I’ve read a few quite heavy books recently, and this lovely novella by Ben Aaronovitch was just what I needed to re-orientate myself to a happier reading place. Abigale is a teenaged black girl in London who is learning about magic from Nightingale and The Folly, but strikes out on her own to solve a mystery of missing children and is helped by an army of talking foxes. I loved how she uses spatterings of young people (possibly specifically young black Londoners, I’m not sure) words and phrases and that Ben Aaronovitch gives humorous definitions of them in footnotes – I felt I was learning a new language. It’s a very enjoyable urban fantasy story.
There were lots of things which I loved about this book – I loved how the title character was called January because his mum messed up filling in his birth certificate and wrote his birth month where his name was supposed to go! I loved the little factoids about language and word origins from the character who was an expert in these things, and of course, I loved the wise enormous talking mammoths!
Set in a future where much of Earth is flooded due to climate change, it begins with January being the principal dancer in the Royal Ballet, the continuation of which is hanging by a thread in an increasingly less inhabitable London, until things get too bad and January becomes a refugee and is sent to a Chinese run Earth colony on Mars.
The Mars colony has by this time been going for several generations and the people living there have adapted both naturally and by genetic enhancements to the different environment, most notably, due to much lower gravity, they are taller, slighter and less strong than Earth born people.
What follows is a mix of a political type thriller and a love story and a whodunnit. ‘Earthstrongers’ the newly arrived refugees are feared due to being so much more physically strong than naturalised Martians and there is a lot of prejudice and racial hatred towards them. They are forced to wear literal cages to weaken them and to take low paid physical labour type jobs. Also, the Martians don’t use gender pronouns and have somehow genetically altered people so it’s not obvious which gender they are and it’s very rude to ask.
In a weird publicity stunt, January is asked to ‘marry’ (more of a job/contract than a romantic liaison) a senator and then there’s lots of political mystery and intrigue, not all of which I followed (possibly because I’m quite distracted at the moment because my beloved pet spaniel, Chester suddenly went blind and after several vet visits and tests turns out has end stage cancer) and he (January) is such a sweet well meaning person that he is torn between hating the politics that his new spouse stands for, but finding himself drawn to them as a person.
I did enjoy the book, mostly – I like Natasha Pulley’s writing style, and I loved January’s character, and the little bits of whimsy (like the aforementioned mammoths). I did get a bit confused, although like I said maybe that was on me and what I’m going through with Chester. Other reviewers have dissed the science and also the Chinese cultural elements, but I don’t know enough to have been bothered by those things.
Wow. This book is like the burst you get in your brain from eating too much wasabi. It is riveting, compelling, fascinating, beautiful, horrible, disturbing… I could go on but that would be boring, which is one thing this book isn’t.
Like peeking through fingers at some horrific news story or road traffic accident, you want to look away but can’t and the writer so skilfully teases out the list of terrible things that you are on the edge of your seat wanting to know how we got to where we are.
The story is narrated by Frank, a sixteen year old living with his father on a remote Scottish island owned by his family and connected to the mainland by a bridge. We learn early one that Frank is very disturbed. He describes dead pan how he dismembers animals to construct sort of pagan totem poles and the elaborate ways he has of killing them. He also admits to having murdered three children while he was younger, but not to worry as it was just a phase he went through.
It is a engrossing study of a damaged sociopathic/psychopathic mind and Frank is so matter of fact and self effacing that you can almost sympathise with him, but not really because he is totally abhorrent.
At the beginning of the book we learn that Frank’s older brother, Eric has escaped from the mental hospital where he was sent for (among other things) setting fire to people’s pet dogs. Frank’s father is not what you would call normal either, at best chronically OCD he clearly cares for Frank, but is not the ideal role model. Frank’s hippy mother abandoned him shortly after his birth. In the nature/nurture debate Franks was dealt a pretty shitty hand either way.
I’m not sure what I thought of the ending – certainly shocking, but perhaps a little rushed, and I felt like I had to do a lot of unpacking and thinking about it after the book ended, which perhaps is the point of a good book.
I do feel like I need to read something light and happy now though!
I was totally engrossed by this book, and had a couple of very late nights reading it on my kindle in bed!
The opening is similar to 28 days later (or indeed, The Day of The Triffids) in that the main character, Neffy, is one of the few survivors of a terrible pandemic. She had been a subject in a trial for a vaccine against the new virus and had been given the vaccine and the virus in an isolated room in the facility. After a week of being very unwell, she comes through and the whole world has changed. Along with the four other remaining/surviving members of the study she is trapped with dwindling food and water, afraid to go outside and with no internet or phone signals.
Much of the book is exploring Neffy’s backstory through the dual devices of letters she writes to an octopus she used to care for in her role as a marine biologist, and a machine created by one of the other survivors which (in the few people for whom it works) allows you to relive memories is a very vivid virtual reality type way.
There are themes of captivity and freedom and moral dilemmas from the ethics of studying octopuses in captivity, to donating an organ to save a family member, to sacrificing one person to save many etc.
I found the book deeply moving and thought provoking. The ending was a little abrupt, and I needed to unpack it, and look online at what other people thought before I could let the book go and move on, but I think ultimately the ending was optimistic, if vague enough to need your imagination to fill in the details.
This was my book group read for September 2024 and I have to say, wow, what a great book. We had a book group outing to No Alibis bookshop in Belfast and the staff were very helpful in suggesting several books for our next read, and this was one of them. A incredibly well-written debut novel – the prose is beautiful without being overwritten, and the three female lead characters are totally believable even thought the author is male.
Set in Donegal in 1994 leading up to the referendum on divorce (prior to which, divorce was illegal in Ireland and although couples could separate, the woman was left with few if any rights) the three female characters are all trapped by their relationships with very bad husbands as well as living under the judgemental scrutiny of small town gossips. I listened on an audiobook and loved the Irish narrator although it took me a while to work out who was who. The only nice male character was the priest (an ex-guard/police) which was refreshing since so many priests in literature are bad(!)
From the buzz on the book group WhatsApp, everyone seems to have enjoyed the book, and I’m looking forward to discussing it with the girls.
This book has hundreds of five star reviews on Amazon, and I find myself wondering if they were all written by Peter Oxley’s mates, because I did not find the book to be great at all.
Set in the squalid streets of 18 hundred’s London, two low level criminals decide to go straight by setting up a demon hunting agency (in this version of London Demons are real, as well as golems, magicians, ghosts etc). For me the first half of the book really dragged – I didn’t warm to the characters, I found the action a bit chaotic and while others describe the book as very funny, I wasn’t really picking up on any humour. Many of my favourite books are urban/steampunk fantasy so it was not the genre that upset me. I did quite like the character of the young upper class woman trapped in a marriage with a very bad man, and my interest grew as she took more of a roll.
It wasn’t awful, and it did grow on me to the point where I considered buying the second book in the series, but then I caught myself on.
The Amber Spyglass: His Dark Materials Trilogy, Book 3 – Philip Pullman (Audiobook). Narrated by: Philip Pullman, cast – 18.08.24
I have read/watched/listened to Philip Pullman’s magnificent trilogy several times and it never ceases to delight me. An advantage to my terrible memory (always bad, even worse now as I creep nearer to old age) is that I get to be gripped each time – while I remembered the big things that happened, there were many subtle things (subtle knife things, lol!) that I had forgotten and so enjoyed all over again. Now I’m even more desperate for the release of the final instalment in The Book of Dust trilogy (the first of which is a prequel to His Dark Materials, and a good romp, but for me, the middle book, which follows a grown up Lyra and her troubled soul/troubled relationship with her daemon Panteleimon is by far the more engrossing read which ended on such a cliffhanger!) I do hope the final book becomes available soon.
This BBC recording with full cast is very good, except for my one tiny bugbear (as a side note – I googled bugbear, to make sure I was spelling it correctly, and was surprised when the first couple of definitions came up with it meaning a kind of terrifying bogey monster type thing – I had only previously heard this expression to mean, as I intended in this case, something that is a enduring irritant, like: people smoking in public is a bugbear of mine. It seems that the current American English meaning, and possibly the original medieval English is the monster and not the much more usual to me, irritant. Hmmm.)
Anyway, the slightly irritating bugbear to me was how every member of the cast was so freaking posh! It was like something from the BBC archives where everyone spoke like they were having tea with the Queen. I think there was one minor character who sounded a bit northern, and they sounded like a posh person trying to put on a weird kind of northern accent. Ah well, that aside it was brilliant!
Pullman’s writing manages to delve into depths of philosophical thought while still having full and relatable characters, emotional heft and a cracking exciting storyline. Amazing.
This was a very thought provoking and beautifully written novel about a very unpleasant person. David Lurie is a 52 year old divorced English professor in Cape Town. When his weekly triste with a prostitute ends he stalks her for a while, but he is turned off by seeing her in ‘real life’ with her own children.
He turns his attention then to a student thirty years his junior and coerces her into a sexual relationship with him. He claims to have real feelings for her, but when she turns to him for help he is not interested. The girl’s family complain to the university and they try to hush it all up by getting him to apologise, but he refuses to admit that he has done anything wrong and chooses instead to retire.
To escape the city for a while, David goes to stay with his daughter in her smallholding farm/dog boarding kennels in the countryside.
We some better sides to his nature, for instance he bonds with some dogs and helps out at the local animal hospital but when his daughter is raped and her home burgled he is outraged and yet is not nudged towards any remorse at his similar act of using power to get sex from his young student.
Apparently there is a film with John Malkovich based on the novel which I might seek out.
Bear Head (Audiobook) – Adrian Tchaikovsky –11.08.24
Because I loved Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, I went to see what else he had on Amazon, and Dogs of War audiobook was included free in my audible membership, so I gave it a go.
The themes are similar to Service model, although this duology is not comedic. In service model, the AI robot was programmed to be a Valet, and struggled to find a place in the world without a master to serve, and in the same way, the main character in dogs of war, Rex, is a dog that has been augmented with AI and bionic stuff – like a cyborg dog and the bionic man’s love child, and it is very ingrained in him to serve his master and has feedback built into him to respond very positively to being told by his master that he is a ‘good boy’ and very negatively to being told ‘bad dog’.
Rex works with a troupe including Honey, a cyber bear, bees, a swarm of cyber bees with a single hive mind intelligence and Dragon who is a cyber-dragon! Honey is very intelligent, and when she gains access to the internet she realises that their master is not a good man and by following him they are killing innocent people which throws Rex into turmoil because he is a very good dog who doesn’t want to hurt innocent people, but also everything in him wants to obey his master.
The second part of the series explores the reaction of the world to these creatures who are sentient and feeling ‘people’ but also dangerous created weapons as well as the way humans begin to be augmented in various ways including being linked by technology which is almost moving towards telepathy or even a new hive mind species. I found the books very interesting and fun to read.
I’m not sure what I made of this comedy thriller trilogy set in Finland (and translated from the original work written in Finnish).
The main character, Henri is an ex-actuary and probably autistic spectrum maths whizz with limited people skills and a logical and maths based take on the world around him.
At the start of the trilogy Henri loses his job and shortly after discovers his brother has died and left him his adventure park (like a big kids soft play indoor slides etc type place) as well as big debts and some very bad guys trying to recoup what they lent him.
What follows is like a Mr Bean farce – murderous people try to scare/kill Henri and end up accidentally killing themselves in weird ways. This pretty much happens in all three books – Henri feels a duty to help keep the adventure park open and save the jobs of the people who work there, but is also constantly in danger and the police are sniffing around him because bad guys keep either going missing or turning up dead in his vicinity.
I liked Henri’s character, and there was a certain tension in wondering how he was going to get out of each new dilemma, but I did start to roll my eyes a bit that yet another murderous thug has been accidentally impaled/decapitated/crushed etc. I liked it enough to read all three books, and I enjoyed following Henri’s story (there was a kind of funny cast of characters who worked in the adventure park, but I got very irritated by the descriptions of one character that went on and on about how much he farted). I liked how Henri went on an emotional and character development journey and I quite like how it all resolved for him.
Sarah Wray Writer 