Having been blogged out, read out, burned out and whatever else I can think of as down and out recently, I was determined to give myself a long summer break, determined that is until I picked up The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao. I could not put this debut novel down. The powerful clash […]
Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee
Fonda Lee has turned in a bravura performance in the new novella, Untethered Sky. Set in a vividly imagined desert kingdom of Dartha, a young woman named Ester narrates the story of how she came to devote her life to raising and flying giant hunter birds called rocs. From an early age, when her brother […]
9 Favorite Fantasy Fiction Books I Read in 2022
Though I’ve usually thought of myself as a science fiction reader primarily, this year’s favorite fantasy fiction has shown me how diverse and vital this vast category can be. None of the nine books in this list resorts to the tired conventions of Eurocentric medieval-style settings and hero questing. Each one takes a completely original […]
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Impressed as I was by Simon Jimenez‘ beautiful and moving first novel, The Vanished Birds, I have to say I’m just staggered by his second, The Spear Cuts Through Water. Using the second person, the narrator lures “you” with intensely lyrical but dramatically apt prose into a world between worlds. One of several story tellers […]
A Storm of Wings – A Novel of Viriconium by M. John Harrison
From the beginning of M. John Harrison’s A Storm of Wings (1980), you know you’re entering a shattered world with a diminishing human presence, but it is also a dazzling world captured in densely brilliant and beautiful prose. This second novel of the Viriconium series caught me by surprise. The first, The Pastel City (1971), […]
Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse
Rebecca Roanhorse has created a stark fantasy world in the weird west of her powerful novella, Tread of Angels. From its brilliant opening, as a dark and violent wind blowing off a mountain called Abaddon storms into the grim town of Goetia and slams down Perdition Street into the Eden, its main den of gambling […]
