Keren Landsman’s The Heart of the Circle is set in a world like our own in which a fraction of the population are born sorcerers—people with extra abilities beyond the norm. Sorcerers are subdivided into elementalists and psychics—the former can control either air, water, fire or earth, and the latter are either empaths or seers. […]
Given I’m about to review Keren Landsman’s novel The Heart of the Circle, you might be wondering ‘but what about the cultural boycott of Israel?’. If so, or if you’re actually wondering ‘what is the cultural boycott of Israel?’, then read on.
Red and Blue are agents on opposing sides of a war conducted across time itself. They are perfect spies, virtuoso killers, artists when it comes to manipulating timelines. Each of them has the sole purpose of ensuring their side wins. And then they fall in love. The novella This is How You Lose the Time […]
Yoon Ha Lee’s Hexarchate Stories is a collection of short stories set in the universe of Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, and, more specifically, mostly revolving around the life of everyone’s favourite mad general, Shuos Jedao. And it’s just now hitting me that the series is really, truly over. A collection with many eyes Hexarchate […]
In Kameron Hurley’s latest novel, The Light Brigade, main character Dietz is a ghoul—a jobless, stateless person, without residency or citizenship—in future São Paulo. After an event known as the Blink hits Dietz’s home, wiping two million people off the face of the earth, Dietz joins up to fight in the Corporate Corps against the […]
New Suns is a collection, drawn together and edited by the legendary author and editor Nisi Shawl, of stories by authors of colour. It opens with an epigraph from Octavia E. Butler: “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” This collection is a journey into different worlds under different suns—worlds drawing […]
I don’t usually do non-review posts these days, but this one caught my eye and hooked me in. Plus it’s been a bank holiday weekend for us here in the UK, so I’ve had some time. This is an A-to-Z of book blogging questions that I nicked from Avery over at Red Rocket Panda, and […]
The Outcast Hours, a collection of short fiction from brilliant editors Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin, is all about the night. And just like the night, the stories that populate it are frequently unsettling, and full of not-very-nice people. But it’s also full of freedoms—people (and not necessarily people) finding spaces beyond the ordinary in […]
I feel as if so many of my reviews start off this way, but: I can’t believe I’ve been sleeping on Tade Thompson so long! (And isn’t that one of the great things about reviewing—discovering new authors you might not have picked up otherwise?) I went into Rosewater without reading too much about the content […]
It’s been years since I read any Tamora Pierce. Back in my early teenage years, her Song of the Lioness and Circle of Magic books found me, and it felt as if I’d been waiting for them all my life. So I’m happy to say that coming back to her with Tempests and Slaughter felt […]