It takes a certain chutzpah to have a first-person narrator with no name, and yet this book does. The premise: there exist beings (no spoilers) who can take over a body; they pass between them by touching flesh. They live out our lives, in moments or decades, and move on before they die. Many of […]
This is a troubling book, a dark imagining of a future five minutes from now, or five minutes ago. It’s a portrait of technology entrepreneurs, recalling the heady late 90s Internet boom “before it was cool”, and the heady and terrifying successes that could come about. It’s a story of augmented reality, something a little […]
The second in the Osiris trilogy, and this one is a corker – there’s no need to have read the first book at all. In a climate change ravaged world, Ramona Callejas is the only pilot – and mapmaker– of the last aeroplane in the technophobic country of Patagonia, a poor state at the southern […]
This book is a slow burn, and most of the time, much like Gibson or Le Carré, you have little idea of what’s really happening, reading along trying to keep up. Rudi is a cook in a future Europe in which the nation-state is a fragmentary being. Rudi is quiet, and stays out of trouble, […]
The Kitschies‘ first self-published shortlisted book, and a debut to boot. Chambers had put together a fun, silly space opera that’ll keep you up at night reading by the light of your Kindle (if not by a torch under the duvet), and this is how you should read this book: like you’re young again, and […]
Another dystopia, this time with a woman – seventeen year old Noria – becoming one of the world’s only, if not first, tea masters. Water is the world’s most precious resource; created from desalination plants and completely managed by distant imperial masters in New Qian. Noria is entrusted with a deep secret, one that could […]
A set of devices that gather power from the waves stretches from the coast of India to Djibouti. A woman leaves her old life behind to walk this bridge, illegally, crossing to a new life, searching for something. In parallel, in an earlier life, a young girl escapes death or slavery in West Africa, heading […]
The court of Charles I, the crux of time when the Enlightenment was just on the cusp of beginning and modernity would start its relentless march of progress. This book is at once playful, erudite, maddening, insightful, wickedly funny, and absolutely insane. The modern world echoes back across time into the lives of people: boxox […]
Allan’s almost-debut The Race is an odd beast of a novel – four parts that link together across ideas of reality and illusion, structured almost like a surrealist French film but in its bones a deeply British novel, of the working-class type whose loss has recently been lamented in the press: there are tones of […]
Neil Double is a professional conference attendee – saving executives time while gathering cards and insights. He spends his life on the road in anonymous hotels like The Way Inn, meeting, sleeping with, and being annoyed by the same people, season after season. He’s come to the new MetaCentre to attend a conference for the […]