Posted on

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Dripping with baroque prose, charming characters, and historical references to forgotten Black modernist figures, the book is as decadent as a goblet of foamy pink champagne in a dining hall draped in candlelight.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

Follow the author @socialmedea__

Want more book recommendations? Follow me on twitter @SLangridgeUK for updates on what I’m reading.

Check me out on TikTok @theyrhymesometime

Posted on

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.



Want more book recommendations? Follow me on twitter @SLangridgeUK for updates on what I’m reading.

Check me out on TikTok @theyrhymesometime



Posted on

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

Want more book recommendations? Follow me on twitter @SLangridgeUK for updates on what I’m reading.

Like poetry? Check me out on TikTok @theyrhymesometime

Posted on

The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas

I  loved this book. The original novel was written in nynorsk and is a classic of Norwegian literature, but I can’t believe it loses much in translation. The short, ninety-six page novella is quite positively overflowing with poetry.

For anyone put off by that, don’t be — I read the whole thing in a few hours and couldn’t put it down.

The story starts with a young girl in a small rural community whose world is rocked by the arrival of a new girl to her village. The girls’ tentatively burgeoning friendship is electric with the magic of youth and possibility and uncertainty, and in its messy, non-sensical intensity, provides a painfully honest rendition of young attachment.

After this, things only get weirder, but if you’re concerned about getting lost, don’t be. The story is unendingly compelling, the magic realism (for want of a better term) an effortless texture to the strangeness of the setting. The Ice Palace itself, when it finally consumes us, is a masterpiece of alien intelligence and cosmic beauty which puts any Lovercraftian monster to shame.

“The pine needles stretch their tongues and sing an unfamiliar nocturnal song. Each tongue is so small that it cannot be heard; together the sound is so deep and powerful that it could level the hills if it wished.” The Ice Palace

A vast, majestic book squeezed into an impossibly small story that will suck you, along with its young protagonist, deep into the incomprehensible vastness at the heart of all things. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough.

Have you read it? Share your thoughts below and don’t forget to sign up for future blog updates.


Buy on kindle £4.99

Buy hardback from Blackwells £6.49

Like reading speculative fiction? Want more book recommendations? Follow me on twitter @SLangridgeUK for updates on my latest posts.

Like poetry? Check me out on TikTok @theyrhymesometimes