Former Australian journalist Michael Brissenden’s third novel Smoke (after The List and Dead Letters) was inspired by the devastating bushfires that ravaged the Australian east coast in late 2019 and early 2020. But rather than setting his story in that time and place, Brissenden takes the action to another fire flashpoint – the forests of…
Edward Ashton burst onto the science fiction scene with his ‘cloning meets first contact meets colonisation’ tale Mickey 7 (now the long-delayed movie Mickey 17 directed by Bong Joon Ho and starring Robert Pattinson). Mickey 7 was followed up by a less successful sequel Antimatter Blues. For his third book, Ashton does something different although…
Lots of great speculative fiction books involve steam trains. Some highlights of this China Mieville’s Iron Council, Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express. And of course, being steam driven, trains often feature in pretty much anything written in the steampunk sub-genre. Sarah Brooks’ debut draws on some of this but also on…
Joseph O’Connor fictionalises a true story from World War 2 in the first of a planned trilogy, My Father’s House. The tale revolves around the work of Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty who used his position at the Vatican, a neutral territory within Rome, to help Allied prisoners of war escape. The tale involves the recollections…
Crooked Seeds by Booker-prize longlisted author Karen Jennings is a dark indictment of white South Africa and the legacy of apartheid. Centred around an irredeemably self-centred character, Jennings takes readers into a possible future South Africa while also interrogating the sins of the past. The opening of Crooked Seeds clearly draws on the recent South…
Sarah Perry returns to the locale of her hit novel (and TV series) The Essex Serpent to deliver another deep, dazzling book. Enlightenment takes place over three time periods and concerns itself with a historical mystery so that it becomes, like the comets that come into the narrative, an elliptical tale. While linear on the…
Veronica Roth has well and truly broken out of her YA phase with some recent releases that challenge genre tropes, like Poster Girl and Chosen Ones. Her latest novella When Among Crows is more down the line urban fantasy but is no less enjoyable. In it, Roth draws on the mythology of Poland and its…
Fantasy and science fiction novels often use an ongoing war as the central driving narrative force. In Premee Mohamed’s new book, The Siege of Burning Grass, two rival powers have been at war for years – the Varkal and the Med’ariz. Both forces are hungry for new territory, have absorbed smaller countries into their domains…
Leigh Bardugo draws on her family history to deliver a fascinating historical fantasy The Familiar. Bardugo showed in her Grishaverse books (aka Shadow and Bone etc) a willingness to draw on traditions outside of the general North Western European traditions for her fantasy. The Familiar takes readers to sixteenth century Spain shortly after the defeat…
Katy Massey draws on her own family history as the basis for her downbeat and gritty debut crime novel All Us Sinners. The book is set in Leeds, in the North of England, in the late 1970s, during the reign of terror of the killer who came to be known and The Yorkshire Ripper, All…
