet goes over a little after ten' (comets don't visibly move). But they are forgiveable in the wit and flow of the whole.

Appreciating this novel definitely requires more than a passing acquaintance with Arthurian mythology, but it's thoroughly rewarding to spot all the little references and hints. Bliss and Blunder interrogates the original stories, highlighting misogyny and re-examining canonical relationships. And it's fun: a cracking read which I galloped through.

2025/160: Olive and the Dragon — Victoria Goddard

Olive had dreamed of the next days a hundred times, for all it was no necessary tragedy for any of them, seeing fragments play out of a hundred different choices.
No necessary tragedy, if she chose aright.[loc. 61]

A novella set well before the beginning of the 'Greenwing and Dart' series, Olive and the Dragon focuses on Jemis Greenwing's mother Olive (deceased before the series proper) and her gift of seeing possibilities and probabilities. She is the heiress to the Woods Noirell, too, and she has not taken up her inheritance. There are some hard choices to make, and her son's futures have so many perils. And she has been summoned by a dragon...

I loved this, and it made me want to reread the entire series (in preparation for a new novel at the end of the year). I also found myself fixing on tiny details: Olive knows that bad times (the Fall) are coming; there is a visible companion to the Morning Star; the fairytale logic of who was and was not invited to a child's naming-day. And I think we see this same dragon again, elsewhere. 

I love the Nine Worlds, and especially Alinor, and the Woods. And, my love rekindled, I do need to reread at least some chapters of Bee Sting Cake.

2025/159: They Called Us Enemy — Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, George Takei

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans (the majority US citizens) were relocated to internment camps. George Takei's family was among those affected, and this is his account of what it was like, as a small boy, to be taken away from everything he knew. At the time it was a great and often joyous adventure, but as a teenager he raged against his father for not standing up to the authorities. Only in later life did he come to understand how his parents did whatever they could to protect their three children. 

There's a lot here about memory, and about how differently children understand the world -- especially when they are being protected from the worst of its injustices. The Takei family lost almost everything (George Takei's mother, much to her children's disgust, managed to smuggle a sewing machine to the internment camp) and had to rebuild their lives from scratch when they were finally released. It's to Takei's credit that he pokes gentle fun at his younger self, and refrains from judgment on the war games. (All the little boys wanted to be the American soldiers, not the Japanese.)

Takei also shows us the appalling decisions that the interned Japanese had to make: whether to serve in the US military, which Japanese-Americans had been prohibited from doing earlier in the war; whether to 'renounce' loyalty to the Emperor of Japan, which most of them had never had in the first place. And he shows us just how long it took the United States Government to make amends for any of it. In 1988, 'restitution payments' were announced to survivors of the internment camps: Takei received his cheque, and letter of apology, in 1991. In 2000, surviving members of the all-nisei 442nd Regiment had their medals upgraded to the Congressional Medal of Honour.

I found this very moving, and it made me wonder anew about my own family history. (My father, another 'enemy alien', was interned in France during the Second World War due to his dual Franco-British nationality. He was thirteen, and his mother died in the camp. He never talked much about it.) And, as Takei emphasises, 'old outrages have begun to resurface'. This is an important and educational book, beautifully drawn by Harmony Becker: Takei is using his voice and his popularity to draw attention not only to old horrors but to new ones.

2025/158: The Summer I Ate the Rich — Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite

...what I am doing is only leveling the playing field. I have claimed my power for myself just as these wealthy people have done time and time again. And I will not feel bad about it, even if I am bending the rules to my will. [p. 319]

Brielle Petitfour is seventeen, Haitian-American, a gifted cook who's planning to start up a supper club in order to pay the bills. Her mother Valentine is in constant pain, and her health insurance won't pay out for the medication she needs. Brielle's father is out of the picture, and isn't the father of her half-sisters in Haiti, who form a Greek chorus (they're named after the Muses) to contextualise Brielle's family history. Brielle's best friend Marcello, also a chef and helping with Brielle's supper club, is expected to go into the family business: his grandmother runs a funeral parlour, which for complicated reasons is popular with the wealthy of Miami.

All of these factors -- plus a second-hand phone, a road accident and a teenage romance -- come together when Brielle's mother loses her job, and Brielle's supper club (with recipes including ingredients purloined from Marcello's family's business) becomes a sensation.

Brielle makes no bones (haha) about being a zonbi: she's not the lumbering brain-craving monster of American horror (though the opening scene is a detailed description of preparing cow brains for dinner) but an individual with an acute sense of taste, a gift for butchery, and a certain amount of innate magic. Her 'intention' not only makes her cooking delicious, but it can influence those who eat her meals. And she's extremely attuned to the chasm between her life and the lives of the rich families who employ her mother, compete to host her supper clubs, and hoard their wealth rather than helping others.

I liked this a lot. Brielle is a charismatic and relatable character whose morality, while different from the norm, is well-defined. She's loyal to friends and family, resilient, and capable of standing up to a hell-boss. I wasn't wholly convinced by the romantic element of the novel, but I really enjoyed Brielle's progress from powerless teenager to agent of change. "I know that I’ll be able to help out more than just my family. Because no matter what anyone says, there’s always more than enough to go around." [p. 382]

In an afterword, the authors (who are sisters) describe the genesis of the novel in their own experience: their mother, like Brielle's, had a pain pump that beeped every few minutes when it was empty -- which is auditory torture for anyone already experiencing chronic pain. They also write about the origins of the zombie myth and how it's been appropriated by American culture. As Brielle says in the novel, "It stems from the fear of slavery. That your existence of forced labor will continue far into the afterlife, white masters lording over you even in the next plane." [p. 28].

2025/157: Saltwash — Andrew Michael Hurley

English delapidation was... the blistered formica on the tables of a seafront cafe. Derelict gift shops and thrift shops with whitewashed windows. A pub with steel plates over its doors. Cracked, pebble-dashed sheters along the promenade, roosted by gulls. [loc. 168]

I've enjoyed Hurley's previous novels (The Loney, Starve Acre, Devil's Day -- I note that I read all those in the space of two months!) but found Saltwash thoroughly depressing: bleak, nihilistic and devoid of joy. The setting (the eponymous Northern seaside town in November, delapidated and down on its luck) is dispiriting, and the protagonist is dying of cancer and raddled by guilt. Unreasonable guilt, in my opinion.

Tom Shift has gone to the Castle Hotel in Saltwash to meet his pen-pal Oliver, whose erudite and theatrical letters have been one of Tom's few recent pleasures. He's perturbed to find that there is some sort of annual get-together happening at the hotel: none of the other guests (all elderly and/or ill) will 'spoil the surprise' but everyone is excited about the prize draw. Apparently it offers some form of deliverance from remorse, tying in with the novel's tagline: 'ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN, IF ALL CAN BE FORGOTTEN.'

Hurley's exploration of character is exceptional: there's little straightforward description, but Tom really comes to life on the page, with a difficult childhood and a long life behind him. Oliver, too, is a vivid character, who is not at all as Tom expected. However, I simply didn't accept that Tom's burden of guilt was rational: and if there was supposed to be something literally marvellous happening at the climax of the novel, it wasn't obvious enough.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 23rd October 2025.

2025/156: Dreamhunter Duet — Elizabeth Knox

'I was finished. I wanted time to stop, and to let me stop with it. And I wanted revenge.
I ... said to the land, 'Bury me, and rise up. Rise up and crush them all.' [loc. 5131]

Rereads, after reading Kings of This World -- which is set in the same alt-Aotearoa-New Zealand, rather later than the Dreamhunter duet, which begins in 1906. My original reviews from (OMG) 2005 and 2007 are here: The Rainbow Opera and The Dream Quake.

The link points to the first of two volumes: the second has only just become available on Amazon.

I remembered much more of the first book than of the second. I was struck this time round by the powerful narrative of Lazarus Hame, a convict, as recited to Laura the dreamhunter: the alternate history that he describes is quite chilling. I also noted the lack of an indigenous population in Southland: this is a version of New Zealand (South Island only) that was not inhabited by the Maori, though there are indications of a relatively amicable entente between the European colonists and the Shackle Islanders. 

There is a Place where dreamhunters can go to experience location-specific dreams, and bring them back to be shared at Dream Palaces. In the first novel the origins of the Place are a mystery: in the second, the genesis of the Place is explained -- though it is distinctly non-linear. There is something (several somethings) that might be a golem. There is tragedy, teenage romance, and government corruption; despair and redemption; joy, and the Biblical story of Lazarus and the song he heard in the tomb.

I am still thinking about these books, aided by this spoilery blogpost from the author. (And I am now tempted to reread everything else that Elizabeth Knox has ever written.)

I love the emotional precision and clarity of Knox's writing, and the sense of time being flexible and traversible: and I love the importance of love in many forms and expressions. And I love the complexity of these books. 

2025/155: Sabella — Tanith Lee

There are genuine ruins (beware tourist traps) here and there. Thin pillars soaring, levelled foundations crumbling, cracked urns whispering of spilled dusts -- all the Martian dreams that old Mars denied to mankind. [loc. 53]

Another reread, when I was (unsuspectingly) coming down with a migraine: I last read this in the last millennium, and had forgotten much of it. It's a short novel, an SF vampire romance set on Novo Mars -- like original Mars, but pink rather than red, with rapid sunsets and mutated earth-import flora and fauna. 

The novel opens with Sabella Quey receiving an invitation to her aunt's funeral. There's an ominous bequest (her aunt was a devout Christian Revivalist, and knew about Sabella's unsavoury youth) and a gorgeous young man who tracks Sabella back to her isolated home, and does not question her about her aversion to sunlight, or the bottles of red juice ('pomegranate and tomato juice... my physician makes it up for me') in the fridge.

Later comes Sand's brother Jace, in search of his sibling: perhaps in search of Sabella herself. He's certainly suspicious, and rightly so. Sabella is a vampire, a blood-drinker, and though she tried to save Sand he died. His wasn't the first death she's been responsible for, either: she learnt early on that sex was a great way to get what she needed, but she couldn't risk her partners telling the truth about her.

What I remembered from this book was the gorgeous desert-scapes, the 'blood stone' which goes red when she's replete, the brothers Vincent, the Bradburyesque vibe. What I'd forgotten was the SFnal explanation of Sabella's vampirism, and the pervasive, repressive religion : the sexual violence which Sabella endured as a teenager, and (ugh) the submissive elements of her most successful relationship. I do love Tanith Lee's prose style here -- not to mention her dialogue -- and I'm tempted to reread more of her SF romances (The Electric Forest, in particular). I have a sense that her later novels are more Gothic, more decadent and lush and voluptuous: this early work feels remarkably wholesome, though still very sensual.

2025/154: I Who Have Never Known Men — Jacqueline Harpman (translated by Ros Schwarz)

I ... have no memories of my own childhood. Perhaps that’s why I’m so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human. [loc. 1546]

We first encounter the nameless narrator near the end of her solitary life, determined that her story will not die when she does. Gradually we discover her history: that her first memories are from an underground prison where she, and thirty-nine adult women, were held captive for years. She can't recall anything from before the prison, and none of the women can tell her much: just screams, flames, a stampede... The guards are all male, and don't speak to or interact with the prisoners, except to pinish them for talking, for touching.

Then a siren blares, the guards flee, and the women escape. (It is not as simple as that.) They find themselves in an empty world; they find other bunkers, where all the prisoners are dead; they argue about whether this is Earth, about why they were imprisoned, about what happened. And eventually there is only our narrator, much younger than the others, alone in a refuge of her own.

In some ways this is a bleak novel: in others, it's surprisingly uplifting. I admired the narrator's pragmatism, and her ability to fantasise. It's clear that she does love, and does suffer, even if not in the same ways as the older women. (I could make an argument for her being something other than human, but that interpretation feels too glib.)

Translated from the French, this was a novel for the Prix Femina in 1995. Jacqueline Harpman was a Belgian Jew whose family fled the Nazis (many of her relatives died in Auschwitz): later in life she became a psychoanalyst. I'd like to read more of her work.

The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. [loc. 2358]

2025/153: All of Us Murderers — KJ Charles

"Gideon and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Or perhaps I do. Perhaps all of us Wyckhams are murderers, by Act or proxy or inaction or just heredity..." [loc. 2943]

Zebedee Wyckham is invited to visit his cousin's remote country house. Expecting a warm welcome from a cousin he only vaguely remembers, Zeb is horrified to find himself thrust into the company of his relations: his estranged brother Bram, Bram's wife Elise, Zeb's cousin Hawley, a new-found young cousin called Jessamine -- and, worst of all, Zeb's own ex, Gideon, who he hasn't seen since they both lost their jobs due to Zeb's behaviour. 

As if the company weren't bad enough, the food is vile, there are rumours of ghosts walking the hallways, and nobody can leave. There's a family curse (of course), a legacy to be bestowed upon whoever marries Jessamine, and a huge garden full of ominous follies: the cousins' grandfather, Walter, was a notorious Gothic novelist, and the house he built reflects his work. As do the events playing out there...

Zeb, who has what we'd now call ADHD ('It's always stop fidgeting and pay attention, as if that wasn't what fidgeting was for' [loc. 2348]: I feel seen!) and his family don't have a high opinion of him. Nor does Gideon, for quite different reasons. But unravelling the tangle of scandal, death, disappearances and injustice is a task for two.

Excellent explorations of class, neurodiversity, toxic families and the roots of the family's wealth: All of us Murderers has a distinctly KJ Charles flavour (I was reminded, at various points, of Think of England, Masters in this Hall, and Death in the Spires) though I think is more explicit about the appalling ways in which the rich acquire and maintain their wealth and status. That makes it a darker novel than many of this author's works, but there is plenty of humour and a modicum of reconciliation. And a delightful epilogue which felt like a frothy meringue after the horrors of the main narrative.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 7th October 2025.

2025/152: Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin

As for the boys at the bar, they were each invisibly preening, having already calculated how much money he and his copain would need for the next few days, having already appraised Guillaume to within a decimal of that figure, and having already estimated how long Guillaume, as a fountainhead, would last, and also how long they would be able to endure him. The only question left was whether they would be vache with him, or chic, but they knew that they would probably be vache. [p. 53]

I read about James Baldwin's life and work in Nothing Ever Just Disappears, and it sparked the urge to read one of his novels: Giovanni's Room is perhaps the best-known: a short novel about an American, David, who goes to Europe to 'find himself', takes up with Giovanni but fears and rejects his own sexuality, and ends up with emptiness. David's first-person narrative begins, he tells us, on 'the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life': the morning on which Giovanni will be executed. 

Gradually, we discover that David has been sexually attracted to other men since his teens; that he and Giovanni, a bartender, met in a gay bar to which David had gone with an older gay friend; that David's fiancée Hella is travelling in Spain; that Giovanni's eponymous room in a cheap boarding-house is chaotic and filthy, and comes to symbolise everything that David is trying not to be.

Baldwin packs a great deal into this short novel: issues of race, class, toxic masculinity, traditional gender roles, the transactional nature of gay sex in the bar scene... Ultimately I think it's about David's inability to accept (or even recognise) his own feelings. He loves Giovanni but won't admit it even to himself. ('With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.') He keeps trying to assert his heterosexuality at the expense of his homosexuality: and in the end he is left with nothing, nobody.

Not a cheerful novel, but a masterpiece of first-person narrative: a narrator who doesn't really know himself, and doesn't seem to believe in the reality of other people.

What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.’ [p. 165]

2025/151: Is a River Alive? — Robert Macfarlane

...the Mutehekau Shipu’s mode is, surely, purely flow, I think, and its grammar of animacy is one of ands and throughs and tos and nows, of commas not full stops, of thens not buts, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings, silver-blues and grey-greens and mist-drifts and undersongs, process not substance, this joined to that, always onrushing, always seeking the sea and here and there turning back upon itself, intervolving, eddying in counterflow to cause spirals and gyres that draw breath into water, life into the mind, spin strange reciprocities, leave the whole world whirled, whorled. [loc. 4333]

If a corporation can be treated as a person, why can't a river? Macfarlane explores three river systems -- the Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador, the Mutehekau Shipu in Canada, and the three rivers braided through Chennai -- and combines poetry, spirituality and adventure in a philosophical discussion of what constitutes 'life' and how a river is part of the 'polyphonic world', important and valuable not just for how it can be exploited but for its own intrinsic qualities.

The book starts in Cambridge, with the chalk springs at Nine Wells: and ends there, with Macfarlane imagining his children remembering him there after his death. The book describes three expeditions: to the Ecuadorian rain forest (with a spiritual mycologist who seems connected to the fungal world, and can locate and identify hitherto-unknown species of mushroom with uncanny accuracy), to Chennai (with activist and author Yuvan Aves) to explore the dead rivers of the city and their ecological importance, and to Canada to kayak down the Mutehekau Shipu (with 'the only person in history to have been buried alive on opposite sides of the planet', geomancer Wayne Chambliss) and fulfil the instructions of Rita, an Innu poet and activist. 

Macfarlane is very aware of the natural world around him -- even in Chennai he finds joy in turtle eggs and an 'avian Venice' -- and open to the ideas of his friends and companions: his accounts of conversations are fascinating. And there's an underlying theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh: 'Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s hesitation on the edge of the Cedar Forest is the moment when human history trembles on the brink of a new, destructive relationship with the living world. They might still turn back. They might leave the forest and the river intact and alive. They do not.' [loc. 1505]

Things I learnt from this book:

• 'lacustrine': 'of, relating to, formed in, living in, or growing in lakes'
• 'the Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze River in China impounded so much water that it has measurably slowed the rotation of the Earth' [loc. 507] -- discussion of this.
• Ecuador was 'the only place where rain continued to fall during the ice ages' [loc. 1254]

The spiritual and poetic dimensions of this book will not appeal to all readers: but there's solid science (50 pages of notes and references) and a refreshing sense of the author's humility and openmindedness, which I found inspiring. A beautiful and accessible read: I'm tempted to buy the paper version just to see the author's photos in colour.

Irritatingly, the Kindle version told me I'd 'finished' well before the 'Acknowledgements and Aftermaths' section, which details further developments in the stories of each river. The Mutehekau Shipu has received legal protection, multiple Rights of Nature cases have been fought and won in Ecuador, and various songs co-written by Macfarlane and his fellow travellers are available.

2025/150: The Last Gifts of the Universe — Riley August

I have been viewing her last stand wrong. Like so many things, it is an issue of translation... It is not a stand — defensively — but a stance. A position. The last one they give to their loved ones, or the world, before they die. [loc. 1776]

Scout and Kieran are siblings, and Archivists -- interstellar archaeologists, searching for whatever killed every other civilisation humanity has ever found. Together with their adorable, plot-relevant ginger cat Pumpkin, they land on yet another dead planet (where Scout, breaking the rules, plants some seeds: 'it doesn't have to be dead forever') and find a recording made by one of the last survivors of an ancient civilisation. In turn, that leads to other planets, and a breakneck race against Evil Corporate Verity Co, who want to secure any data for themselves.

It was the cat that lured me in, obviously: but I kept reading because -- despite some clunky metaphors ('so irreversibly damaged that the data print amounted to Wingdings': really, centuries from now, people still remember Windows fonts? Why?) -- it's a sweet and thoughtful exploration of grief and loss: not only the dead civilisations and the woman in the recordings, but Scout and Kieran's mother, who's recently died.

Pumpkin is a delight, and so is Scout's love for him. The bond between the siblings, with its amiable friction, feels very real. And Scout is, subtly and in passing, revealed as trans: which does not change anything about the plot, except that the Verity Co. mercenary can show off her research with a simple deadnaming.

The SFnal trappings might not stand up to hard scrutiny, but the emotional arcs are solid. Also, cat in space! "...cats are magic in any universe." Truth.

2025/149: Sir Hereward and Mr Fitz: Three Adventures — Garth Nix

Self-motivated puppets were not great objects of fear in most quarters of the world. They had once been numerous, and some few score still walked the earth, almost all of them entertainers, some of them long remembered in song and story.
Mister Fitz was not one of those entertainers. [loc. 137]

Two novellas and a short story featuring Sir Hereward, mercenary knight and artillerist, and his former nursemaid Mister Fitz, a sorcerously-animated puppet who is centuries old and wields arcane magic needles. They roam a fantasy landscape (more Restoration than medieval) and are tasked -- by the Agents of the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World -- with destroying specific extra-dimensional entities ('godlets') which may manifest as Lovecraftian horrors or as apparently-benign forces enriching their domains at the expense of neighbouring fanes. If the godlet is on the list, out it goes.

Sir Hereward is young, something of a dandy, the only male offspring of the Witches of Har 'these thousand years', and an admirer of women, especially those with facial scars. Mister Fitz is the competent one, who would roll his eyes a lot if they were not painted on. In these stories they encounter a leopard-shifter, some malevolent starfish, and a pirate crew. Godlets are expelled, villains dispatched, and ladies considered. 

Great fun, with an ambience reminiscent of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber -- and very good at plunging the reader into the middle of a well-built world without describing it in any detail. (The gradual revelation that the battle-mounts are not horses, for instance.)

Irritatingly this version is no longer available from Amazon -- they instead guide me to an expanded version with eight stories rather than three. I confess I am tempted, because I'd like to know more about the origins of Sir H and Mr F... but I don't want to pay again for the content I already own.

2025/148: The Mirror and the Light — Hilary Mantel

...he has no one to talk to, except Christophe and his turnkey and the dead; and with daylight the ghosts melt away. You can hear a sigh, a soufflation, as they disperse themselves. They become a whistling draught, a hinge that wants oil; they subside into natural things, a vagrant mist, a coil of smoke from a dying fire. [loc. 13141]

The finale to the trilogy that began with Wolf Hall and continued with Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light covers the last four years of Thomas Cromwell's life, from the death of Anne Boleyn in 1536 to Cromwell's own execution in 1540. Cromwell is more powerful and successful than ever, but he's haunted by the dead: Cardinal Wolsey his mentor, Thomas More, the men and women he's condemned and sent to the scaffold or the pyre. At 900-odd pages, there's a certain amount of repetition, and the tension is uneven: but stitch by stitch, Cromwell's enemies collate the information that will lead him to the executioner's axe.

We get a strong sense of Cromwell's determination to improve England, even if it means going against his king's wishes. He is clear-eyed about royalty, describing princes as 'half god and half beast', inhuman creatures. When Cromwell praises Henry as 'the mirror and the light of other kings', he is aware that the light might turn away from him and leave him in darkness. It's no accident that the axe, at the end, is inscribed speculum justitiae: mirror of justice.

Though this is a patriarchal world, there are women with agency: among them are three daughters. Dorothea, Wolsey's daughter, tells Cromwell that she believes he betrayed her father, wounding him to the quick; he cultivates the Princess Mary, even though closeness to her might attract charges of treason; and his own unexpected daughter seems to repudiate him. By the end of the novel, he is alone except for the dead, and his loyal servant Christophe -- one of the few wholly fictional characters in the trilogy, and one whose final words in the novel are a splendid denunciation of Henry's justice. And we've come full circle from Cromwell's father yelling at him 'so now get up': but we end knowing so much more of his rise, and his fall.

Mantel's prose is precise and beautiful -- I especially liked Cromwell's description of Crivelli's Annunciation, quoted below -- and the final pages are incredibly powerful. I especially liked the sense of antiquity, of London's and England's history: and the sense of inevitability as Cromwell's enemies close in. Splendid, moving: but I could not fully immerse myself for the whole novel, due to its length, and I feel my experience was lessened thereby.

Perhaps you have seen, in Italy, a painting of a house with one wall removed? The painter does this to show you the deep interior of a room, where at a prie-dieu a virgin kneels, surrounded by bowls of ripening fruit. Her expression is private and reserved; she has kicked off her shoes and she is waiting to be filled with grace. Already you can see the angel hovering above the rooftops, a blur of gold on the skyline, while below in the street the people go about their business, and some of them glance upward, as if attracted by a quickening in the air. In the next street, through an archway, down a flight of steps, a housewife is hanging out washing, and someone is rising from the dead. White pelicans sit on rooftops, waiting for Christ’s imminence to be pronounced. A mitred bishop strolls through the piazza, a peacock perches on a balcony among potted plants, and striated clouds like bales of silk roll above the city: that city which itself, in miniature form, is presented on a plat for the viewer, its inverse form dimly glowing in the silver surface: its spires and battlements, its gardens and bell towers. [loc. 2668]

2025/147: Volkhavaar — Tanith Lee

From the Great City Square came a noise like two armies, four bull-rings, eight orchestras, sixteen taverns. Every color and every sound and scent known in the Korkeem — and a few not known. Wonders opened like flowers and the fans of peacocks, and dusts and incenses spread before the sun chariot in a mauve gauze, as it galloped into the morning. [loc. 1690]

Short, standalone fantasy novel by Tanith Lee -- probably my most-read author in my teens and twenties, though I haven't engaged as much with her more recent work. I first read Volkhavaar when I borrowed it from the library, at a tender and impressionable age: as usual when rereading, I'm surprised by what I remember and what I'd forgotten. I remembered the black stone idol, and the flowers, and the bronze sword. I'd forgotten the rather downbeat ending (which I think would have impressed me massively at the time -- what, you don't have to have a HEA?) and the excellent cat, Mitz.

The setting is what I think of as typical Lee: medieval-ish, demons and a multiplicity of gods, an Arabian Nights ambience, supernatural creatures who are more benevolent than their usual fictional depictions, enterprising young women and gorgeous young men. Our heroine, Shaina, is a slave who's never lost her pride: our hero Dasyel is an actor, clearly under the spell of our villain Kernik (whose villainy stems from injustice and abuse, plus a nasty streak all his own). Also a likeable vampire and the aforementioned excellent cat, who belongs to the rather feeble Princess Woana. Shaina falls in love with Dasyel without ever speaking to him, and enlists the help of a witch. Things do not work out as planned -- but there are happy endings all round, though not necessarily the traditional ones.

Volkhavaar made a powerful impact on me when I first read it: the vivid descriptions, the exuberance of the prose, the strong determined heroine. And perhaps the inversion of gender roles, with Shaina falling for Dasyel simply because of his looks, and doing her best -- through peril and pain -- to win him: just like a knight, an adventurer, the hero of a hundred fairytales... 

I've read a lot of fantasy novels over the intervening decades, but I still think Tanith Lee, with her glorious excesses and her subversions of genre tropes, is one of my favourites. I probably do need to read more of her later works -- many of which are out of print. 

The cover on the Gateway edition is appalling so I'm showing the cover of my old paperback copy, which ... is less appalling, and bears at least some resemblance to the novel within.

2025/146: Kings of This World — Elizabeth Knox

'In the 1980s we coined the term P, for Persuasion, which turned into P for Push when people stopped being so polite about it.' He paused a moment and pursed his lips, as if pleased with himself. [loc. 178]

Knox's latest YA novel is set in her fictional island nation of Southland, and references both Mortal Fire and the Dreamhunter Duet. Unlike the earlier books, it's set in more or less the present day: there are cellphones, EVs, the internet. And there is P (for Persuasion): a coercive / perceptual ability possessed by the Percentage, 1% of the population -- and a divisive issue in Southland society.

Vex Magdolen, sole survivor of a massacre at an 'intentional community' known as the Crucible, has strong P. After a childhood in the fosterage and state care system, she enters Tiebold Academy, where 75% of the students (though not Vex's roommate Ronnie) have P. Within a few weeks she's made friends and found her people ... but after a disturbance at the Compulsory Senior Year Morgue Visit, Vex and four of her classmates -- plus an adult assistant -- are kidnapped and imprisoned by mysterious masked captors. Was the original target Hanno, son of the richest man in Southland? Or was it one of the others -- Vex, Ari the senator's son, Taye who seems immune to Pushing?

The story alternates between the teens' captivity and Vex's first weeks at Tiebold Academy: and it doesn't end with the kidnapping, but with a confrontation that also reveals unexpected truths about Vex's past. There's love, zealotry, loss, treachery, and politics, and adults who think they know what's best for the young people under their care.

But most of all there is Knox's refulgent prose, vivid and simple (the promise of which was why I went to considerable lengths to acquire a copy of this book, not yet available in the US or UK). I loved the additional details of Southland's history and culture -- 'plague, the Place, and P' -- and am now eager to reread the other Southland novels: and Knox has said she intends to write another two novels set in Southland. Hurrah!

I note that I haven't said much about the plot of Kings of this World. The aspect that most intrigued me was Vex's childhood storytelling, which reminded me of the Game that Knox has mentioned in various contexts. I was also prompted to read Vonnegut's story 'Harrison Bergeron', about handicapping the gifted. And I am still thinking about Vex's family's reputation for foresight.

2025/145: The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar — Indra Das

“Why won’t you let me remember?” I dared ask.
She blinked. “You deserve to be real in this world. It’s not an easy thing to be stuck between worlds.” But stuck I was, and ever have been. [loc. 286]

Ru George grows up in Calcutta [sic] in the 1990s. He's the child of immigrants, and lives with his grandmother and his parents. Ru's father is a failed fantasy author: his novel The Dragoner's Daughter (about dragonriders on a distant planet using their mounts to traverse multiple realities) sold only 52 copies. Ru's grandmother tells him fantastical stories about his grandfather having started life as a woman (Ru can see the truth of this in old photos). Ru's mother administers the Tea of Forgetting after meals, and before bedtime. 

Ru grows up a lonely child with only the vaguest idea of who he is, and who his family are. He's prone to spinning extravagant yarns to his schoolfriends. (But are they fantastical, or true?) By his teenage years, now home-schooled, he has just one friend: Alice, the daughter of the couple who run the Crystal Dragon restaurant. Alice and Ru share enthusiasms for video games, metal music and fantasy novels. And slowly they share Ru's -- or Ru's family's -- secrets.

Like all the best novellas, this packs a novel's-worth of content into its pages. There's a story about found family, a story (or two) about refugees fleeing wars, a story about memory and forgetfulness, a story about gender. In a way, it's also about the stories we tell to ourselves and to others. Ru, the perpetual outsider, is so lonely, so rootless, and yet he hopes. And when he remembers, the story turns full circle on itself.

I know now that forgetting and remembering was a cycle I have relived many times, a snake eating its tail...[loc. 36]... “Belief is a serpent eating its tail forever, knowing that its tail is finite.” [loc. 979]

2025/144: Cinder House — Freya Marske

Scholar Mazamire's own theory was that a ghost was how a building held a grudge, because it was not human enough to do it on its own. [loc. 527]

A novella-length variation on 'Cinderella': it begins with Ella's death at sixteen, dizzy with the poison that has killed her father, falling downstairs as the house convulses at his demise. Shortly thereafter, Ella finds herself merging with the house itself. She cannot leave the property, and the only people who can see her are her stepmother Patrice and her two stepsisters, Danica (who likes to read) and Greta (who likes to get her own way). She feels any damage inflicted on the house, and she's compelled to tidy and clean and make good. She becomes an unpaid maid of all work.

She cultivates a penpal, Scholar Mazamire, with whom she exchanges long letters about magic and ghosts: and at last she finds herself able to leave the house -- though she's wrenched back home on the stroke of midnight. She wanders the streets, and can enter any public place: she visits the ballet often, and wishes she could talk about the performances with the other regulars. Nobody can see her, except for a faerie spell-seller at the night marker who introduces herself as 'Quaint'. When the royal family issue an invitation to 'all unattached ladies of the kingdom' for a series of balls before the Prince becomes betrothed, it's Quaint who makes it possible for Ella to attend.

There are some very well-executed twists here, from Ella's mirror-studded shoes to the Prince's worsening curse to the skeleton in the attic. (I applaud Marske's restraint in identifying that skeleton). Ella's situation reminded me of being housebound after illness -- the author confirms, in her afterword, that it's 'a story about chronic illness and disability' -- with that sense of being trapped, unable to change one's circumstances or make choices about one's life. I found her skin-hunger and her taste for steamy romances all too relatable!

I would love to read more set in this world: but the story fits novella-length very nicely, and the implied world-building is fascinating and credible. I especially liked the magic system, with its subjects and objects and exceptions. Perhaps Quaint could have a novel of her own...

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 9th October 2025.

2025/143: Twilight Cities: Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean — Katherine Pangonis

...in Syracuse, the ghosts feel like they raise the city up; in Ravenna, Nicola thinks they hold it back. [loc. 3703]

Pangolis explores five ancient capitals (Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch) leavening historical detail with her own impressions of each city's modern remnants: a blend of history and travel writing which works better in some chapters than in others. This book won the Somerset Maugham Award (which, I learn, is 'to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries'): Pangolis's previous work was Queens of Jerusalem, which I have not read.

One aspect of the book that I found fascinating was the intermingling of past and present: for instance, 'at least 30% of the [male] Tyrians are indeed descendants of the Phoenicians'. Though this is a source of pride, it's also been used to differentiate between Christians and Muslims. Carthage, which began as a Phoenician settlement, has an only slightly lower percentage of Phoenician genes amid its populace, but Pangolis writes that she did not 'meet a single Tunisian who describes themselves as Phoenician'. History can be a mixed blessing. As one artist in Ravenna tells the author, he grew up with  'this phantasmic history, which dwarfs everything the city is in the modern day. That trumps the reality of the city. ... Ravenna is so much more than her history, but you grow up with these ghosts.' [loc. 3699] 

Some of the cities she explores are in ruins -- more now than at the time of writing, 2023, when 'the thunder of Israeli rockets could be heard in the city of Tyre'. Massive Israeli airstrikes in 2024 destroyed much of the ancient city.  Antioch, where Pangolis had bathed in the hammam with the local women, suffered severe damage in the 2023 Turkish earthquake: the chapters on Antioch and its modern overlay Antakya are an elegy for a shattered city. 

The chapters are sometimes repetitive, and sometimes read like potted histories (lists of battles, kings, religion). Pangolis often omits the BC on dates: this confused me at first ('recent results do indeed put the foundation of the city sometime between 835 and 800') and would be more acceptable if the histories she recounts didn't span both BC and AD. And the section on Ravenna (with its lengthy description of Lord Byron's affair with a Ravennese lady) didn't quite fit with the other cities under discussion. 

Also, I think the author was confused: 'In the archaeological museum in Syracuse there can be found the skeleton of a curious one-eyed dwarf elephant. In 1914 the palaeontologist Othenio Abel suggested that the presence of these giant one-eyed creatures in Sicily gave rise to the legend of [the Cyclops] Polyphemus' [loc. 1852]. No, the elephants weren't one-eyed: their skulls, though, do have a large central opening, the proboscis cavity.

Overall an interesting read, but I would have liked more of the author's modern experiences ('the crackle of the live coral'; climbing over walls to visit the stones of Carthage) and less of the battles-and-kings history.

Some things I learnt:

• 'In 1985, the mayors of Carthage and Rome finally signed a peace treaty, officially ending the Third Punic War, which otherwise had lasted 2,131 years.'
• Justinian's Plague wiped out nearly a quarter of the population in the eastern Mediterranean
• The Marsala shipwreck 'reads like an instruction booklet for ancient shipwrights, with letters from the ancient Phoenician alphabet demarking where sections joined another, and which piece went where' [loc. 1174]

2025/142: Everfair — Nisi Shawl

He had been warned, but had thought Everfair too remote, too obscure, for Leopold's dependents to seek its destruction. He had thought that because this land had been legitimately purchased they were safe. He had trusted to his enemy's basic humanity to preserve them. [p. 95]

Everfair is a steampunk-flavoured alternate history, beginning in 1889. The Fabian Society, instead of founding the London School of Economics, purchases land in the Congo as a refuge for those fleeing the oppressive, violent regime of the Belgian government and their rubber plantations. Everfair, as the new country is called, is initially populated by African-Americans and liberal whites, as well as escaped slaves. King Mwenda, whose land it was before the Belgians stole it, is not wholly pleased with the way that Everfair is run: but he and his favourite wife, Josina -- a fearsome diplomat -- are playing a long game.

The steampunk aesthetic is strong. Many of those formerly enslaved have been mutilated: a young Chinese engineer known as Tink (his name is Ho Lin-Huang) creates artificial limbs for them. (Fwendi, a young woman who's survived the loss of a hand, revels in the fireworks and weaponry that her assortment of prosthetics provides.) There are 'air canoes' and steam-powered bikes; uranium as a power source; ingenuity and artifice.

There is also, of course, race. Shawl explores many aspects of racism and colonialism, including the white saviour / white martyr trope; the tension between Christian missionaries and the spiritual world of the indigenous people; the social consequences of having a Black grandparent; the white horror of 'miscegenation'; the unspoken assumptions and the privilege that underlies even the best intentions of Everfair's founders. Shawl's characters illustrate these tensions and tropes: a Christian preacher who becomes an acolyte of the forge-god Loango; a Frenchwoman with a Black grandfather who decides not to 'pass'; a character who's enthusiastic about the idea of a 'white martyr' to rally British readers to the cause, until the martyr turns out to be someone close to her...

There is a lot in this novel -- which reads more like a set of connected short stories, spanning a period of around thirty years, than a single arc -- and a plethora of viewpoint characters. There is romance both queer and heterosexual; many women with agency and competence; atrocities and joys; spiritual and scientific revelations. There are also supernatural elements. (I loved Fwendi's cats!) And yet for me it fell a little flat. It felt very dense: it felt as though there was a trilogy trying to get out. And perhaps because it's so dense, some of the characters felt less realistic, less rounded, than others. That said, I'm wishlisting the sequel Kinning, which sounds splendid.

2025/141: The Nature of the Beast — Louise Penny

One person, not associated with the case, would be chosen to represent all Canadians. They would absorb the horror. They would hear and see things that could never be forgotten. And then, when the trial was over, they would carry it to their grave, so that the rest of the population didn’t have to. One person sacrificed for the greater good. “You more than read his file, didn’t you?” said Myrna. “There was a closed-door trial, wasn’t there?” Armand stared at her... [p. 34]

This was a real contrast to The Long Way Home: there's a murder in the first couple of chapters, and a plot that spans decades and continents. We learn more about some of the less storied inhabitants of Three Pines (Ruth and Monsieur Béliveau, the grocer, were activists in the 1970s: one of the villagers is a veteran of the Vietnam War) and a terrifying new -- or old -- threat is introduced.

The story opens with a small boy's discovery of something terrifying in the woods. His story isn't believed, because he's an imaginative kid and something of a fantasist. Soon after, he's found dead. Accident or murder? Gamache doubts the official verdict (the aftermath of corruption is still infesting the Sûreté du Québec) and is drawn into the investigation. 

In parallel, there's an amateur production of a play: when it turns out to be the work of a notorious serial killer, most of the actors withdraw. That might seem relatively trivial, but the ways in which these two plots intersect, and the agenda of the hapless CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) agents, is unexpected but as tight as clockwork.

There's a lot of discussion about whether one can separate the created and the creator -- Gamache thinks not: ("This is how he escapes. Through the written word, and the decency of others. This is how John Fleming gets into your head.") -- and about how those who have committed, or planned to commit, atrocities carry on with their lives. And part of a plot thread is about a horrendous plan to 'bomb Israel back to the Stone Age', which reads differently now than it would have when this novel was published.

I liked this a lot, though it's a dark novel and sows the seeds for more darkness ahead. I am looking forward to seeing how that darkness unravels, and is illuminated.

2025/140: The Long Way Home — Louise Penny

Armand Gamache did not want to have to be brave. Not anymore. Now all he wanted was to be at peace. But, like Clara, he knew he could not have one without the other. [p. 42]

After finishing the first big arc in the Gamache series last December (with How the Light Gets In) I had been saving the rest of the series for this winter: but unseasonably poor weather enticed me to read the next book. It was like coming into a warm room after a long cold journey: the familiar characters, the emotional honesty, the humour, the intricacies of crime.

The mystery to be solved, in The Long Way Home, is the non-appearance of Clara Morrow's husband Peter. Over a year ago, they separated -- Clara told him to leave -- and he was due to return on the anniversary of that separation. But Clara's had no word from him, and she's concerned. For his part, Gamache doesn't want to leave Three Pines, where he and his wife Reine-Marie are enjoying a happy and peaceful retirement. On the other hand, Clara and Peter are his friends: and Peter, his reputation as an artist suffering by comparison to Clara's recent success, was a troubled man.

This novel takes Gamache and his allies into the world of art: art schools, art dealers, artists. It also, physically, takes them to the wild coast at the mouth of the St Lawrence River: splendid descriptions of landscape, travel, and chance-met individuals. I don't think it's going to be one of my favourites of the series, but it was very nice to be back with these characters -- so nice that I instantly went on to the next in the series...