One of my favourite books from the last few years. It won the BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction, the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2019, and the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novella. If you’re only going to read one book this year, read this one.
The story follows two time travelling beings, Red and Blue, acting as agents of cosmic forces which are locked in a fierce battle for the timeline. These opposing empires, The Garden and The Agency, fight to influence events throughout history in a mission to lay the seeds for their preferred outcomes in the future. Pursuing each other up and down the timeline, Red and Blue’s initial antagonism melts into curious, adversarial jesting, before blossoming into friendship, and then love.
“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.” This Is How You Lose the Time War
The story takes the form of messages the two central characters leave for each other at the scenes of their triumphs and defeats. Letters written in the wind, in the heat signature of water, in the entrails of sea creatures, in the heart rings of a tree. Hiding these letters from the ever watchful superpowers they serve, the lonely warriors tease, flirt and slowly come to reveal themselves to each other, unaware that something is on their trail.
A mesmerising story of love and resistance in which the oppressive powers that be, fight the long game, and still cannot win. It blew me away. The prose is delicious, the love story seductive, and the sci-fi vivacious with fresh ideas and immaculate plotting. I doubt you’ve read anything like it before and you should absolutely read it now.
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Buy paperback from Bookcase London £4.99
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Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, Bewilderment is an important and beautiful book about empathy and the sadness and beauty which define living in our troubled world.