2025/095: Night and Day in Misery — Catriona Ward

...she understands, now, that she has not been alone these eight years, not really. She carries all that she is, and has been, within her. Stella gasps with the mercy and the cruelty of it all. [loc. 405]

Short story, part of Amazon's 'Shivers' collection: read because Catriona Ward is a favourite author and it's too long since her last novel.

Stella is visiting the motel where her husband Frank and son Sam stayed eight years ago, the night before they died when Frank's car crashed off a suspension bridge and into a river. Sam would be ten now. Stella's life has frozen: she's estranged from her mother (who advised her to leave Frank) and finds it hard to connect with her sister Dina. She blames herself for Frank and Sam's death, and just wants to be with Sam again. She writes a farewell letter and falls asleep: but dreams...

Too short, but very atmospheric: I listened to the audiobook, which was read slightly too dramatically for my taste, but still good. The prose is lovely and the story, though simple, feels organic and rounded.

2025/094: Return of the Thief — Megan Whalen Turner

Nahuseresh tells me I am not king. We’ll see if he really prefers the Thief. [loc. 3700]

Series finale, and it really delivers. The narrator, for the most part, is Pheris Mostrus Erondites, a vulnerable child who has been taught that his only safety lies in pretending to be a 'drooling idiot'. He's non-verbal, and has other traits indicative of something like cerebral palsy: his cousins have nicknamed him Monster. Eugenides (now annux, high king, of the Peninsula) has 'invited' Pheris to be raised in the palace, away from his family -- his grandfather is Baron Erondites, Gen's greatest opponent in court -- and quickly realises that Pheris' mind is as sharp as his own.

And Pheris observes a great deal. He sees that Gen is often ill; that he keeps returning to the temple of Hephestia, trying to get a straight answer from the gods; that he wants to reject his violent impulses, but also wants to go to war with the Medes. He sees, too, that Gen is willing to laugh at himself: one of the most delightful (and cheerful) scenes is a satirical play about a king named Emipopolitus, who's wasting the country's money on mad ideas. Gen clearly knows the playwright...

This is a novel about war and vengeance, treachery and death. It's presented as Pheris' 'chronicle of the high king' -- his Exordium reminded me of Thucydides* -- and though Pheris literally turns away from the most distressing scenes, there's a lot of violence. But there are also moments of joy, and several instances of divine intervention. And, unexpectedly, a happy ending for most (though not all) of the characters.

Pheris is a fascinating narrator, and a very credible character in his own right: damaged by his family more profoundly than Gen by his frequently-deplored cousins, non-verbal but fascinated by mathematics and keen to become literate under the tuition of Relius, ex-spymaster, possessed of stubborn courage and immense loyalty. I liked him a lot, and I liked the ways in which Turner showed us that his physical problems don't make him in any way lesser. 

Gen fascinated (and occasionally appalled) me all over again. He is, after all, on first-name terms with the gods -- and Pheris, fortunately for the chronicle, can see and hear them too.

And I love that the end of the series is full of hope and new life and possibility: that foreseen disasters are still in the future: that this is not a tragedy.

* Pheris: "I will include in my account what I did not see and hear myself only if I learned of the events as they occurred and from those who were present." [loc. 56]
Thucydides: "Of the events of the war I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry." source: 1.22.

2025/093: Thick as Thieves — Megan Whalen Turner

There is freedom in this life and there is power, and I was ambitious for the latter. [p. 15]

Kamet is a slave, albeit an expensive and efficient one: he is secretary to Nahuseresh, the erstwhile Medean ambassador to Attolia. Disgraced by the failure of the mission to Attolia the year before, Nahuseresh has returned to court in Ianna-Ir, hoping for a new post. Unfortunately his latest request has not been granted -- and the court is a dangerous place for a man out of favour. Fearing that he'll be blamed for Nahuseresh's death by poison, Kamet accepts the help of an Attolian soldier who's promised him his freedom. Together, they flee across the desert, the Attolian constantly lauding his king, Kamet feeling effortlessly superior. But the two are becoming friends, despite the secret Kamet can't admit.

This is very much a road-trip story. It's told as Kamet's first-person narrative, and there is a great deal he does not know. (I am unclear, though, why he refers to his companion as 'the Attolian' despite knowing his name from early on.) He's convinced of his own value, and of the barbarity of Attolia. To entertain his presumed-illiterate companion, he recites his own verse translations of the old myths of Immakuk and Ennikar, who are reminiscent of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. And he finds himself thinking differently about loyalty, freedom, power and friendship.

Not my favourite of the series, not least because the protagonists of the main arc don't appear until late in the novel: but Kamet's growth as a person, and the echoes of myth in his friendship with the Attolian, are engaging, and the various secrets -- some hidden in plain sight, others only evident in the final chapters -- are cleverly hidden and revealed. (Kamet's poor eyesight, from years of reading in bad light, is a plot point.) And it's nice to see Medes other than the oily Nahuseresh, who's been portrayed as a dyed-in-the-wool villain (the novel opens with Kamet having suffered a beating for 'overreaching') but had, it seems, some redeeming qualities.

2025/092: A Conspiracy of Kings — Megan Whalen Turner

All my life they had made choices for me, and I had resented it. Now the choice was mine, and once it was made, I would have no right to blame anyone else for the consequences. Loss of that privilege, to blame others, unexpectedly stung. [p. 79]

Sophos, the heir to the kingdom of Sounis, was one of Eugenides' companions in The Thief. He doesn't especially want to be king, though he'd quite like to marry the Queen of Eddis. But suddenly catastrophe strikes, Sophos loses everything, and Sounis is under threat. In order to save his country from civil war, he has first to save himself.

I didn't enjoy this as much as the previous three books in the series: this is partly because Eugenides is a peripheral rather than a central character, and partly because there is much more large-scale conflict. But Eugenides is there (scheming and manipulating, obviously): and Sophos, growing up over the course of the novel -- growing from Sophos to Sounis -- is a fascinating character. His resolution of the impasse between factions was stark and shocking: it would have been unthinkable to the young man at the beginning of the novel, but it is the act of a king.

Another interesting set of narrative choices, too. The first half of the novel is Sophos' first-person narration, but it becomes clear that he's telling his story to somebody. The rest of the novel alternates between third-person and Sophos' continued account.

A Conspiracy of Kings felt like a pivot to the wider world, to the pieces being placed for war. Yet the interpersonal relationships, and the character growth, are just as important as before. I'm glad I didn't read it first: I doubt I'd have appreciated just how intrinsic to the story are Eugenides and Attolia.

2025/091: The King of Attolia — Megan Whalen Turner

... what he had taken for the roughness of sleep was the king’s accent. While half asleep, he had spoken with an Eddisian accent, which was only to be expected, but Costis had never heard it before, nor had anyone he knew. Awake, the king sounded like an Attolian. It made Costis wonder what else the king could hide so well that no one even thought to look for it.[p. 219]

Eugenides has become King of Attolia, but is not well-received by the courtiers and soldiers of the city. They believe he's a barbarian who forced the Queen to marry him, and who has not consummated the marriage. (There is a rude song about this.) They put snakes in his bed and sand in his food: they regard him as helpless and inept.

But this is not his story -- or, rather, not his narrative. It's the story of Costis Ormentiedes, a young soldier in the King's Guard, who we first see trying to compose a letter to his father after having punched the King in the face.

I continue to marvel at Turner's storytelling skill. Though the focus (and, usually, the viewpoint) is firmly with Costis -- Ornon, the Eddisian ambassador, gets some scenes too, as does the Queen -- the core of the novel is Eugenides' reluctance to become King in truth as well as in name, and in the gods' determination that he will fulfil the role they've crafted for him. Keeping Eugenides at one remove from the narrative distances us from his thoughts and feelings, but there are (as ever with Turner) lots of telling details. The click of a latch, the toss of a coin, the roughness of an accent...

Costis is a likeable narrator, and his gradual realisation that Eugenides isn't what he appears feels authentic and natural. Even the minor characters have agency and agendas: even the villains have redeeming features. And there's a strong sense of the presence, the reality, of the gods: numinosity? A splendid and superbly-crafted novel.

2025/090: The Queen of Attolia — Megan Whalen Turner

“You made a mistake,” Attolia agreed. “You trusted your gods. That was your mistake." [p. 267]

Another reread: my review from 2010 is here. I remembered the shockingly violent act at the beginning of the novel, and the state of affairs at the end, but not much in between. And, unable to acquire any of the following novels -- well, back then I thought it was a trilogy! -- the characters faded away.

Eugenides is taken captive by the Queen of Attolia, more beautiful but less kind than his own Queen (Eddis, who's also his cousin). She exacts a brutal penalty for his trespasses, and sends him home. Tensions between the three countries of the peninsula (Sounis, Attolia, and Eddis) are high, and soon there is war. The Queen of Attolia is becoming increasingly vexed by her Medean ambassador, Nahuseresh. When Eugenides, tasked to 'steal peace', encounters her again, she weighs her options and proves amenable to the solution he suggests.

This is a carefully-crafted and emotionally devastating novel. The viewpoint is third person omniscient, with the focus on Gen and Attolia, though other viewpoints occur throughout the book. But the author doesn't tell us everything that's going on, every thought or plan or nightmare. As with The Thief, I found myself rereading to see how the emotional denouement was signalled: the seeds of the revelation that keeps Attolia's glaziers in business. It is beautifully done.

I also very much appreciate the two Queens, who have power and agency, and I note that the pantheon of gods is ruled by the Great Goddess Hephestia. And Eugenides, despite his imposed disability, is still competent and witty, though more vulnerable (and thus seeming younger) than in The Thief.

I must have been so frustrated back in 2010 when I couldn't read more of Eugenides' story. Luckily, that is no longer the case.

2025/089: The Thief — Megan Whalen Turner

It was a relief to explain everything to her... what I’d thought of the magus in the beginning and what I thought of him in the end. What it meant to be the focus of the gods’ attention, to be their instrument, used to change the shape of the world. And it was nice to brag a little, too. [p. 218]

A reread: my previous read (review) was in 2009, back when I was still reading print books, and acquiring them from BookMooch, which was able to provide copies of the first and second book in the series -- but not the third, or the fourth that had only just been published. They weren't available in UK editions until a few years ago. Now there are six books; I have purchased two as Kindle deals over the last few years; and all six are available via Kindle Unlimited. Sparked by a setting similar to Ancient Greece (though with definite Byzantine overtones, and more technology: watches, glass windows, rifles) I immersed myself, and have read all six in the space of a week. It has been blissful, and I'm sure I've noticed aspects and elements which would have eluded me if I'd read each volume as it became available.

At the start of the book, a young thief named Gen is languishing in the King's prison, having boasted that he can steal anything. He's still working on stealing himself out of prison when the king's magus turns up, wanting a 'proficient but anonymous thief' to help him acquire a mysterious treasure. Together with two useless young noblemen and a professional soldier, Gen and the magus set out. By the end of the book, the treasure has been retrieved, the secret agendas of the party have been revealed, the gods have made their existence known, and Gen has turned out to be the epitome of the unreliable narrator.

I didn't recall much of the book from my first reading, so I went back to the start and admired Turner's deftness with subtle clues. Nothing's explained, but everything's laid out for us to see. Gen is an immensely likeable narrator: I enjoyed his competence and self-reliance nearly as much as his deceptions. (I was reminded of Lymond, though apparently Turner didn't read Dorothy Dunnett's novels until well after The Thief was published. Rosemary Sutcliff, on the other hand, was a major influence.)

Originally a standalone novel, and marketed as YA: nevertheless, there is violence and unpleasantness, and a likeable character dies. I'd have enjoyed it tremendously as an adolescent, but I didn't find it simplistic in style or content. And, having finished it, I immediately acquired the rest of the series.

2025/088: The Walled Orchard — Tom Holt

...how Athens came to have the most pure and perfect democracy the world has ever seen, in which every man had a right to be heard, the law was open to all, and nobody need go hungry if he was not too proud to play his part in the oppression of his fellow Greeks and the judicial murder of inconvenient statesmen. [p. 46]

I owned a paperback copy of this novel -- actually two novels in one volume, Goatsong and The Walled Orchard -- for many years but did not read it. Suddenly, recently, the time was right and I was very much in Ancient Greek mode: and I am now much more familiar with the glories of Classical Greece, and the horrors of the Sicilian Expedition, than I was before. (See, for instance, Glorious Exploits.)

The narrator of the duology is Eupolis of Pallene, a gentleman farmer and writer of comedies, from his childhood survival of the plague, which left him scarred and ugly, to his old age. Entwined with the Peloponnesian War and the Sicilian Expedition are the triumphs and disasters of Eupolis' career as a dramatist and his ongoing feud with rival playwright Aristophanes, and his unhappy marriage to Phaedra, a young woman whom he rescues from Aristophanes and his bevy of drunken yobs. 

Eupolis loves and hates Phaedra, who is evil-tempered and keen to make her husband look ridiculous: he loves and hates Athens, her shining ideal of democracy and the idiotic voters who perpetuate it. But Aristophanes is the true villain of the piece, even (especially?) when he and Eupolis are fleeing for their lives through hostile Sicily, forced to compose cod-Euripides on the fly to entertain their hosts. 

Eupolis' fate is tied to Aristophanes', perhaps by the will of Dionysus. His innate cynicism and stubborn determination -- not to mention his true gift for rhetoric and for comedy -- help him endure the horrors of war, the PTSD afterwards, the sabotage of his final play, and the overthrow of democracy.

I found the Sicilian scenes harrowing and brutal, but extraordinarily vivid because of Eupolis' narrative voice. The minutae of everyday life in classical Greece are recounted with dark humour (though there are also moments of deep joy) and never feel laboured or over-explained. And the greater arcs of the story -- of the decline of Athens, of the horrors of war, of the flaws and failures of democracy -- feel as immediate as today's news.

Democracy is a cannibals’ harvest festival, where everyone does their best to feed the hand that bites them. [p. 519]

2025/087: How to Survive in Ancient Greece — Robert Garland

Greek religion does not promote morality. Piety towards the gods and the dead, not good behaviour, is its central aim. [loc. 350]

Read in fits and starts between other books, mostly for the fascinating factoids and descriptions of legal process in classical Greece. Presented as a handbook for time-travellers, How to Survive in Ancient Greece is good at highlighting some key differences: the improbability of growing old, the more equitable distribution of wealth (1% really wealthy, 1% really poor, 'the majority of Athenians are very poor by our standards'), the less equitable treatment of women. Entertaining, engaging, informative.

2025/086: Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain — Allan H. Ropper, Brian Burrell

Sadly, when it comes to ... such borderline theories, I have no spiel to offer, and sometimes revert to being a jerk. In this case, I suggested that they both might be magnetized. As an experiment, I said, he and his wife should float on their backs in their swimming pool to see if they both pointed north. I was guessing that they had a pool. I was right. They never came back. [p. 102]

There are some fascinating case studies here (ovarian teratoma, motor neurone disease, Parkinson's) and Ropper stresses the importance of listening to the patient's account of their problem, as well as observing the physical signs of it. Unfortunately Ropper presents as rather arrogant, very much the leader of any team he's in. (He does make one mistaken diagnosis: the patient dies: he doesn't tell the patient's family about his mistake.) 

He's also dismissive of 'conversion disorders' -- the modern term for hysteria and psychosomatic issues -- and rather too fond of describing his patients' physical appearance. The chapter on brain death was especially interesting, but also horrific because it read as though one patient's reputation affected how he (well, his body) was treated by hospital staff.

Interesting and well-written but I prefer the humility and compassion of authors such as Oliver Sacks. That said, I did laugh at the episode I've quoted at the top of this review... despite knowing that those people were experiencing what they perceived as a medical issue, and that they were paying for medical care.

2025/085: One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth — Mark Cocker

What faces a young swift is a metamorphosis no less than if it were a larval insect bursting from the chrysalis as a winged imago. What hatched as a toad-mouthed lizard has already morphed to a light-wreathed angel, but now it must go from a condition of complete reliance upon parents to independence, instantly and without alternative. It must launch itself from a dusty, dark roof and fly out to the Sun. There are no second chances. It is a one-shot deal. It must fly, but fly perfectly, having never done so. It must simultaneously learn to feed and do so immediately... [loc. 2361]

Mark Cocker frames his narrative as a single summer day, from dawn to dusk. He draws on history, physics and anecdote to support his hypothesis that 'it takes a whole universe to make just one small black bird', and his account is nature writing at its best -- discursive, poetic, emotional, scientific, full of anecdotes and unexpected facts. (He suggests, based on the writings of Pliny, that swifts did not inhabit urban environments until after the 1st century AD.) 

There's plenty of sound information about the lifecycle, the migrations and the flight of swifts, but there is also a continuo of Cocker's sheer joy in their existence, and in the complexities of the natural world. He writes of 'my ever-deepening appreciation that, as far as we know, we live among the greatest event in the universe, partaking of the deepest mysteries and the grandest miracle possibly across 100 billion galaxies' [loc. 306] and I feel an echo of the same awe. I was also fascinated by his account of avian migration: an organ in the right eye of migrant birds that somehow perceives magnetic force, and a grain of magnetite close to the olfactory nerve. And I was, am, uplifted by his sheer delight (and his use of delight as a verb) in the manifold splendours, connections and complexities of the world around him.

I read most of One Midsummer's Day in my garden, glancing up often to watch swifts circle and scream overhead in a cloudless blue sky.

The birds were engaged in their own split-second chase. Each swerve filleted a beetle from air. Their lines were smooth and effortless. They reminded me of blue tuna coursing at will among bait-balls of fry. It was chaos but compounded of clarity and exactitude, and it was exhilarating to see such purity of movement. [loc. 2286]

2025/084: Copper Script — K J Charles

You couldn’t get hot for handwriting. And yet he had ... [loc. 1329]

Set in London in 1924. Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler, of the Metropolitan Police, is approached by his slimy cousin Paul to sort out a graphologist who's wrecked Paul's engagement by accurately reporting, to his fiancee, his infidelity. Fowler drops in on the graphologist, one Joel Wildsmith, expecting to find a con artist of some variety: but he's disturbed, and impressed, by the accuracy of Joel's analyses. (And by Joel himself: but Aaron never acts on his desires, times being what they are.) He devises a scientific test, presenting Joel with a set of handwriting samples -- and Joel's gift reveals a sociopath.

The protagonists are both fascinating characters: Aaron with his Italian heritage, union-firebrand stepfather, aristocratic connections and dedication to his career; Joel, who lost a hand in the War and hates his prosthetic even more than he despises the police (to be fair, he's a victim of entrapment, and the Met is notoriously corrupt), and whose knack for sensing a writer's personality ('I imagine being the person who wrote like that, and then I tell you what I feel like') is spookily accurate. Applause, too, for Detective Constable Helen Challice, one of the first women police officers in the Met, who's routinely handed all the 'women's' cases -- rapes, domestic abuse, paedophilia -- and is determined to remain calm and professional in the face of this onslaught.

As I've come to expect from KJ Charles, this was witty, sexy and very much rooted in the iniquities of the period. Lots of interesting details about London, too: the Indian restaurant, the plethora of mutilated war veterans (and the blandly unsupportive advice given by the Ministry for Pensions), the gangs that more or less run the poorer areas of the capital, the role of newspapers in shaping public opinion, the prejudice and double standards that pervade the Metropolitan Police.

Copper Script isn't (yet?) one of my top five KJC novels: the villain was somewhat two-dimensional, and the denouement felt hasty and downbeat (though it is probably the only happy conclusion that could reasonably be achieved). Still, an engaging and entertaining read, with a strong thread of socialist sensibility.

Minor quibble: a corpse in the Regent's Canal (freshwater, non-tidal) has not spent the night in the Thames...

The author has already had more than 25 novels scraped without payment by AI companies. The author would like AI companies to fuck off. [About the Author, loc. 3392]

2025/083: Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories — Diarmuid Hester

... this new queer writing was all about using language to weave connections: to a place (San Francisco’s Bay Area) and between people (real or imagined). All in the service of queer community politics. In the late 1970s, [Bruce] Boone and [Robert] Glück thought about calling it something. ‘How about New Narrative?’ Boone suggested as a joke. [p. 287]

Hester starts off at Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman's house at Dungeness, with the vague notion of 'a larger project I had in mind, which would examine the importance of queer places in the history of arts and culture' [p.7]. He begins with E. M. Forster and Cambridge (where, when he arrives in 2017, there is not a single queer bar or club); continues with queer suffragettes (Vera Holme and Lady Evelina Haverfield); explores the excesses ('given a choice of either/or, she chose both') of Josephine Baker's time in Paris. 

Then to Jersey for Claude Calhoun and Marcel Moore, who in 1937 'packed up their stuff, put their cat in a Hermès handbag and bid adieu to France': in Jersey they used their special middle-aged-woman powers of invisibility to distribute surrealist anti-German propaganda, and were sentenced to death, but walked free after Germany's defeat.

I was less familiar with James Baldwin, Jack Smith and Kevin Killian, the other artists featured in Nothing Ever Just Disappears. Hester's curiosity about their lives and deaths, his pilgrimages in search of forgotten queer spaces, and the ways in which queer artists imagined those spaces differently, kept me reading, and made me think about how artists use their art to carve out and transform spaces. I hadn't previously encountered the concept of the New Narrative: authenticity, honesty, subjectivity, and the identity politics of the (often queer) author. Feels quite punk...

2025/082: The Bull from the Sea — Mary Renault

The fire leaped high; it shone down the long stone-lined cutting into the mound, showing the painted doorposts of the burial vault, the new bronze hasps of the open doors, and the Erechthid snake upon the lintel. But it did not pierce the dark beyond; sometimes when my back was turned I could feel him standing in the shadows beyond the doorway to watch his rites, as they show dead men in the funeral pictures. [loc. 336]

Sequel to The King Must Die: I think as a teenager I read this first, an old paperback from the jumble sale. Narrated again by Theseus, it's the story of everything that happens after his return from Crete: his father's funeral, becoming king, his friendship with Pirithoos the Lapith (a Bad Influence, to be honest), his relationship with the Amazon Hippolyta, their son Hippolytus and Theseus' frustration with his chosen life... There are curiously primitive Kentaurs, an encounter with Oedipus, and a foreshadowing of Paris's Judgment: also a fleeting encounter with a young Achilles. And through it all, warp and weft, Theseus's sense of the gods: his religious and spiritual practices. 

Again, though there is nothing that's definitely supernatural or mystical, those beliefs shade every experience he has. He attributes the stroke he suffers to Poseidon, though others say it was the Mother ('I had stolen two of her daughters out of her shrines, and tamed her worship at Eleusis') or Apollo ('I was struck without pain, as men are killed by his gentle arrows; and as I was only half to blame for his good servant’s death, he left me half alive.'). 

Though there are moments of great happiness, this is not a happy book. It's about pride and downfall, about misjudgements and poor choices. I had less patience with Theseus' piracy and war-making than with his bull-leaping: I was angry at his dismissal of his mother's valid concerns about how he might have offended the Great Mother, and especially his dismissal of abandoned Ariadne ('Do you know how the Wine King dies? She took to it like a fish to the sea, though she had been reared softly, knowing nothing of such things. There is rotten blood in the House of Minos' [loc. 661]); his treatment of his son is horrific, though he does realise this in the final chapter of the novel.

Renault's writing is superlative. I especially like her descriptions of landscape, and her ability to craft sentences that sound as though they have been translated from an ancient text. I'm saving my last unread Renault historical, The Praise Singer, for when I want to really immerse myself in her evocation of ancient Greece.

Man born of woman cannot outrun his fate. What need, then, to trouble his short morning with the griefs of time? He will never live to know them. [loc. 3831]

2025/081: The King Must Die — Mary Renault

‘Listen, and do not forget, and I will show you a mystery. It is not the sacrifice, whether it comes in youth or age, or the god remits it; it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all.' [p. 17]

Definitely a reread, and I can remember when and where I first read it: in the library during study period in my third year at secondary school. I also remembered encountering the quotations from this novel in the chapter-headings of Watership Down, my favourite book when I was nine or ten years old... I remembered most of the details of The King Must Die, despite not having reread in the last couple of decades: I had forgotten (or never noticed) just how many hints of other myths -- Orpheus, an anachronistic Agamemnon, Jason -- are present, and how much they are woven into the theme of goddess-worship.

Theseus grows up in the citadel of Troizen, where his grandfather teaches him about moira, '‘The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end.' [p. 15]. He doesn't know who his father is, but decides after experiencing 'earthquake aura' that it must be the god Poseidon. When he's seventeen, his mother tells him that his father is Aigeus, the King of Athens. Theseus sets out to find him, encountering many adventures en route, and becoming Year-King (doomed to death next year) in Eleusis: and when he reaches Athens, his father's wife Medea tries to poison him.

When it comes time for the tribute to Minos, Theseus is one of the party: seven youths and seven maidens, sent to Crete to die in the Labyrinth. There, he forges a loyal and lucky bull-dancing team; falls in love lust with Minos' daughter Ariadne, a living goddess; foments a rebellion; foresees an earthquake; and elopes from the ruins of Minoan civilisation with Ariadne, who he abandons on Naxos.

All true to the myth: but with the possible exception of the earthquake aura (a sensitivity that many animals possess) none of it is supernatural or mystical, except that Theseus interprets it so. Renault's ancient world is rooted in archaeological evidence and in the tension between the 'sky gods' and the ancient matriarchal religion. Theseus seemed heroic to my teenage self: now I read him as misogynist, violent, arrogant and hot-tempered. (So: heroic!)

I still love this novel: and I still wonder, as I have wondered for nearly fifty years, exactly what Ariadne has in her hand after the Bacchic revels. 

Great introduction by Bettany Hughes, too: 'not fact-bound chronicles, but respectful dances with antiquity' [loc. 155]. She stresses that "The ancient Greek muthoi, myths, does not mean fairy-tales, but rather points of information – things seen or experienced to be shared for the benefit of humankind."

2025/080: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

[They say] that keeping them here in the pits is too much, that it goes beyond war. They say we should just kill them, make them slaves or send them home, but ah, I like the pits. It reminds us that all things must change. I recall the Athenians as they were a year ago: their armour flashing like waves when the moon is upon them, their war cries that kept you up at night, and set the dogs howling, and those ships, hundreds of ships gliding around our island, magnificent sharks ready to feast.[loc. 131]

I reviewed this back in December 2023: prepublication review. Since then, I've been puzzled by readers saying they'd expected something light-hearted and humorous -- then I discovered that it won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2024, and that it was being promoted as 'bold and funny', 'Fierce, funny, fast-paced', 'hilarious' etc. Reading these plaudits, you may be surprised to find that the novel's mostly set in a concentration camp, where prisoners (chained and starving) are regularly beaten to death.

Reread for book club, where we discussed the tension between humour and horror, and I discovered the story behind the mysterious Tuireann: we felt he was a collector, but his story was only broadly hinted.

There's some glorious prose here, too, that reminds me to look forward to Lennon's next novel.

It’s an eerie walk this morning. The moon is still up, a slender blade that’s larger and crisper than the frail sun. Theros is long gone. The leaves don’t so much fall as rip from the trees. All of them are red, and they skitter along the roads like bleeding stars under that knife of moon. [loc. 1366]

And here's an interview which gives some background to the novel: .

...thousands of Athenian prisoners being flung into a quarry outside the city of Syracuse. ... a couple of years later, I was reading Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, where he describes how some of those defeated Athenians survived by quoting lines from Euripides. Ferdia Lennon: ‘I was tired of Merchant Ivory accents’ (Observer)

2025/079: Funeral Games — Mary Renault

‘All those great men. When Alexander was alive, they pulled together like one chariot-team. And when he died, they bolted like chariot-horses when the driver falls. And broke their backs like horses, too.' [p. 308]

At times heartbreaking, and at others profoundly unpleasant, this is the story of how Alexander's empire fragmented after his death. There are a lot of strong and deadly women in this novel: Roxane, Alexander's widow (and pregnant with his son when he died), later murders his other wife and her unborn child; Olympias, Alexander's mother, murders quite a few people before being stoned to death; Kynna raises her daughter Eurydike as a warrior, and dies as one herself. I was fascinated by Eurydike, the warrior queen of Macedon, and her grudging care for her husband Philip II (Alexander's half-brother, who had 'learning disabilities': I applaud (and wince at) the scene where Eurydike's political ambitions are shattered by the sudden arrival of her period.

Bagoas, narrator of The Persian Boy, grieves for Alexander and plots with Ptolemy (now Pharoah in Alexandria, Egypt) to redirect Alexander's mummy and bier, which was to be buried in Macedon but is cunningly diverted to Egypt. And at the end of the novel, in 286BC, Ptolemy -- who Renault presents as Alexander's half-brother -- has finished his History of Alexander, and is sitting with his cat Perseus in a sunny room, looking out at the gold laurel-wreath on the tomb of Alexander. That's the happiest moment of what is often a very dark book. There are moments of calm and joy, and even justice: but history does not permit many.

2025/078: The Persian Boy — Mary Renault

The living chick in the shell has known no other world. Through the wall comes a whiteness, but he does not know it is light. Yet he taps at the white wall, not knowing why. Lightning strikes his heart; the shell breaks open.
I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a king.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it. [p. 130]

The narrator of The Persian Boy is Bagoas, a Persian nobleman's son enslaved and gelded as a child. After years of abuse (not all of it sexual) he catches the eye of Darius the Great, King of all Persia, and is for a time the king's favourite. But Darius flees before the armies of Alexander the Great, and Bagoas is given as a gift to Alexander by Nabarzanes, a lesser king who rebelled against Darius and then surrendered to Alexander. 

Bagoas becomes Alexander's lover, wracked by jealousy of the King's former(?) lover Hephaistion: 'Maybe, since their youth, desire had faded ... but the love was there, public as marriage' [p. 147]. Bagoas is Alexander's companion for the next nine years, until Alexander's death in Babylon soon after Hephaistion's. He accompanies the army through Persia and all the way to India, and observes Alexander's conquests, the wife he marries in Bactria, and the eventual refusal of his men to push further East.

It's a romance, but it's also a keen-eyed account of Alexander's career, his personal relationships^* and military prowess, and his desire to unite the Greek and Persian lands over which he rules. Bagoas is a delightful narrator: a competent aide, a jealous lover who sets aside his jealousy because it is more important that Alexander is happy, a seasoned courtier, a man set on vengeance for his murdered family. He is courageous, cunning and resilient: and his first-person narrative reveals a complex and passionate emotional landscape.

As ever with Renault, the historical aspects of the novel are impeccable. I learnt a lot about Alexander's campaigns, in a format I found more congenial than a history book, and about the world in the fourth century before Christ: for instance, I hadn't known of the Canal of the Pharaohs. Though this is a very different novel, in timbre and scope, to Fire From Heaven, I found it even more enjoyable.

^{Renault's theory about the sexual dynamics between Alexander and Hephaistion, and Alexander and Bagoas, is clear without being explicit.}

2025/077: Fire from Heaven — Mary Renault

'Man’s immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.’ The rose-red on the hilltops changed to gold. He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, I am not afraid. It was better than music or his mother’s love; it was the life of the gods. No grief could touch him, no hatred harm him. Things looked bright and clear, as to the stooping eagle. He felt sharp as an arrow, and full of light. [p. 120]

This first volume of Renault's 'Alexander' trilogy covers the life of Alexander the Great from childhood (he's four years old in the first chapter) to the death of his father, King Philip of Macedon. It explores the conflict between his parents: Olympias, fierce and domineering, an acolyte of Dionysus and perhaps of darker goddesses, and Philip, drunken and lascivious but still a fearsome warrior and charismatic leader. Olympias tells Alexander that he is descended, via her, from Achilles: and she likes to hint that Alexander is not Philip's son at all.

Alexander is intelligent, good-looking and determined. Whatever he sets his mind to -- playing the kithara, taming a horse, making his way across country to kill his first man in battle -- he achieves. (Philip rarely appreciates his son's accomplishments.) Hephaistion loves him helplessly, though not hopelessly: their relationship does become sexual, though it's clear that Alexander could as easily have remained chaste. Ptolemy, who may be his half-brother, swears blood-brotherhood with him. 

This being Hellenic antiquity, the women get a rough deal. "...at the best? The loom, the bed, the cradle; children, the decking of bride-beds, clacking talk at the hearth and the village well; bitter old age, and death. Never the beautiful ardours, the wedded bond of honour, the fire from heaven blazing on the altar where fear was killed." [p. 246]. There's a scene between Alexander and his sister Kleopatra, when Philip's arranging for her to marry her maternal uncle: she says 'The gods are unjust to women.' ‘Yes,' says Alexander. 'I have often thought so. But the gods are just; so it must be the fault of men.’ [p. 338] There is a girl who flirts with him: his mother is implicated in her death. And he loses his (heterosexual) virginity to another girl, whom Olympias has sent to him. His heart, though, is given to Hephaistion. 

The prose is dense: Renault writes tremendously evocative scenes, full of sensory detail and of the characters' response to their environment. She can say as much in a wordless scene as with a page of dialogue. Fire from Heaven is told in omniscient third person, with characters' thoughts described as freely as their actions. Its centre, though, is always Alexander, and the historical and psychological forces that shaped him. 

I found Renault's depiction of ancient Hellenic society and culture -- with its constant brutal violence and danger, its appreciation of beauty and learning, and its religious and spiritual practices -- compelling, coherent and very different to post-medieval life. Alexander is the centre of the novel, and the epitome of a Macedonian prince. To modern eyes, he is monstrous: a calm, efficient, brutal killer. But Mary Renault makes him heroic, and makes us see him thus.  I was occasionally reminded of Dorothy Dunnett (whose Lymond novels also centre on a gifted young man and the forces that shape him): there's something about the style (perhaps a convention of mid-20th century novels?) and especially the descriptions. Perhaps they are both mythologising.

I purchased this copy in 2019: I'm pretty sure I read the novel decades ago, and did not especially appreciate it. Now, with a reignited interest in Ancient Greece, and a better idea of the politics / warfare of the region, I found it fascinating -- and Renault's prose is addictive.

2025/076: Knave of Diamonds — Laurie R King

I'd planned this. (I plan everything, so you can bet I'd worked on how to do this.) (Not, mind you, that I'd entirely decided just how much to tell her.) (And about whom.) [loc. 602]

I was an avid reader of Laurie R King's Mary Russell books (in which an elderly Sherlock Holmes marries a young woman of considerable talents) -- my enthusiasm waned around Pirate King, and though I've read and enjoyed several novels in the series since then, there are definitely others I've missed. No matter! This, the nineteenth novel in the series, more or less stands alone (though there are clear and rather intriguing references to earlier books) and I found it engaging and fun, though (again) Russell and Holmes are separated for a good part of the novel.

The year is 1926. Mary has just returned from a wedding in France (cue a lot of namedropping: Hemingway, 'Scotty' Fitzgerald, Picasso...) when she's visited by her long-lost Uncle Jake, who she hasn't seen since before her parents died. Uncle Jake is a confidence trickster, a joker and a thief: and it turns out he has a story to tell about the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels back in 1907. Trouble is, Sherlock Holmes investigated that theft, and Jake has no desire whatsoever to encounter him. Luckily, Holmes is in London visiting his brother Mycroft -- so Jake and Mary head for Ireland, where there are safes to be cracked, old ladies who are tougher than they look, Irish wolfhounds, coverups at the highest levels, Ernest Shackleton's brother Frank, and several reunions.

Great fun, though the accounts of zig-zagging across the Irish Sea and placing faith in railway timetables were perhaps too evocative, and actually quite stressful! The story is told by three narrators: delightful though parenthetical Uncle Jake (who's almost certainly gay) and Mary Russell in first person, Holmes in third. There is period-accurate but open-minded discussion of 'homosexual rings': the author adds, in her afterword, 'one can only hope that the repercussions of being outed will continue to lose their power to destroy'. And between and around the excitement and adventure, there is character growth and reconciliation, as well as some delightful dialogue.

Yet again, this is a novel 'anglicised' by changing 'ize' to 'ise' and to hell with the consequences. (Sise, seise...) Publishers, please do a spell-check as well as a global replace!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 10th June 2025.

2025/075: Bee Speaker — Adrian Tchaikovsky

It is truly amazing how many flavours of dumb an apocalypse can spawn. [loc. 1990]

Third in the series that began with Dogs of War and continued with Bear Head. The time is about two centuries after the events of Bear Head, and three generations after the fall of the Old ('the world that once was') due to failure of the global information network, in a 'deluge of artificially-generated false testimony' exarcerbated by climate disaster. Human existence on Earth is now rather dystopian, as a group of Martians discover when they respond to a distress call.

The Crisis Crew team consists of two humans (Tecomo and Ada) and two Bioforms -- genetically and biologically engineered animals, originally created to serve humans, now regarded as people and part of a thriving Martian society. One of the Bioforms is a Dogform, Wells, who is overwhelmed by the sheer sensory input of Earth: the other is a Dragonform, Irae, who is the best character in the book. (Not in a moral sense. Definitely not in a moral sense.)

The call they answered came from the Factory, which still makes dogforms (though their process is more brutal, less high-tech, than the original Bioforms). Cricket, a young monk from the Apiary (where they cherish and worship Bees), encounters the 'monsters' on his way to the Factory, and finds himself involved in momentous events. The inhabitants of the Griffin Bunker are determined to fight to preserve their feudal society; a Distributed Intelligence is roaming the countryside in a number of bodies; the monks have a secret, and the Bunker another.

I'm not super-keen on post-apocalyptic stories, but this was fun. There are nine narrators, each with a distinctive voice (an achievement in itself) and a different set of prejudices, beliefs, and traits. Four of those narrators identify as female, and there's a non-viewpoint character who is clearly trans. Though almost all of the story takes place on Earth, we get a good idea of how the Martian colony has evolved and transformed. Earth, meanwhile, is not devoid of Old People, which in this novel means a person from before the apocalypse.

Fascinating characters, clever plot, themes of transformation and of personhood -- and, of course, a close-knit team dealing with an alien, technologically-backward culture.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 5th June 2025.

2025/074: A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece — Philip Matyszak

...the lad has now decided that he is off to Athens to study Epicurean philosophy – which would only be true if Epicureanism taught the importance of getting as far from one’s parent and potential spouses as humanly possible. [p. 60]

Having greatly enjoyed Matyszak's 24 Hours in Ancient Athens for its blend of narrative, historical fact and wry observation, I decided to try another of his books about Ancient Greece. A Year in the Life of Ancient Greece is set a couple of centuries later than 24 Hours, in 248BC, and explores the lives of a small cast of characters: a farmwife, a diplomat, an athlete (it's Olympics year), a female musician, an escaped Thracian slave, a merchant who falls ill in Egypt, a young woman due to be married, and a builder of temples. It opens with a nice little scene outside the Temple of Hera at Elis, with a group of people sheltering from the rain and a temple attendant contemplating who, and what, each of them may be. Over the preceding twelve months (starting from the autumn equinox) we discover their stories and how they're connected.

Lots of information about agriculture, about athletic training, and about medicine and music. I especially liked Kallia, who plays the lyre and has been composing her own work in unconventional modes, or scales: Thratta, the escaped slave who becomes a herbalist, is also a likeable character. I learnt slightly more than I'd expected about the mechanics and geometry of temple construction, and some unsettling facts about the role of women. (For instance, if an Athenian man died without male heirs, his youngest daughter would become an epikleros, having to divorce any husband she might have acquired so that she could marry her father's closest male relative and keep her father's wealth in the family.)

Fascinating, well-referenced, with copious footnotes and explanatory sections. Also a joke about the River Meander.

2025/073: Sorcery and Small Magics — Maiga Doocy

“How can I stop doing something that I don’t even know I’m doing in the first place? It’s not like I’m sabotaging myself on purpose. The feelings are just there.” [p. 281]

M/M romantic fantasy. Leovander Loveage is brilliant at small magics, his cantrips and charms executed with musical accompaniment. Sadly, Leo's larger spells -- his Grandmagic -- never work out right. He's a student at the Fount, an institution where scrivers (like Leo) write the spells, and are paired with casters who execute them. Unfortunately, in their final year, Leo is not paired with his best friend Agnes but instead with his nemesis Sebastian Grimm, a past victim of Leo's practical jokes, who has little time and less patience for Leo's frivolity.

 When they accidentally perform a forbidden spell (Leo expects it to change the colour of his eyes: it does not) they have to work together to fix the problem. Which entails a trek into the Unquiet Wood, where sorceries and brigands and monsters abound and the Wilderlands, where magic flourishes unchecked, loom close; an encounter with an excellent sorceress named Sybilla; and Leo and Grimm's gradual realisation of the exact nature of that forbidden spell...

Sorcery and Small Magics is told entirely from Leo's point of view, and it takes a while to unravel the trauma behind his determination not to perform Grandmagic, and the true emotions underlying his happy-go-lucky demeanour. He's not altogether likeable: he mistrusts his friends, but is happy to follow advice from shady characters encountered in taverns; he always makes the worst possible choice; he has little respect for the lived experience of others. Yes, there is loss and pain in his past, but he's had years to become a better person. There are definite signs of improvement by the end of the novel, though, and of a more serious and honest Leo.

This is the first in the Wilderlands trilogy, and I'm intrigued enough by the worldbuilding, and by some of the characters, to want to read the next volume.

2025/072: A Language of Dragons — S F Williamson

‘The ones who have hoards don’t need to work, but the ones who don’t, well …’
Hoards. Like piles of gold or money. Why do dragons need money? They don’t shop for groceries or pay bills. It hits me that, in all my years learning dragon tongues, I’ve never questioned how dragons fit into our human society. [p. 180]

London, 1923, where there's a Peace Agreement between the British government and the Dragon Queen; where some dragons fought in the Great War alongside humans, but others massacred the entire human population of Bulgaria; where Vivien Featherswallow, seventeen years old and the daughter of respectable Second Class parents, will stop at nothing to ensure that she can continue her studies in dragon linguistics, and prevent her little sister from ever being demoted to Third Class.

The novel opens with Viv trying to impress the Chancellor of the Academy for Draconic Linguistics -- but it turns out her parents aren't so respectable after all, and by midnight they're in prison, Viv's in custody, and a coup d'etat is in progress.

Then the Prime Minister offers Viv a job at Bletchley Park, at the Department for the Defence Against Dragons (which seems to employ only teenagers with shadowy pasts). Viv's job is in the Codebreaking team, but it's actually more dragon linguistics. One of her colleagues is a former friend who Viv betrayed: another is a would-be priest. Romance! Melodrama! A teenager with a history of bad decisions in a position to affect the lives of thousands! What could possibly go wrong?

I'd have enjoyed this more if Viv had been a more relatable character, though I do applaud the author's portrayal of a flawed, impulsive young woman who's only gradually acquiring the ability to reflect on her actions and take responsibility for their consequences. The intricacies of draconic linguistics and biology were fascinating, and I loved Viv's sheer enthusiasm for learning and discovery. The secondary characters could have done with more characterisation: I found it hard to differentiate or care about most of Viv's colleagues. And the romance was not wholly convincing (and, be warned, does not have a happy outcome). 

I believe it's first in a series -- the end of the novel opens up a whole new set of possibilities -- and I'd like to see where the story goes.

2025/071: The Lost Books of the Odyssey — Zachary Mason

Now every debt is paid, every sin erased and I can begin anew, I who was once Odysseus and now am no one. [p. 145]

The conceit of this novel, or collection of short stories, is that the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contain 'forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’s story that omit stock epic formulae in favour of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity'. These are those variations, some more credible than others, which are effectively Odyssey AU^*. 

What if Odysseus were a coward? a sorcerer (making the golem Achilles)? What if he returned home but found Penelope dead? or remarried? or aged in some 'malevolent illusion'? What if Agamemnon, after the war, hired a master assassin to kill the overly-cunning Odysseus, but that assassin was Odysseus himself? What if Odysseus is the author of the Odyssey? What if the Odyssey is actually a chess manual?

There are a couple of stories about side-characters, too, such as Polyphemus. And the Cyclops' remains are shown to one Odysseus: "a huge skeleton embedded in a cliff-face. The skull had a single wide orbit flanked by fearsome tusks nearly half as long as its body" [p. 223]. The footnote to this scene references the excellent The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor. Mason provides thorough footnotes throughout, explaining real or imagined theories underlying each story, and tantalising me with the goddess Quickness, with Egyptian colonies, with Helen's veils.

I bought this book several years ago, but the time to read it fell after seeing The Return (which I enjoyed very much): it was a perfect complement. The prose is powerful, the tone and style varied, and though not every story hit the mark there were some truly memorable variants on the myth.

I fear global replace has corrupted this text in an attempt to anglicise it: 'prizes' become 'prises', 'seize' becomes 'seise', 'sizes' becomes 'sises'.

^*AU: 'alternate universes': a fanfic term. I note there is no gender-swap variant here.

2025/070: Hy Brasil — Margaret Elphinstone

Sometimes I seem to recognise things, as if I’d dreamed it all already. Like ... this road through the orchards. The apple trees. Meeting you like I just did. The way the sun makes patterns on the gravel.I keep having the feeling that it isn’t new. People say autumn is melancholy, but I find it’s the spring that feels so old. [p. 153]

Hy Brasil is a group of volcanic islands in the mid-Atlantic: a former British colony, a former NATO base, a former pirate kingdom. It's hard to find due to magnetic and meteorological anomalies, and for centuries its actual position was a matter of debate. Travel writer Sidony Redruth (whose career is founded on the lie of her prize-winning article about Ascension and St Helena, researched solely in her local library) is commissioned to write a book about the islands. Hy Brasil incorporates her working notes for Undiscovered Islands, along with the narratives of some of the islanders: Lucy Morgan, in love with a dead man, rattling around in ancient Ravnscar Castle; Colombo MacAdam, a reporter for the Hesperides Times; and Jared Honeyman, who's trying to fund a dive to raise the Cortes, a 17th-century Spanish galleon, from where it sank near the small Ile de l'Espoir. 

Hy Brasil is geologically, politically and economically unstable. There seems to be plenty of money for new swimming pools and the Pele Centre volcanic observatory, but for some reason President James Hook (one of the four men who sparked the Revolution and won Hy Brasil's independence from the UK) is oddly reluctant to approve a grant for Jared's research. Could his history with Jared's father, another revolutionary, be the reason? Or is there something about the Ile de l'Espoir -- commonly known as Despair -- that he'd prefer remained secret?

There are echoes of other islands: references to The Tempest ('Caliban's Fast Food Diner', Mount Prosper), to Odysseus (Hook's wife waited ten years for his return, weaving) and to Tennyson's Ulysses, to Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. There are references to St Brendan, to Vikings, to the Matter of Britain (those treasures in the Metropolitan Museum in New York: a chalice, a spear, a cauldron...) Yet Hy Brasil is also a part of the modern world -- well, the world of the late 1990s, which feels astonishingly remote now: no internet, no mobile phones.

The novel was first published in 2002 and I think I read it fairly soon after that, certainly before 2005. Very little felt familiar, except the mythic element of the treasures: I'd completely forgotten that it is also a story about political corruption, a thriller, and a romance. This time around, I found it as delightful as it is in my vague distant memory: and I think I appreciate Elphinstone's prose, and her characterisation, more than I did when I first read it.

2025/069: The Only Good Indians — Stephen Graham Jones

“Why are you doing all this?” If you tell him, he would get to die knowing it was all for a reason, that this has been a circle, closing. Which would be more than you ever got, that day in the snow. [p. 247]

Four young Blackfeet men once went hunting in winter on restricted ground, breaking an important tribal code. Ten years later, Ricky dies in a brawl outside a bar; Gabe is an alcoholic who seldom sees his daughter Denorah; Cass is planning to propose to his girlfriend Jo; and Lewis is married to a white woman. But Lewis starts to hallucinate a dead elk, and then his dog dies horribly.

It's a novel of three parts: Lewis' descent into madness and paranoia; the story of a young woman who becomes interested in a sweat lodge ritual that Gabe and Cass are planning; and Gabe's daughter Denorah, star basketball player, fleeing something terrible. The characterisation is subtle, and the events of a decade ago are revealed only gradually. Themes of family, cultural heritage, alcoholism, racism, the environment...

... and, oh yes: violence against women (and other females). It all starts with that hunting trip, and the age-old prohibition against killing a pregnant animal. The vengeance enacted on those who slew her is one matter, but they aren't the only victims: the women close to them, uninvolved in the original slaughter, also meet horrific fates. It's not really fridging: it's not a motivation for the male protagonists. It's just ... collateral damage.

This, I suppose, is folk horror in an American context, or a Native American context: Jones, like his protagonists, is a Blackfeet Native American -- and an elk hunter, apparently, which might be why that scene is so very vivid. I loved the prose, and the dialogue, and the little details: I hated the deaths of the innocent. And I'd like to read more of Jones' work, but I shall be wary of collateral damage.

2025/068: Bonds of Brass — Emily Skrutskie

I’m watching out for him, and no matter where he goes, I’ll be there to defend him. Even if it’s wrapped in layers upon layers of deception. Even if it can never last. [loc. 2515]

Ettian, as a child, survived the brutal invasion of his world (and the massacre of his family) by the Umber Empire. Seven years later, he's the star pilot at Rana's Military Academy -- until the day when his classmates attempt to assassinate Ettian's BFF, Gal, because Gal is the heir to ... the Umber Empire.

Oops.

Ettian doesn't think twice before saving his friend, but there's plenty of time for second thoughts later when the two of them are on the run, trying to get Gal to safety. Can Gal single-handedly transform the Umber Empire from the merciless juggernaut it's become under his mother's rule? Will he continue her quest for galactic domination? Or will he join the rebellion and fight to save Ettian's home world? (Also, will Ettian ever get to kiss him?)

First in a trilogy, this was great fun, though I did occasionally wonder why Ettian remained so devoted to Gal, who often seemed rather shallow. Much more interesting as a character was Ettian's new friend Wen, a con artist who he meets when trying to buy a used spaceship. Wen is chaos incarnate, clever and competent, a survivor to the core. She might be the most likeable person in the novel.

Huge twist at the end which was foreshadowed, but certainly not inevitable. I'm still trying to decide whether I want to read the rest of the trilogy: on the one hand, Bonds of Brass was well-written and well-paced (though everything speeded up and got twistier in the final few chapters) and the world universe-building was intriguing. On the other hand, Gal and Ettian's relationship didn't ring true for me -- though, again, that might be just me and my bad cold. (Which you will be pleased to hear has now faded away.)

2025/067: The Girl from Everywhere — Heidi Heilig

“The age of exploration is long over, amira. Now it’s the age of globalization. And once everyone agrees something is one way, all the other ways it could have been disappear.” [loc. 958]

Nixie Song is sixteen years old and lives aboard her father's pirate ship, the Temptation. This is not your usual pirate scenario, though, for the Temptation can sail to any place or time, as long as Nixie's father Slate has a hand-drawn map to that place. And given the fantastical nature of some cartography, their voyages are not limited to the mundane. Nix's best friend, Kash (short for Kashmir) seems to have originated in an Arabian Nights-flavoured city, while the ship is illuminated by glowing fish from a mythical land named Scandia. 

Nix is as much at home (or as much a stranger) in 21st-century New York as in 18th-century India. But her father, opium-addicted and probably bipolar, is obsessed by a single place and time: Honolulu, 1884, where Nix's mother died giving birth to her. He's determined to find a way back to save his lost love -- but then what will become of Nix?

I loved the mechanics of Navigation, the piracy, the ancient tombs, the tiger-smuggling and the sense of danger in the margins of the maps. (And Swag, the miniature dragon.) I liked Nix's pragmatism and competence -- she's the one in charge of trading, and she really wants to learn Navigation so that she can have a ship of her own --  though was less impressed with some of her more stubborn decisions. I liked the twisty and evolving plot, and the secondary characters, and the audacious heist in 19th-century Hawai'i, and the vividness of Heilig's locations. The romantic triangle, however, left me cold.

That said, my recollection of The Girl from Everywhere (which I bought in 2017!) is somewhat blurred by the bad cold I was enduring when I read it. I'd like to reread before embarking on the sequel, The Ship Beyond Time.

2025/066: Taking Stock — A L Lester

"…being decent about…you know.” He gestured vaguely. Portnoy nodded, interpreting his hand wave as he meant it…being a queer, shacking up with a criminal, having poor judgment in my personal life generally. [loc. 1475]

Another novel set -- coincidentally -- in the early 1970s, mostly in rural England. Laurie Henshaw has been working on his uncle's farm since his teens. At thirty-two, he has a stroke, and is struggling to accept that some things are now impossible for him. Meanwhile, in the City, Phil McManus is on extended leave after his boyfriend set him up to take the fall for an insider trading deal. He retreats to a country cottage to wallow.

They literally bump into one another at the local Post Office. (Yes, it is set in the past, when rural post offices existed.) It's nto a meet-cute, though. Laurie is mourning the loss of his strength and coordination: Phil is grieving his lost career and his London life. And it's not long since homosexuality was decriminalised: 'Phil hadn’t made a move or said anything and Laurie hadn’t liked to ask. You still didn’t, unless you were sure, despite the change in the law.' [loc. 1016]

Strong themes of found family (I liked Cat, a homeless girl who's found refuge at the farm) and echoes of a lost rural past. Lester evokes the period nicely: the possibility of simply going to ground and not being connected, the prejudice, the traces of old superstitions and beliefs, the existence of flourishing farms. A small gentle story which was just what I needed when I was in bed with a bad cold.

2025/065: Levitation for Beginners — Suzannah Dunn

...surely anyone could see that this new girl was . . . well, what? I wanted to say she was a liar, although I couldn’t think of any actual lies she’d told. It was more that she was somehow all lies, I thought: made of lies; one big lie. [loc. 1399]

The setting is June 1972, somewhere in the south of England. Deborah (who's looking back from the vantage point of her sixties) is one of a close-knit group of girls in their last year of primary school. Deborah is the clever one: come September, she'll be going to grammar school while all the rest of them go to the local comprehensive. She has a secret crush on Tutankhamun, a widowed Scottish mother given to gnomic pronouncements ('the way to make me strong, she thought, was to make me scared') and a love of swimming.

Then comes Sarah-Jayne, whose family moves into the Vicarage -- which allegedly has its own swimming pool -- and everything begins to change. Sarah-Jayne has a fancy haircut and a red trouser suit and proclaims herself in love with David Cassidy. Sarah-Jayne goes out for lunch with her sister's boyfriend Max, who lets her drink wine and buys her presents. Sarah-Jayne tries to teach the other girls to levitate. And Sarah-Jayne, Deborah realises, doesn't know the secret at the heart of her own family.

In some respects, nothing much happens in this novel: it's a vignette of rural life and undercurrents that are only vaguely apprehended by the narrator. In other ways, it's an unsettling story about lies and sexuality and adolescent friendships. I'm just a little younger than Deborah and I recognised so much of my own childhood in this novel: even the characters' names were the names of girls in my class at school. There's a marvellous passage in the first chapter (it convinced me to buy the book) about the underlying horrors of the Seventies: Deborah concludes the litany of dangers with "I’m only half joking when I say I’m surprised that any of us lived to tell the tale." 

Reading this was weirdly nostalgic, but also horrific. It made me wonder about the secrets I didn't know in our small village, the kinds of secrets that Deborah observes but doesn't understand. And it makes me glad that I was blithely ignorant.

I’ve been lucky, I’ve led a sheltered life and to this day no one else has ever looked at me the way that man did ... He knew before I did that I could see through him. Which meant I was in his way. [loc. 3271]

2025/064: The Incandescent — Emily Tesh

Demons were attracted to complexity and personhood. Laypeople assumed that this meant every magicians was on the brink of getting possessed all the tie, but really demons entering the mundane plane moved into complex and person-shaped spaces, like hermit crabs moving into shells. If you were unlucky enough to meet a magician with a demon looking out from behind their eyes, you could usually assume they'd invited it in. [loc. 225]

There are some books I read, and think about, and then review. There are others that I read, and think about, and then succumb to a reread before I review. The Incandescent is in the latter category, and I enjoyed it differently but just as much the second time through.

This is a dark academia novel, in the sense that it's set at a school for magic: but our protagonist is not a student, but Dr Walden (Saffy to her friends), 38 years old, Director of Magic at Chetwood School. Her career is her life, and she's constantly busy: teaching (the four students in her Upper Sixth Invocation group are important characters); negotiating with the demon in the staff room photocopier ('No representation without exsanguination!'); dealing with the Marshals, who police the school for stray demons; implementing a strict Personal Electronics Policy; filling out risk assessments for practical classes... 

Dr Walden is an alumna of the school herself, though she doesn't like to talk about the events of her final year: she is also a powerful magician. Everything goes pear-shaped when Nikki, one of her best students, summons something out of her league: and suddenly Dr Walden is fighting for her life, revisiting the catastrophe that happened when she was the star of the Upper Sixth, and revealing a dangerous secret to the abrasive (but attractive) Marshal Laura Kenning. 

The novel's plot is demon-heavy: none of your potions, herbalism et cetera, just invocation (demons), evocation (spells) and instantiation (alchemy). But the demons are as much characters as the humans, and more likeable than some. The school is vividly described (Tesh was a teacher, though possibly did not have to deal with a demonically-possessed photocopier) and the secondary characters -- from Walden's rather judgmental perspective -- well-observed. The magical system makes sense (though there was one element where I wondered how a magical oath might manifest; surely more efficiently than that?) and there's a strong sense of how this magical school fits into the real world: newsletters, legal responsibility and so on. 

But what I liked most was the journey from 'Dr Walden' (superiority complex, arrogance, cosplaying her grandmother, dry humour) to Saffy. I also liked the distinction between her two major adult relationships -- with Laura, and with Mark, a security advisor -- and how differently she thinks and feels about them. I loved the Phoenix, too, though I should not.

There's a point in the last third of the novel where everything changes, and it is truly shocking. Even on first read, I had to go back and reread a few pages to check whether what I thought had happened was what was on the page. It was. Splendidly done! The ending felt a little anticlimactic (but that's resolution for you) and there were a few loose strands that didn't seem resolved. (One character's employment, or rather who they're working for; another character being accepted in a new role...) But overall, an extremely enjoyable read with a relatable protagonist, a twisty plot and plenty of emotion.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 13th May 2025.

2025/063: The Tainted Cup — Robert Jackson Bennett

That’s the problem with the damned Empire these days . . . All these complacent bastards think the only thing that matters is which tiny beast is dancing in your blood, altering your brain, making you see and feel and think differently. The person an enhancement is paired with is just as important as what enhancement they get. And we get some say in what kind of person we are. We do not pop out of a mold. We change. We self-assemble. [p. 65]

I read and enthused about Robert Jackson Bennett's 'Divine Cities' trilogy, beginning with City of Stairs, though was a little disappointed by the trilogy's conclusion: that might be why I skipped the Founders trilogy (though I note I own the first volume). The Tainted Cup -- the first in yet another trilogy a new series (source), 'Shadows of the Leviathan' -- has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel of 2024, and was on offer, so I thought I'd give it a try.

In the Empire of Khanum, augmentations (temporary grafts, long-lasting suffusions) are used to shape living beings -- plants, animals and humans -- to imperial needs. Chief amongst those needs is the annual wet season, with its incursions of leviathans from the eastern ocean. The leviathans can be detected days or weeks before their arrival by the seaquakes which signal their movement out of the depths towards the continent. They are mountain-sized, unique, devastating. Walls are built to keep them out, and the Legion attempts to distract them with gunnery. (But every augmentation is sourced from the blood and bone of leviathans...)

The story opens with a death: or, rather, with the arrival of Dinias Kol, youthful apprentice to Iudex investigator Anagosa Dolabra, at the house where the death has occurred. An Imperial engineer has died in a peculiarly horrible fashion, burst apart by the explosive growth of vegetable matter from within his body. The household staff are not especially helpful, but Din, augmented to have perfect recall of every experience, returns to his master and recounts what he's seen and heard. Ana Dolabra -- eccentric, neurodivergent, constantly blindfolded ('best to keep the senses limited... too much stimulation drives a person mad') but able to read print with her fingertips -- deduces that the engineer was murdered, and that he may not be the only victim.

Din has some neurodivergence of his own (he's dyslexic, though has developed workarounds in order to keep this secret) but he can't comprehend Ana's leaps of intuition, or her rather brutal sense of humour. And this is their first murder case: until now, they've worked only on cases of pay fraud. Still, his stubborn determination pairs well with Ana's intense focus and gift for pattern recognition, and he discovers more about his own unique set of skills as well as learning to appreciate hers.

It's a pretty good murder mystery, obfucscated by the sheer biopunk weirdness of the setting: but what I liked most was the characterisation of the protagonists. Din's first-person narrative (like Doctor Watson's) gives us the chance to see Ana's brilliantly non-linear deductive process. I am looking forward to reading the second in the series (out now...).

A final thought: this is very much a society which thinks all the danger comes from outside, and has built up a framework to deal with an external threat while ignoring internal matters. This, from the author's afterword:

Regulations have their uses, but we cannot allow them to form the jar that will eventually be used to trap us and pickle us in our own brine. I wanted to write about civil servants and bold builders for that exact purpose. Keep up the fight! [p. 410]

2025/062: The Road to Roswell — Connie Willis

“Are you sure this here’s a good idea?” Joseph whispered to Francie. “In every dang Western I ever seen, people who pretend to get married end up really gettin’ hitched by the last reel.” [loc. 4613]

Tropetastic romantic comedy set in, and near, Roswell during a UFO festival. Francie is in Roswell to attempt to prevent her friend Serena marrying a UFO hunter, one of a series of unsuitable swains. She is abducted by ... well, by an alien, who she genders as male and soon nicknames Indy (for 'his' prowess with tentacles, reminiscent of Dr Jones' whip). They pick up a hitchhiker named Wade; then another UFO nut, a retiree who's a fan of Westerns, and an old lady who likes playing cards. Each, of course, has something to add to the plot, which mostly consists of driving around New Mexico and Nevada, learning to communicate with Indy, helping Indy search for a mysterious 'tsinibitai', and evading the FBI. Oh, and preventing an alien invasion.

I've enjoyed several of Willis's romcoms (though not in the last, er, twenty years, according to my blog) but this one felt rather shallow and even more improbable than my plot summary might suggest. Francie's fun, but superficial; Wade is obviously hiding something (which Francie never seems to consider is a possibility) and so is the elderly Western fan. And the elderly card-player. There is a romance which, despite apparently popping out of nowhere, was the obvious 'happy ending'. There are aliens, of varying types (but apparently at risk from rattlesnakes, despite biology). And somewhere under the romcom there's an interesting story about Monument Valley and aliens and language. Unfortunately, it's very well concealed.

I ended up returning this novel because of the plethora of unnecessary hyphenations -- 15 in the first chapter or so, including defi-nitely, uni-forms, be-cause, her-self... Publisher, do better! Author, please return to form!

2025/061: Checking Out — Meryem El Mehdati (translated by Julia Sanches)

I find it harder and harder to put my finger on what exactly incenses me: whether it’s the knowledge that no matter how long I live in this place, some people will never believe I’m from here, or the fact that I am not and never will be from there. [loc. 236]

This caught my eye because I'm familiar with the big Canarian supermarket chain HiperDino -- who are, I'm sure, nothing like Supersaurio, the big Canarian supermarket chain for which Meryem, the narrator of Checking Out, works. The daughter of Moroccan immigrants, she's started as an intern: as the novel opens, she's working in Compliance and wondering if her boss Yolanda actually wants to send her home in tears three days a week. She no longer has time to write fanfic, or read, or do much except survive the commute and daydream about people spelling her name correctly.

This is an excellent novel about gradually selling out and becoming a cog in the corporate machine; about the exhaustion that comes from constantly having to push back against sexism, racism, and classism; about being an outsider; about Canarian life. The translation seems smooth (I had to look up a few colloquialisms, but I'm glad they were left untranslated) and I found Meryem extremely relatable. (Especially the line 'I’ve learned that growing up is about pretending, day after day, hour after hour, that you don’t want to just go home and be on your own.' [loc. 1910].)

Things I learnt from this novel:

• guiri - 'a colloquial Spanish word often used in Spain to refer to uncouth foreign tourists'
• Harrylatino, a Spanish Harry Potter fanfic site
• 'It’s impossible to live in the Canary Islands and not feel like you’re in a developing nation instead of Europe. I mean, come on, H&M doesn’t even deliver here.'

And I have a better sense of what it's like to grow up in relative poverty in a major tourist resort. 

Thanks also to anyone who’s ever made fun of fanfiction. I’ve got a book. I don’t know about you. [afterword]

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 8th May 2025.

2025/060: The Vengeance — Emma Newman

“Alas, mademoiselle, there are some problems that cannot be solved with violence.”
“Nah.” Morgane sheathed the knife. “Any problem involving a man can always be solved with violence. Violence or gold, to be fair.” [loc. 2374]

Morgane has grown up crewing on a 17th-century pirate ship, the Vengeance. It's a marvellous life and the ship's captain, Anna-Marie -- Morgane's mother -- is notorious for daring raids, especially on the ships of the Four Chains Trading Company. She's also famous for being the first captain to put in the Articles that women can be crew, with equal shares. And she's brought Morgane up to fight, to be brave, and to eschew shore life.

But Anna-Marie is killed, and Morgane heads for distant France (which she believes is an island) to track down her family and the Comte who ruined them. Of course, it is not that simple: Morgane is confronted with con-men, feral wolves and, worst of all, courtly etiquette. Only with the help of the sensible Lisette, initially engaged as her governess, does Morgane begin to solve the mystery of her birth and of the reasons her mother is called a monster.

Despite the piratical elements (left behind when Morgane set out for France), the cross-dressing (Morgane, of course, disguises herself as Lisette's brother) and the queer relationship (which seemed to come out of nowhere), I didn't engage with this novel. Most of the characters seemed shallow and one-note, and had a terrible habit of dying violent deaths just as they were about to reveal the Shocking Truth. Morgane did not show much in the way of common sense: yes, France is very different from Port Royal, but surely by observing the behaviour of others, and listening to those who are more familiar with the local customs, she might have avoided some of those inconvenient deaths? 

And the grammar is shaky: far too many paragraphs where the third-person pronoun is used for two different people. ('Anger at what she’d been told and anger that she’d been killed'; 'She was petite, looked to be about the same age as her'; 'So she had been duped, just as much as she had?'). Also, though Morgane's dialogue is not too horribly anachronistic, some of the surrounding prose really jolted me out of the historical period. 'She was given the chance to speak but shook her head, feeling like she’d forgotten how to do that. What even were words?' What, indeed...

If I had seen the cover properly, or even the series title, I would probably not have read this novel: it is the first in the '--- of Dumas' series, which is a massive spoiler considering that the presence of --- is only revealed very late (and rather abruptly) in the novel.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 6th May 2025.

2025/059: Agent Sonya: Mother, Lover, Soldier, Spy — Ben MacIntyre

Mrs Burton of Avenue Cottage drank tea with the neighbours, joined in their complaints about the shortages and agreed that the war must soon be over. ... Colonel Kuczynski of the Red Army, meanwhile, was running the largest network of spies in Britain: her sex, motherhood, pregnancy and apparently humdrum domestic life together formed the perfect camouflage. Men simply did not believe a housewife making breakfast from powdered egg, packing her children off to school and then cycling into the countryside could possibly be capable of important espionage. [loc. 4269]

Another of MacIntyre's entertaining biographies of 20th century spies, this is the story of Ursula Kuczynski, a German Jew and communist who spied for the Soviet Union before and during WW2, and was instrumental in the USSR's acquisition of 'the science of atomic weaponry'. Hers was a fascinating life: China in the 1930s, then Poland, Switzerland, and finally England. She was married twice, had three children by three different men, and was never exposed as a spy. In 1950, on the day before the trial of Klaus Fuchs (one of her major contacts), she returned to Berlin, where she began a second successful career as ... children's author Ruth Werner, who (writes MacIntyre) 'has been described, with only slight exaggeration, as East Germany’s Enid Blyton' [loc. 5535].

Why wasn't she exposed? Perhaps because she looked like a respectable housewife: perhaps because Roger Hollis, MI5, was 'either a traitor or a fool'. MacIntyre holds the latter view, describing him as 'a plodding, slightly droopy bureaucrat with the imaginative flair of an omelette' [loc. 4360] and 'really quite thick'. The only person who might have recognised 'Mrs Burton' for the spy she was seems to have been Milicent Bagot, apparently the inspiration for Le Carre's Connie Sachs. She campaigned to keep Ursula's brother interned, and was immensely suspicious of Ursula's husband Len. But Hollis saw only a housewife, devoted to her children.

MacIntyre manages to strike a balance between admiration for his subject's backbone, steely nerve and commitment to a cause, and the consequences of her actions. Her first husband was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag for years; her lover Richard Sorge was hanged by the Japanese; her children (especially her son Michael) were scarred and traumatised; and her work was pivotal in starting the Cold War. An astonishing woman, and a well-paced and thoroughly referenced biography.

2025/058: The Mask of Apollo — Mary Renault

... a show put up by some Etruscans from up north. ... their faces were quite bare; they were using them to act with. It is hard to describe how this display affected me. Some barbarian peoples are ashamed to show their bodies, while civilised men take pride in making theirs fit to be seen. But to strip one’s own face to the crowd, as if it were all happening to oneself instead of to Oedipus or Priam; one would need a front of brass to bear it. [loc. 1579]

I believe this is technically a reread: I certainly owned a copy of this novel in my early teens. But nothing felt at all familiar, and it's possible I found it too difficult back then.

The narrator is Nikeratos (Niko), an Athenian actor, and the time is around 350BCE. Niko is noticed by Dion, advisor to the tyrant Dionysios I of Syracuse. ('Tyrant' in the original sense: a ruler who holds power without any constitutional right.) After Dionysios' death, Niko becomes a witness to Dion and Plato's efforts to mould the dead king's son, Dionysios II, into the platonic ideal of a ruler. It does not end well.

I found the political plot less engaging than the theatrical scenes. Niko has an antique mask of Apollo, made of olive wood, which seems to speak to him and guide him. He is a successful actor (and sometimes also a courier for Dion and his allies): passionate about his craft, appalled by Plato's ideas about reforming the theatre ('the parts of base, or passionate, or unstable men should be related in narration' [loc. 2547]), and dedicated to Apollo, whose mask he wears and whose role he plays at three key moments in the novel. One is during the (or 'a') sack of Syracuse, which Renault describes with understated horror: 'It took them a good while to go through the temple. After a time, we heard the wails of the women left alive, being dragged off to Ortygia. The child screamed on one note until, I suppose, it died.' [loc. 4584] In that scene, Niko uses the theatre's special effects -- a sounding-board with particular qualities, the thunder machine -- to strike the fear of Apollo into the invaders.

Many of the plays Niko performs in, or mentions, have been lost to us. I was especially struck by the use of Aeschylus' The Myrmidons as a cultural marker: "Lovers meet at it, as if it were a shrine like that tomb in Thebes," muses Niko, realising that Dion and Plato had been lovers. Renault slyly slips in a reference to Hamlet: 'I dreamed I was beside some tomb or grave, holding a skull in my hand. It was clean, and I knew this was a play. Some flashes still come back to me; I was the son of a murdered king whose shade had cried me to avenge him...' [loc. 2146].

And the final page has Niko reflecting on how 'All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? ... No one will ever make a tragedy – and that is as well, for one could not bear it – whose grief is that the principals never met." Renault has written that tragedy, and made it clear that Plato was wasted on Dionysios II, and Aristotle inadequate for the young Alexander (whom Niko meets). Someday soon I'll need to (re?)read the Alexander trilogy...

Renault's afterword, which sets out her sources and provides some context for the lost plays she mentions, also includes this comment: "No true parallel exists between this passage in Syracusan history and the affairs of any present-day state. Christianity and Islam have changed irrevocably the moral reflexes of the world." And yet it's easy to see partial parallels, of corruption and nepotism, fascism and oligarchy, dictatorship and tyranny.