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Lote by Shola von Reinhold 

As laconically seductive as the 1920’s which so inspire its heroine, Lote is a tantalising work of black, queer, speculative fiction. Appropriately genre-bending in its style, it combines the page-turning appeal of an investigative thriller, with the nonchalant grace of a period piece set in the modern day. 

Like Europeans in a Henry James, we would be creatures of genteel penury, full of education, artifice, a little vampiric, duping all the dull rich people around us. Except we were Black, except were poor, except we were basically self-taught (by their standards), except we were infinitely more subtle and fabulous, as far as we were concerned.

Mathilda is an escape artist. She has many names and specialises in her own reinvention in the pursuit of a life of beauty and glamour. An ‘Arcadian’, she is much more interested in the past than the present, and spellbound by her ‘fixations’—flashes of inspiration connecting her to figures from the past—she gets herself accepted onto a prestigious, if strange and secretive, residency in order to continue her ‘research’ into their lives.

Dripping with baroque prose, charming characters, and historical references to forgotten Black modernist figures, the book is as decadent as a goblet of foamy pink champagne in a dining hall draped in candlelight. It absolutely delights in its own opulence, channeling all the energy and frivolity of the Bright Young Things, to waltz you through a mystery that asks whether certain historical truths are forgotten, or mislaid, on purpose.

LOTE, is Scottish author, Shola von Reinhold‘s debut novel, and won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Memorial Prize in 2021. If you’ve already read it, let me know what you thought in the comments, and as always, don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates. 

Buy on kindle £3.99 

Paperback from World of Books £7.90

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Second Place by Rachel Cusk

An intimate work of feminist realism that doesn’t pull its punches. Told in the form of letters from its middle-aged, female narrator, M, it considers the terrible savagery of the human ego, and the atrocities it commits against itself and those it is closest to.

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?

M lives a secluded life with her second husband out on the swamp where he grew up. Scarred by the world and its brutality, she is nevertheless unwilling to detach completely, and so to nurture the sense she craves of being ‘connected’ to the art world, she invites artists in residence into her sanctuary. These visitors stay in ‘the second place’, a neighbouring cottage on their land. When she builds up the courage to invite an artist whose work struck her powerfully at a low point in her life, the impact of his presence unleashes unexpected violences, and forces her to confront some of her own. 

The novel considers the flimsy constructs we call identity, and how we piece together our personal narratives from the detritus of our own fantasies painted over by the assumptions and criticisms of others. It records the intricacies of M’s subjectivity with Tolstoyan exactitude, allowing her generosity and strength of spirit to exist alongside the petty, self-indulgent egoisms that underlie her desperate need to be seen.

The secondary characters too, sway unsettlingly between painfully sympathetic and revoltingly absurd, and the little cast assembled in the oppressive environs of the swamp, provide the raw materials for an unflinching psychodrama with notes of Shakespearean tragicomedy.

Published in 2021, The novel was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction. It’s a potent, powerful text, that catches and holds our gaze in its canvas, and dares us to look away.

If you’ve already read it, let me know what you thought in the comments, and as always, don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates. 

Buy on kindle £5.99 

Paperback from World of Books £10.89

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Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead 

Strap in for an epic journey, following a female aviator (inspired by Amelia Earheart) who disappears while attempting to become the first person to fly a circle around the Earth, intersecting both poles.

The novel soars through a landscape rich with complex characters and intimate perspectives on historical events, spanning the turbulent years from the nineteen twenties to the modern day. The aviator, Marian Graves, is a single-minded force of nature, who refuses to allow the conventions of her time to restrict her. We accompany her through a childhood in rural Montana, dressing as a boy and smuggling alcohol during Prohibition, to her service as one of the first female pilots in England during the second world war, and finally, on her fateful journey over Antarctica.

At some point she would have found the edge of her own courage. There is nothing for it but to adjust, be humbled. So she is not exactly who she had thought. So what. She will be someone different.

The novel charts other stories too: that of Marian’s parents, her twin brother, Jamie, and their childhood friend, Celeb, as well as intermittently swerving into the present day where a Hollywood actress playing Marian in a movie about her life, pieces together clues about what might have become of her.

Marian remains the powerful engine of the book however, the perfect heroine for a novel grappling with the vertiginously widening scale of the twentieth century. With the backdrop of globe-trotting exploration, technological breakthroughs, and war, the restless hunger which drives Marian’s desire to fly (to keep moving, to escape), is equally fraught with a suicidal need to push boundaries and to toy with its own destruction. Perhaps this is why, for a story so full of life—its characters exploding with will and desire—the book is also a reconnaissance of loss; a confrontation with emptiness, death and disappearance; with the unchartable that lurks at the edges of what we know.

An exquisitely written and lovingly-rendered story, impressively researched and adroitly pitched for the concerns of a modern day audience, it is definitely worth the read. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, and the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and received glowing praise from critics. 

If you’ve already read it, let me know what you thought in the comments, and as always, don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates. 

Buy on kindle £4.99 

Paperback from Better World Books £4.26

Follow the author @MaggieShipstead

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Speculative Reader’s Best of 2022

I read lots of great books this year, but have whittled it down to my favourite five. If you have any recommendations for books I should read in 2023, I’d love to hear them, so please drop me a note in the comments, and as always, don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates. 

My top five reads from 2022, in no particular order…

 

Best space opera: A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine 

Overflowing with wonderful characters, a charming love story, elegantly rendered intergalactic politics and some fascinating philosophical questions to boot, this is an exciting, glorious book and you should read it.



 

 

Best sci-fi:  This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

I can’t stop recommending this to everyone who’ll listen. A heart-wrenching story of love, friendship, and solidarity, staged against an ideological cold war for the fate of the universe. I doubt you’ve read anything like it before and you should absolutely read it now.



Best historical fantasy: She Became The Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan

An epic story of human will, set in 1300’s China. The heroine is irresistible, the world achingly real and the story of a peasant monk’s mission to rewrite their own fate is and change the world is utterly captivating, you won’t be able to put it down.


 

 

Best speculative detective: The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

If you’re a sucker for a classic whodunnit and you’re down for some speculative genre-bending, you will absolutely adore this book. Everyone I know who’s read it has raved about it, so if you’re looking for something gripping and eminently readable, get ready to be charmed.



Best novella: Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector

An absolute flying gut punch of a book. To say it’s a novella is slightly misleading, but I don’t know what else to call it. It’s an immersive experience in which you enter the current of another’s mind; a mind painfully astute, exquisitely poetic, and utterly consuming. Brace yourself, breathe deep and dive in.



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The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

This is a sophisticated book, long and meandering, which makes sense as it follows a character destined to live, die and be born again with his memory in tact, ad infinitum; a strange sort of immortality.

After his entirely ordinary first life (and death), it takes Harry August a couple more (believing himself mad, possessed or cursed), before he is found by others of his kind and initiated into The Cronus Club. This shadowy organisation exists to support and shelter its members (the Ouroboran), and defend the secret of its own existence. Other than rescuing Ouroboran children from their linear parents to save them from the boredom of endlessly repeating their childhoods, the club is mostly social in nature, though it does have one strict rule: No interfering with linear time. 

It is on his eleventh death bed, that Harry receives a message. A small girl bearing a warning passed back in time through future generations of Ouroboran that something is wrong. The end of the world is getting faster.

Already a little tired of immortality, Harry begins an investigation into the cause of this acceleration, a search which gets him entangled with a formidable nemesis, and leads to a ferocious battle of wits played out across multiple lives, while the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

“Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you’re not helping people, just servicing the machine.”

The premise is intriguing, and underneath the skilful world-building and juicy vignettes about life as a Ouroboran, the text is full of big questions about what it means to live well. On its release, it received widespread praise in the media and had since reached Bestseller status, extremely impressive for a book of this length and complexity. If you have the patience for it, it’s well-written, expertly crafted and rich which space for contemplation.

Already read it? Let me know what you thought in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

 

Buy on kindle £4.99 

Paperback from World of Books £4.19

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Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector

One of the most unexpected reads of my life – not an exaggeration. I thought I was picking up a novel, felt very hard done by after the first couple of pages which felt like slippery, stream of consciousness poetry, and then got wrapped up in one of the most exciting literary journeys of my life. You should read Agua Viva, even though its going to ask a lot from you – it more than repays the effort.

The book is about being alive. It channels a raging hunger to connect honestly and completely with lived experience; an insatiable desire to hold and know the elusive moment of existing even as it passes us by. It is heartbreaking and vivid and empowering and as unique as the incredible mind it sprung from.

“My only salvation is joy. An atonal joy inside the essential ‘it’. Doesn’t that make sense? Well it has to. Because it’s too cruel to know that life is unique and that we don’t have, as a guarantee, more than faith in darkness; because it’s too cruel, I respond with the purity of indomitable joy.” Agua Viva

Clarice Lispector, born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector (Хая Пінкасівна Ліспектор), was a Ukrainian born novelist and short story writer. She moved to Rio de Janeiro in her teens, spent a decade living across Europe and The United States, and then returned to Brazil in 1959. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her short life in frequent pain and it is during this period that she produced the lion’s share of her published work. She wrote Agua Viva in 1973 and died four years later, at the age of fifty-seven. 

Her legacy is now wrapped in mythology; her writing frequently described as spell casting in which the effusive elegance of her prose possesses her readers, earning her a cult status among her fans. Whatever your take on this, Clarice Lispector’s potency is undeniable, and the experience of reading Agua Viva a profound one. So take a deep breath, and plunge in.

Let me know what you think in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy on kindle £4.99 

Paperback from Blackwells £7.56

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The Water Cure, by Sophie Mackintosh

Three sisters live an antiquated, disconnected existence on a remote island. Their lives are ruled over by their autocratic parents, who mete out medieval punishments and force them to compete in bizarre rituals of sufferance.

The girls are introduced to us one by one, their narratives unfolding, sad and lonely as their large, dilapidated home; all empty rooms and creaking floorboards. It is unclear why the family has secluded itself on this remote spot and what exactly they have to fear from the ‘toxic’ mainland and its men, but unease lurks like sea mist in the mind of the reader as the sisters piece their parents’ hints and their own memories together in an attempt to understand what is true.

Then three male castaways wash up on their lonely shore and the spell their parents have worked so hard to craft, begins to unravel.

“It will always be a woman who saves us, we know that now. The protections of men are only ever flimsy and self-serving.” The Water Cure

The story is heavy with female longing, with the desperation for salvation through love and the giving over of oneself to something bigger. It is a quiet, potent story, one of those incisive pieces of speculative fiction that speaks of something too painfully real, too true, for realism.

Let me know what you thought of The Water Cure in the comments, and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy on kindle £3.99

Buy from Waterstones £8.99

Follow the author at @fairfairisles

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 This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

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. 

Don’t forget to tell me what you think in the comments, and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.


Buy on kindle £4.99

Buy paperback from Bookcase London £4.99


Follow the authors @tithenai and @maxgladstone

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Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

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.

The book follows a father, Theo, and his son, Robin, as they struggle to fill the spaces the world has cut out for them. Set in the near future, or perhaps an adjacent timeline, the book moves seamlessly between realism and the speculative. Theo’s job searching for signs of life in the galaxy brings us to visit a variety of different worlds, and Robin, a sensitive boy who is quick to anger, begins an avant-garde treatment for his unspecific neuro-atypicality. The therapy teaches him to mimic brainwaves patterns in an effort to teach him how to regulate his emotions, and has some unexpected repercussions.

“They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp…”

Always teasing a delicate line between despair and hope, shrinking and expanding between the relationship of father and son, and the nature of being in the universe, the book is rich with love and life and the implausible abundance of the natural world. It is the best kind of speculative fiction: Wild and exciting and new, while full of old wisdom.

If you like personal stories with heart that invite you to think about how you live in the world, you should definitely add it to your reading list. 

If you enjoyed it, let me know why in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy on kindle £9.99 

Hardback from Waterstones £9.49

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If I had your face, by Frances Cha

An impressive debut novel about four young women battling to hold their own in the ultramodern, image-obsessed city of modern day Seoul.

Frances Cha, a former journalist, has lived and worked across the US, Hong Kong and South Korea, giving her a unique perspective on the plight of women at a time of shifting cultural norms and extreme wealth disparity.

“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.” If I had your face

The Seoul of the novel is a fascinating, inhuman place, where plastic surgery is ubiquitous, bosses are abusive, men cheat and the future is best not thought about at all. Somehow though, despite this bleak backdrop, the book is never dreary, as in the face of their hardships the vitality of the main characters keeps the narrative buoyant, demanding you read on. The street-eye-view of South Korean culture is intriguing – and I’d recommend the book just for that – but the heart of the story is the relationships between the four women and their growing intimacy and solidarity. 

The three hundred pages fly by, and the book leaves us with enough reason to be hopeful for these characters we’ve come to care so much about.

All in all, if you like a smart book with captivating characters and an enthralling insight into another culture, this will be a great bet. Let me know what you think in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.

Buy on kindle £4.99 

Paperback from Betterworld Books £7.56

  

Follow the author at @FRANCES_H_CHA

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