I grew up reading books, and when I was around 10 years old I discovered science fiction and fantasy. What hooked me about these genres was the imagination and skill that would go into building an entire world which only exists between the covers of that book. But I also found that there was an intense enjoyment to be had from books that sat within those categories, but which were more unusual; books that push the boundaries of their genre or introduce something new.
Of Bees and Mist is a mix between fable and fairy-tale. It tells the story of Meridia, whose home is infested with perpetual mist, and her marriage to a young man that puts her in the sights of Eva, her new mother-in-law, who whispers to bees and is quite evil.
The juxtaposition between the two women is what makes this book so fascinating. I love books about family secrets, and the setting of crumbling houses and collapsing dynasties is what drew me into this story, but what kept me reading was the delicious conflict between Meridia and Eva. I had no idea where this story was going to take me, but I loved every second of it.
Erick Setiawan's richly atmospheric debut is a beautiful, engrossing fable of three generations of women in two families; their destructive jealousies, their loves and losses, their sacrifices and deeply rooted deceptions, and their triumphs.
Of Bees and Mist is a fable of one woman's determination to overcome the haunting magic that is created by the people she loves and the oppressive secrets behind their broken lives. Raised in a sepulchral house where ghosts dwell in mirrors, Meridia spends her childhood feeling neglected and invisible. Every evening her father vanishes inside a blue mist without so much as an explanation, and…
The Scar was a book that I picked up randomly when I was looking, quite literally, for the thickest fantasy or sci-fi book on the shelf.
I found that on top of being nice and long, it is also a beautiful mix of science-fiction, speculation, and fantasy. I hadn’t yet read Perdido Street Station, which is the first in the series, but that didn’t seem important as the story picks up a new thread in this uncanny world.
Bellis Coldwine is one of the travelers aboard a sailing vessel heading for a new colony. The vessel is seized by pirates and the people aboard are captured, taken to Armada, a massive floating city. There, Bellis must uncover Armada’s purpose and plans.
I found the world created in this book so rich and fulfilling, and I couldn’t wait to turn the pages and learn more.
A human cargo bound for servitude in exile... A pirate city hauled across the oceans... A hidden miracle about be revealed... This is the story of a prisoner's journey. The search for the island of a forgotten people, for the most astonishing beast in the seas, and ultimately for a fabled place - a massive wound in reality, a source of unthinkable power and danger.From the author of Perdido Street Station, another colossal fantasy of incredible diversity and spellbinding imagination, which was acclaimed in The Times Literary Supplement as: 'An astonishing novel, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jaded…
What kind of minds get to vote? Microbial aliens, or a world-sized AI?
In Minds in Transit, Chrysoberyl is an artist whose brain hosts a million microbial minds. Chrysoberyl’s microbes design fantastic buildings and a whole new city for her AI patron. But her design blows up with a…
This is the story of four teenagers and their journey to cope with the anxieties of being a teenager, mixed with recovering from traumatic events.
It is such an unusual book that it defies explanation. The best thing to do is to pick it up and read it for yourself. I found it confusing in a delightful way – the mixture of reality and dreamscape is captivating and leaves you wondering what is real and what is imaginary.
This book is chaotic and intense and left me feeling a bit dizzy, but I think if I had read it when I was a teenager it would have accurately reflected how I felt and dealt with the world!
Four talented teenagers are traumatized--coping with grief, surviving date rape, facing the anxiety of standardized tests and the neglect of self-absorbed adults--and they'll do anything to escape the pressure. They'll even build an invisible helicopter, to fly far away to a place where everyone will understand them...until they learn the only way to escape reality is to face it head-on.
Pixel Juice is a collection of short stories, all set in the near future. Some of the stories are linked and have a continuing thread and some are standalone, but all of them are enthralling.
Jeff Noon belongs primarily to the “cyberpunk” subgenre of science fiction, and an ironic prescience runs through these stories in the manner of Dark Mirror, testing your acceptance of the advances of technology, consumer culture, and mass media.
I came away from reading this book the first time feeling quite emotional about how well he evoked the uncanny weirdness we take for granted living in a world dominated by data and screens.
"in the first shop they bought a pack of dogseed, because Doreen had always wanted to grow her own dog..."
Pixel Juice is the collected outpourings of an overactive mind. A selection of fifty stories from Jeff Noon's head, each one strange, telling, disturbing, or sometimes just plain weird.
For the breakdown zones of the mediasphere and the margins of dance culture, Jeff Noon samples the image mix. Product recalls, adverts for mad gadgets, dub cut prose remixes, urban fairytales, instructions for lost machines, almost true tales, dreary onepagers, word-dizzy roller coasters. With new stories from the Vurt cycle and…
The Cave of Past and Present is an archaeological descent into a living labyrinth—part ruin, part machine, part prophecy.
When Moria Chione follows a vanished colleague into the empire’s wild fringes, she uncovers a sentient subterranean archive that reshapes itself around intruders and rewrites their memories as easily as stone.…
As a fantasy reader, you will often come across the same ideas regurgitated in a slightly different form. Not that I have anything against that – some of them are still amazing stories – but when there is a slightly different voice to the storytelling, it is very refreshing. That’s what I found with Dragon Queen, the first in The Silver Kings series.
Some have argued that this series is chaotic and focuses on too many characters, but I found it delightfully action-packed with dark plots, political scheming, and incredible world-building and scenery that played out through my imagination as I read.
Praised by the likes of Joe Abercrombie and Brent Weeks, Stephen Deas has made dragons his own.
In the years before the Dragons laid waste to man's empire, the fearsome monsters were used for war and as gifts of surpassing wealth to buy favour in the constant political battles that tore at the kingdoms.
Notorious in these battles was the Dragon Queen. And now she is a prisoner. But no one is more dangerous than when caged ...
The critics, fellow authors and readers alike are agreed - if you love dragons and epic fantasy, Stephen Deas is the writer…
Kim Teng is shepherding Earth’s last whales to their new home planet, but the arrival of the whales is far from peaceful, and their new home might not actually be uninhabited. When strange creatures start howling in the night and people begin disappearing from their basecamp, Kim and her friends soon realize that while someone didn’t want them to ever arrive at New Eden, someone—or something—else wanted to make sure they did.
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
A hundred years in the future, in a world where technologically enhanced bodies are valued above organic ones, Complete Life Management (CLM) is selling perfection in the form of the latest and greatest bionic model, the Apogee. As an elite runner and inadvertent spokesperson for the humanism movement, NYPD Detective…
