I didn’t set any reading goals for 2019—by midwinter last year, I was tired, I was broke, and I was heartsick. 2018 hadn’t been a good year. I listened to the Mountain Goats on repeat for weeks. Now, I’m heading into 2020 in almost the same mood, but with the added grit of defiance. Hey, […]
Tobias Finch has always lived in Greenhollow Wood. He’s known to the locals as the Wild Man, tall, broad, bearded and with long, wild hair; potentially dangerous, definitely scary. Henry Silver is the new owner of the estate on which Greenhollow Wood sits. Young, handsome, an incorrigible flirt and a folklore enthusiast (to say the […]
Arakeesians—sea dragons—haven’t been seen in the Hundred Islands for generations. The Hundred Islands fleet—at war with the Gaunt Islanders—must make do, building their ships from the dwindling supply of dragonbone that remains. Joron Twiner is the young, drunkard shipwife, or captain, of a black ship: a ship of exiled criminals. Following the death of his […]
In Jaime Lee Moyer’s new novel Brightfall, the woman previously known as Maid Marian is a hedgewitch. What’s more, she’s a hedgewitch of rare talent and training. And all her skill will be needed when word reaches her that Robin Hood’s gang of Merry Men—now more than ten years disbanded—are dying in mysterious circumstances. What’s […]
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 […]