Category Archives: Books

The Second Bell – Gabriela Houston

Bleak yet hopeful, grounded but magical, Gabriela Houston’s debut novel The Second Bell is a quiet, powerful story of family, community and survival inspired by dark Slavic mythology. In a remote, mountainous village, Miriat gives birth to a child with two hearts – a striga – and is forced to choose between abandoning her daughter or leaving the village forever. Choosing exile, Miriat raises her daughter amongst other strigas, who teach Salka to control her second heart and the dark powers it possesses. Life in the striga village is hard but safe until nineteen year-old Salka faces a choice of her own, which puts both her and her mother at risk and threatens the balance of her life, and the village as a whole.

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Bear Head – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War (2017) was a bold, powerful piece of typically smart sci-fi; its sequel Bear Head picks up some of the same characters and themes and runs with them. Life for construction worker Jimmy Marten is pretty dull, despite the fact that he lives on Mars and has all manner of interesting body modifications, right up until the digital awareness of a talking bear takes up residence in his digital headspace. Honey the bear is a bit confused about what she’s doing, but she knows that she wants to make contact with her old friend Bees, the Distributed Intelligence who laid the foundations of human life on Mars. These days Bees is something of a digital bogeyman however, and while Honey tries to put her fragmented memories into order, back on Earth the tide of political opinion continues to turn ever more extreme, led by the relentless, loathsome presence of World Senate hopeful Warner S. Thompson.

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First Team – Robbie MacNiven

Robbie MacNiven’s First Team is the second instalment of Aconyte Books’ Marvel: Xavier’s Institute series of X-Men prose novels, and it perfectly blends the powerful darkness of a world in which young mutants are surrounded by hate and oppression, with a warm sense of friendship and family. Compared with many of his peers at the Xavier Institute, Anole – otherwise known as Victor Borkowski – knows that he’s had a remarkably comfortable life for a mutant. When his parents are threatened by the anti-mutant extremist group known as the Purifiers, however, he gets first-hand experience of the hatred that many mutants suffer under, and finds himself relying upon his found family at the Institute – particularly close friends Cipher and Greymalkin – for support in his mission to track down and stop the Purifiers.

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Iron Truth – S.A. Tholin

Book one in S.A. Tholin’s Primaterre series, Iron Truth is a bold, expansive science fiction adventure packed full of strong characters, breathless action and looming cosmic horror, all within a beautifully crafted and believable setting. Botanist Joy Somerset leaves Mars on a colony ship bound for a new life on a quiet, unpolluted planet, only to wake from cryo-sleep to find herself in a bleak future, trapped on dust-shrouded Cato. Meanwhile Commander Cassimer of the Primaterre banneretcy leads his squad to Cato in search of a missing ship, their mission quickly complicated by the planet’s inimical weather. In Joy’s eyes, the Primaterre soldiers offer hope of a way off-planet, but she has a lot to learn about the new world she finds herself in. To distant, closed-off Cassimer, Joy is just a means to an end, until over time she becomes more than that – a source of strength, and something to hold onto when his world is turned upside down.

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These Lifeless Things – Premee Mohamed

The first title released as part of Solaris Satellites – Rebellion Publishing’s new direct-to-reader range of novellas – Premee Mohamed’s These Lifeless Things is a strange, unsettling, ambiguous tale of the costs of survival and the difficulty of piecing history back together. One of a handful of survivors from when They invaded, Eva ekes out a rough living in the city, avoiding the terrifying sentinels and all the other new dangers, and keeping a journal of her days. Decades later, young Emerson finds Eva’s journal on a research trip to the city, recognising it as a rare opportunity to gain an insight into what actually happened in the years following the invasion.

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The Haunting of Tram Car 015 – P. Djèlí Clark

Set in the same world as his short story A Dead Djinn in Cairo, P Djèlí Clark’s novella The Haunting of Tram Car 015 is another slice of alternate-world urban fantasy, full of characterful storytelling and vibrant world building. Agent Hamed Nasr of Cairo’s Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, along with his younger colleague Agent Onsi, are called to Ramses Station to investigate a haunting in one of the city’s trams. When it transpires that it’s the tram car itself which is haunted, what Hamed assumed was going to be a simple task becomes much more complicated, as the agents attempt to identify the spirit and coax it out of its mechanical host…to varying degrees of success.

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Last One at the Party – Bethany Clift

The debut novel from Bethany Clift, Last One at the Party takes a classic sci-fi trope – the sole survivor at the end of the world – and strips it back to its core, delivering a powerful, emotional story of a regular woman in a recognisable world gone wrong. In a very near future, even the lessons learned from the Coronavirus pandemic are no use when a new, horrifyingly virulent virus ravages first America and then the rest of the world. There’s no hope for a cure, yet in London one woman – the nameless protagonist here – finds herself still alive in the ruins of her life, with everyone she ever knew now dead and gone. At first she loses herself in drink, drugs, raids on Harrods and the lingering luxuries still on offer in the city, but it’s not long before loneliness compels her to seek out other survivors or, failing that, some remaining reason to keep going.

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The Night Parade of 100 Demons – Marie Brennan

Aconyte Books’ growing range of Legends of the Five Rings novels continues to impress with Marie Brennan’s fantastic The Night Parade of 100 Demons, a “supernatural investigation adventure” featuring a pair of mismatched samurai and a horde of creepy spirits. Dragon shugenja Ryōtora travels to the remote village of Seibo Mura, where rampaging yōkai have been causing havoc and killing villagers. There he meets Phoenix scholar Sekken and begrudgingly, albeit politely, agrees to accept the other man’s help in discovering what’s causing the disturbances, and how to prevent any further chaos. Despite their apparent differences the two samurai forge an effective partnership, but both men must find ways to deal with the secrets they carry if they’re to succeed in saving Seibo Mura.

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Inscape – Louise Carey

Louise Carey’s debut novel Inscape is a smart, modern sci-fi thriller, a dystopian tale exploring a worryingly realistic future in which corporations dominate every aspect of life, and London is held on a knife-edge between two all-powerful tech behemoths. Tanta is a Corporate Ward of InTech, raised to be utterly loyal to the company which has given her everything, and trained to be the consummate agent. When her first full mission ends in blood and loss, she throws herself into hunting down the source of leaked corporate data alongside a partner whose chequered history and weary worldview couldn’t be more different to her own. Tanta is desperate to succeed and prove her value to InTech, but as her investigation proceeds she’s forced to confront some difficult truths about the company and her life up to this point.

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Widow’s Welcome – D.K. Fields

Book one in the fantasy/crime trilogy Tales of Fenest by D.K. Fields – pen name of Katherine Stansfield and David Towsey – Widow’s Welcome introduces a vibrant, unconventional world in which stories hold great power. In the Union of Realms, a “collective of six different peoples with their own customs and traditions”, political control is determined in an election every five years by carefully-chosen storytellers and the popularity of their stories. The city is always hectic during an election year, as people from across the Union descend on the central city of Fenest to hear each realm’s story. When a Wayward man is found dead in an alley with his lips sewn shut, however, Detective Cora Gorderheim starts to realise that there’s more going on than general unrest.

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