“Wyrd Sisters” by Terry Pratchett

The witches are in good form in this fun-packed caper. They’re doing their best not to meddle, as the king of Lancre is deposed by a power hungry duke, and the witches are left holding the baby. Literally.

The mysterious baby that the witches find themselves with gets left in the care of the kindly leader of a travelling band of actors, and their fates are intertwined with the duke and the kingdom of Lancre, ably assisted (not meddling, honest!) by the witches. The story is littered with Shakespeare references - most strongly Macbeth, with the three witches, and the duke obsessively cleaning the blood from his hand - to little snippets and references to other plays, as the playwright in the band of actors crafts subtly familiar lines into his plays.

There are also nice little touches of satire creeping in, as the duke realises the power of language to “reinterpret” history, and attempts to use the mass media of the time (travelling theatre) as a form of propaganda. The book was written in 1988, but I suspect if it had been written after 2020, the phrase “fake news” might even have appeared. The satire, however minimal, is done with a deft hand and is full of humour.

I was smiling and chucking the whole way through this book. And while the overall story arc was largely predictable from the beginning, the journey was very enjoyable. The characters were all solid, and it’s lovely to see the three witches having their own distinct characters, as more of the witch lore is established. I’m looking forward to enjoying in the later books in the witches sub-series.

My rating: ★★★★☆

“Recursion” by Blake Crouch

A solid, fast-paced thriller, with a mind-bending plot where people find themselves having lifetimes of memory of a life they didn’t live. The mechanism behind these “false memories” has far-reaching, global, existential consequences. Our two main characters, Barry and Helena, find themselves in the position of being the only people who have any chance of stopping the gathering chaos - but hope seems slim. To say much else would be to give away more than is in the blurb - which I don’t want to do.

The entire story - including the main jeopardy, and some delicate nuances of what our heroes need to do to save the day - has a foundation on a characteristic of the main plot device that I found very difficult to believe, and was never properly explained. There’s even a bit of “lampshade hanging” that goes on when one character incredulously queries whether or not this surprising characteristic is really true, and another character simply says “Apparently”.

For a while, this was niggling at my enjoyment of the story, but it does result in some really thorny and interesting problems for our heroes to solve, and a genuinely exciting escalation of jeopardy towards the end of the book. So is it forgiven? Well, mostly.

This is thoroughly plot-driven story, but with a couple of very solid main characters. There is some romance, and the blurb refers to the book as “a deeply emotional story about time and loss and grief”, which, for me, is overstating the emotional content enormously. Yes, there is a believable connection between the two main characters, and the impact that this has on their decisions, and outcomes, make sense - but I never felt the emotion of their relationship. However, this isn’t to say that the book is without an emotional impact: some of the climactic sequences towards the end of the book are quite raw - and appropriately so.

If I’d have felt the emotion between the main characters, and if my suspension of disbelief hadn’t been so robustly challenged, then it would have been a firm 5 stars. But it’s still a solid, page-turning thriller, based on a unique, imaginative, and interestingly complex central premise.

My rating: ★★★★☆

“One Day All This Will Be Yours” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

What a blast. An excellent story about the lone survivor of a time war that has shattered time across the universe. All he wants is to be left alone, protecting the future from anything similar ever happening again.

I loved this from start to finish. I love a time travel story, especially where the mechanisms and consequences of time travel are self consistent and interesting - and this is a treatment of time travel I’d never come across before. Tchaikovsky seems to excel at writing the kind of flippant first-person narrative that I really enjoy, and the whole story is peppered with funny, snarky, witty, pithy, outrageous and simply joyous little moments of fun and dark humour. And the storytelling is superb.

Six stars out of five, rounded down.

My rating: ★★★★★

"In Universes" by Emet North

An incredibly imaginative and compelling tale across parallel universes, as we follow various versions of our main character, Raffi, as they search for identity, belonging, love and redemption.

The book can be seen as a set of 11 short stories involving Raffi and a loosely common set of people and situations. These are tied together by a single thread of regret about an incident with one of Raffi’s friends, Britt, when they were teenagers. The other characters - Kay, Graham, Alice - have different roles in each story: sometimes friends, sometimes lovers, sometimes just acquaintances.

Raffi is a cosmologist, with an interest and expertise in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics - the theory that the randomness of quantum mechanics is resolved by all possible outcomes occurring in alternate, newly created worlds. But that’s where the science stops - this is not really a sci-fi book, and there is no attempt to explain any mechanisms for people to travel to, or even be aware of, the alternate worlds. Rather, each story is set in an alternate universe, and any brief mention of the science just serves to guide the reader’s understanding about the loose relationship between each story. And that’s not a criticism - I actually found it a subtle but effective way to relieve what might otherwise be jarring switches of context between each story.

In most of the worlds, Raffi is dealing with feelings of loss, regret, or detachment. By the end of each story, Raffi tends to come to a conclusion that that these feels are unresolved, and wonders what life would be like in different circumstances. Each following story then takes on some of these different characteristics, but often with other significant changes - sometimes fantastical rather than realistic. And sometimes these are as a consequence of what Raffi wishes for (Monkey’s Paw style), and sometimes they are a vehicle to explore other issues (like the world in which women fracture into hordes of animals).

In one respect this is a difficult read, because each of the stories is a further exploration of these feelings of loss and regret, which remain unresolved for a majority of the book. However, this was lifted enormously by the range and breadth of imagination that the author has poured into each story. Each chapter could stand alone as a short story in its own right, with its own unique sense of character and place. Even (or especially) those with a fantastical element, where the world building was concise and compelling.

I found Raffi’s search for identity, for an authentic self, and for a sense of redemption or resolution, to be engaging and compelling. And that’s testament to the author, as I have found these themes in other books to be off-putting when they come across as the minor dissatisfactions of someone in an otherwise privileged situation. But I found Raffi’s character to be sympathetic, and these struggles of identity and authenticity to be meaningful rather than trite.

And I found the final story, with its fantastical elements, to be a fitting conclusion to Raffi’s struggles.

So why not 5 stars? Only because I found the book so difficult to pick up from time to time. And by three-quarters of the way through the book, I was finding it affecting my mood - but perhaps that in itself is an indication of the quality of the writing and emotional engagement.

This book isn’t for everyone, and I definitely need something lighter for my next read. But it is an incredibly accomplished debut work.

Thank you #NetGalley and Random House UK Cornerstone for the free review copy of #InUniverses in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

My rating: ★★★★☆

NetGalley review

“Rare Singles” by Benjamin Myers

DNF at 66%.

This is a gentle character driven observational story about an American soul singer, Earlon “Bucky” Bronco, who has had no fame at home in Chicago, but gets invited to a “Weekender” Northern Soul event Scarborough in England - due to a level of fame and adulation in the UK that he was previously unaware of. His host, Dinah, is also struggling in her home life, but finds solace in the music. Bucky battles his own demons of physical pain, drug addiction and bereavement, as he tries to find his place amongst an enthusiastic crowd of Northern Soul fans.

This should have been an emotional and engaging story. The characters of Bucky and Dinah should have felt real to me, in a way that I could have connected to. The writing style is lyrical and poetic, especially Bucky’s inner monologue - his observations of the world around him are detailed and expressive, which ought to have given Bucky and emotional depth.

But, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I couldn’t connect to Bucky or Dinah - I felt like I was being told about their thoughts and feelings, rather than experiencing them. And without that emotional connection, the slow story progress and expressive, detailed passages of Bucky’s experiences and thoughts felt like wading through descriptive treacle in order to get to the next plot point. Perhaps also due to my lack of emotional engagement with the characters, the growing relationship between Bucky and Dinah also felt forced, and their moments of connection then felt slightly saccharine.

This is a shame, because I really wanted to enjoy this book, and the characters of Bucky and Dinah should be sympathetic, and have an interesting journey. In the end, I found myself skimming over descriptive passages that should have been emotionally engaging, and continuing beyond that point wasn’t going to benefit anyone.

Thank you #NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the free review copy of #RareSingles in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

My rating: ★★☆☆☆

NetGalley review

“Walking to Aldebaran” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Wow, that was intense. In this novella, Gary Rendell is lost and alone inside an alien artefact in the outer reaches of the solar system. The exploratory mission he was on went wrong, and now he’s wandering the corridors of this strange ancient place, trying to find his way home, or at least something familiar.

Adrian Tchaikovsky captures the alienness of the location, and everything that Gary comes across while he’s exploring, brilliantly, and there is a creepy sense of otherness that maintains the tension. The story is told in a dual timeline - the beginning of the mission, and Gary’s current predicament - alternating between chapters. We slowly learn what happened to the exploratory team at the start of the expedition, while Gary’s current attempts to find a way home slowly unfold. The slightly flippant first-person narrative helps the story skirt the edges of unreliable narration, giving the question of how Gary has survived so long a sense of doubt and unease.

A very well paced, straight-forward plot, just the right length, excellently told, and nicely disturbing.

My rating: ★★★★☆