Mohamed Kheir’s Sleep Phase, beautifully translated by Robin Moger (who also translated Kheir’s story collection, Slipping) brought to mind related neurodivergent conditions that I once wrote about on my mental health blog, Storied Mind. To experience the world as derealized is the feeling that the world around you is not quite real or completely strange […]

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s gripping novel Shroud reworks one of the oldest stories in the world of a hero lost in a hostile world and trying to get home. Facing the unknown, those who are cast adrift have to use every resource at their disposal and their own wits and training to survive. Of course, in Tchaikovsky’s […]

Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus is the second novel in his Astra Black series (following 2022’s Sweep of Stars) and moves the story of the Muungano world forward from multiple perspectives, each of which probes the internal struggles of a large cast of characters. While the novel shifts more to deepening our understanding of […]

After four years and all those immunizations, I finally came down with covid. So I’ve been out of commission for a couple of weeks and just now am regaining my ability to think, read and write.It will take me a while to get back to book reviewing, but in the meantime I’ll be posting here […]

Ray Nayler’s beautiful novella, The Tusks of Extinction, focuses on a handful of very different characters whose lives converge on a hunting expedition in the Russian taiga at least a century in the future. That convergence manages to speak volumes about human nature, greed, memory, family bonds, the connection of living things to the earth […]

People of Light 1 is a first glimpse into a world called Elektra, settled by humans in the past two hundred years, a past, of course, far in our future. This begins a series of interconnected stories that will appear here in draft form and will ultimately be published as a single book. 1.K’Lin picked […]