Ian Mond

Gogmagog, Jeff Noon & Steve Beard (Angry Robot 978-1-91520-282-6, $18.99, 353pp, tp) February 2024.

Gogmagog is the first novel I’ve read by Jeff Noon since the publication of Nyphomation in 1997. The books he wrote immediately after his Vurt phase – Needle in the Groove and Falling Out of Cars – didn’t appeal to twenty-something Ian (though Falling Out of Cars looks right up the al­ley of fifty-something Ian). ...Read More

The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need, Adam Marek (Comma Press 978-1-91269-775-5, £9.99, 244pp, tp) March 2024.

A large chunk of the 21 stories in Adam Marek’s new collection, The Universe Delivers the En­emy You Need – a magnificent title that’s sadly not shared by a single piece in the book – plays on similar concerns raised by Joel Dane in The Ragpicker: that technology is putting a ...Read More

The Ragpicker, Joel Dane (Meerkat 978-1-94615-459-0, $17.95, 290pp, p) July 2024.

If you believe the advertising campaigns from Meta and Apple (especially Apple’s slick ads for its Vision Pro), virtual and physical realities will harmoniously exist together. It’s a utopian attitude that conflicts with the often dystopian vision pre­sented by the genre, where VR, with its immersive pods and body suits, is a means of escaping the harsh realities ...Read More

The Underhistory, Kaaron Warren (Viper 978-1-80081-202-4, £16.99, 383pp, hc) April 2024.

The publication of a new novel from Kaaron Warren is an event worthy of fanfare. She’s one of the rare few – Kirstyn McDermott is another – who can blend literary and horror fiction without undermining the strengths of either. It makes for a reading experience that’s both deep and textured, but also taut and brutal. The Underhistory ...Read More

The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman (Viking 978-0-73522-404-9, $35.00, 688pp, hc) June 2024.

In a “Historical Note” to his new novel The Bright Sword (his first adult novel since wrapping up The Magicians trilogy), Lev Grossman remarks that people have been re-working and re-inventing King Arthur’s story for nearly 1,400 years. As he poetically puts it, the legend has “never been told quite the same way twice. Every age and ...Read More

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to The Waste­lands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron Books 978-1-25087-861-8, $28.99, 336pp, hc) June 2024.

I was surprised to discover that there are few novels, vintage or contemporary, set on the Trans-Siberian Express. There are plenty of memoirs and travel guides, but, unlike the Orient Express, with its Agatha Christies and Graham Greenes, very little fiction. The irony is that Sarah Brook’s eerie debut novel, The Cautious ...Read More

Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom 978-1-25084-768-3, $27.99, 304pp, hc) June 2024.

To quote Tom Clancy (or was it Jeff Bezos?), it takes ten years to become an overnight success. I suspect Vajra Chandrasekera can relate. He spent a decade working on his craft, with short fiction published in various genre magazines and anthologies. Then, last year, Chandrasekera published his first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, which immediately caught ...Read More

Takaoka’s Travels, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (Stone Bridge/Monkey 979-8-98868-870-9, $18.95, 178pp, tp) May 2024.

In 865, at the age of 65, Imperial Japanese Prince Takaoka, the third son of Emperor Heizeil, a Bud­dhist monk who also went by the monastic name Shinyo, set forth from Canton with three aides to Hindustan (India). Sadly, Takaoka never com­pleted the journey, reportedly mauled and eaten by a tiger somewhere near the Malay peninsula. In ...Read More

Mood Swings, Frankie Barnet (Astra House, 978-1-66260-259-7, $26.00, 304pp, hc) May 2024.

The Ministry of Time wears its time travel on its literary sleeve. Frankie Barnet’s debut novel, Mood Swings, isn’t nearly as overt. In fact, it begins with the world in lockdown – not because of the pandemic (though I did get flashbacks) but because animals have turned on humanity. “Wasps targeted small children and the elderly; ...Read More

The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press, 978-1-66804-514-5, $28.99, 352pp, hc) May 2024.

As Gary Wolfe has long remarked – both in the pages of this magazine and on The Coode Street Podcast – time travel, one of the foundational pillars of science fiction, has been absorbed by the literary mainstream. Starting, arguably, with Audrey Niffenegger, both literary superstars (Kate Atkinson and Emily St. John Mandel) and ...Read More

The Invisible Hotel, Yeji Y. Ham (Zando 978-1-63893-137-9, $28.00, 320pp, hc) March 2024.

Early on in Yeji Y. Ham’s intense debut novel, The Invisible Hotel, our narrator, Yewon, describes her mother’s daily ritual of cleaning of their ances­tor’s bones in the family’s bathtub.

My stomach began to thrash. I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to smell it. Heat, breath, sweat, the odor that rose into the ...Read More

Parasol Against the Axe, Helen Oyeyemi (Faber & Faber 978-0571366620, £16.99, 272pp, hc) February 2024. (Riverhead 978-0-59319-236-8, $28.00, 272pp, hc) March 2024.

Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, Parasol Against the Axe, takes place in Prague, Oyeyemi’s home since 2013. Interviewed by The Guardian in 2019, Oyeyemi described Prague as a “very layered city; it could be a film set; it could be a fairytale; it could be a gritty, ...Read More

Snowglobe, Soyoung Park (Delacorte 978-0-59348-497-5, $20.99, 384pp, hc) February 2024.

There’s significant whiplash going from the op­pressive darkness of Yeji Y. Ham’s The Invisible Hotel to the propulsive plotting and excitement of Soyoung Park’s debut young-adult novel Snow­globe (translated from Korean by Joungmin Lee Comfort). Set two centuries into the future, we are presented with a world (or at least the tiny portion we see) blanketed in snow and ...Read More

The Briar Book of the Dead, A.G. Slatter (Titan Books, 978-1-80336-454-4, $16.99, 368pp, tp) February 2024.

When I reviewed A.G. (Angela) Slatter’s 2022 novel The Path of Thorns, I said she was one of the best contemporary fantasists in the field. But I was wrong; my vision was too narrow. Angela is simply one of the best contemporary writers of fiction, regardless of genre. Deep down, I already ...Read More

Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere, Anastacia Reneé (Amistad 978-0-06322-168-0, $17.99, 144pp, tp) March 2024.

I’ve never really seen eye to eye with poetry. As a kid, all that word-play, metaphor, and allu­sion seemed like hard work, especially when my literary diet consisted mainly of Terrance Dicks Doctor Who novelisations and Stephen King. But in the last decade I’ve made a concerted effort to read outside my comfort zone ...Read More

Again and Again, Jonathan Evison (Dutton 978-0-59318-415-8, $28.00, 336pp, hc) November 2023.

I’ve been a massive fan of Jonathan Evison’s fiction since encountering his 2012 novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. Not only does Evison have a cracking sense of humour, but he can see beauty and humanity in the darkest and most challenging of situations. I never thought, though, that I’d be reviewing one of Evison’s books ...Read More

Womb City, Tlotlo Tsamaase (Erewhon Books 978-1-64566-056-9, $27.00, 416pp, hc) January 2024.

Tlotlo Tsamaase’s debut novel, Womb City, ini­tially presents as science fiction. In an evocative opening, our protagonist Nelah tells us that ‘‘in our city, everyone lives forever. But murder hangs in the air like mist.’’ The city is Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. The mist is a ‘‘puff of human corpse-detecting chemicals’’ that can locate where a ...Read More

The Deluge, Stephen Markley (Simon & Schuster 978-1-98212-309-3, $32.50, 896pp, hc) January 2023.

I won’t lie. I balked at reading Stephen Mark­ley’s second novel, The Deluge. At nearly 900 pages, I knew it would take me two weeks to read, time I could spend working through a back­log of 2023 books that I’ve been meaning to pick up (including new novels from Francis Spufford, Daniel Mason, Emily Habeck, ...Read More

Him, Geoff Ryman (Angry Robot 978-1-91520-267-3, $18.99, 376pp, tp) December 2023.

The central conceit of Geoff Ryman’s Him is to imagine an alternative history where Jesus is born biologically female but identifies as male. It’s a provocative premise that seems designed to of­fend many people of faith. And yet, while gender identity is a crucial aspect of the novel, Him is, in fact, a respectful and somewhat authentic rendi­tion ...Read More

Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-37410-928-8, $28.00, 336pp, hc) January 2024.

While reading Marie-Helene Bertino’s offbeat third novel, Beautyland, I was regularly reminded of the work of other authors. The central premise – the narrator believes she’s from another planet – brought to mind Sayaka Murata’s 2020 novel Earthlings. As a first-contact novel that reshapes rather than subverts the trope, it bears similar­ity with Adam Soto’s ...Read More

Silent City, Sarah Davis-Goff (Tinder Press, 978-1-4722-5524-2, £20.00, 288pp, hc) July 2023. (Flatiron Books, 978-1-25026-262-2, $27.99, 256pp, hc) October 2023.

Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff is the sequel to one of my favourite novels of 2019, Last Ones Left Alive. Zombies are not typically my thing (I needed to be persuaded to watch The Last of Us, though I’m glad I did), but I was taken in ...Read More