Mystery

Bats Of The Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson

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PREMISE: I admit, I generally copy this premise shit from Goodreads. No point me reinventing the wheel. I also do that because it’s a professional summary of the book and something that I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near in terms of quality. However, I realise that’s such a cop out and in my attempt to produce a professional blog of all my own shite writing and perspectives, I’ve decided to do it all myself. Which basically means if you have even a passing interest in the book I’m talking about, go to Goodreads for a better summary of it because I’ll have likely fucked it up.

So, this book; two related, converging stories set a few hundred years apart, told using a stunningly clever and gorgeous variety of media (text, pictures, drawings, maps etc.).

I have a dream. That one day my one little daughter will walk into Waterstones or Foyles or Barnes & Noble and not see a Romantasy section full of similar-looking novels with beautifully designed covers and gloriously curly fonts but rather a shelf with the title ‘Original Novels’ and under which sits copies of this book and S and House Of Leaves and Maxwell’s Demon and XX and hopefully a raft of other novels that have some originality about them.

To quote the kids of today, this kind of book is my jam. Particularly when it’s done as well as this. That’s the thing with books like this; there’s so much thought gone into the story, the design, the individual elements to be added, how it all hangs together etc. It becomes a real experience to read. It won’t be for everyone. One man’s Donald Duck is another man’s Donald Trump (aside from the fact that one is a laughably fucking idiotic clown of a cartoon character and the other is a duck).

In fact, this book is everything Trump isn’t; it’s intelligent, eloquent, thoughtful, interesting, fantastic to look at and something that adds to society that we can be grateful for.

Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel

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PREMISE: A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square-shaped hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.

I absolutely flew through this book and love the way the story is told via interviews and reports and the odd journal entry. It’s written in a really addictive way and, having now checked it out further, has two sequels which I will doubtless bag at some point. It feels like the literary version of a Transformers film; it’s probably not going to win the Nobel or Booker prizes and probably not even the Arthur C. Clarke award, but…it’s fantastically entertaining, intriguing, has a great premise and takes it in a good direction and is just a fun read. And, like watching a Hollywood summer blockbuster, sometimes that’s all you need.

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

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PREMISE: Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it’s the same valley, the same town–except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he’s still alive in Odile’s present. Edme –– who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile –– is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil’s top candidate, yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future..

Yesss. Re-read that first paragraph above – a town that repeats across endless valleys in 20-year gaps. What’s not to like about that idea? Books like this hit my g-spot. If you Google it, someone somewhere will call this type of novel ‘speculative fiction’, although I’m pretty sure the definition of ‘fiction’ is that it’s speculative, otherwise it would be fact. But I get the pigeon-holing and actually I’m grateful for it as it allows me to Google ‘speculative fiction’ and discover books like this. What’s even better about this one is that there’s a really beautiful story being told within the construct of the valleys and the time difference. A great book to get lost in.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

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PREMISE: Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.

Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

You ever read a book where every word feels important? Not just well thought out or well written, but actually critical to the story in a way that kind of carries a gargantuan weight. That’s what Martin MacInnes does. Across all three books he’s written he has a way of writing that is not just addictive in terms of the prose and the beauty of reading but somehow it’s as if every single word is of vital significance.

Unlike me, as I clearly can’t even explain why I like something. Good job I don’t do this book review (not that these are reviews) shit for a living. I’d have been sacked long ago.

I loved MacInnes’ first two books but this felt like a real step up and I think of it within a bracket of books I’ve read that have something cerebral, wondrous and magical about them. Very much looking forward to book no.4.

The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

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PREMISE: Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let’s begin . . .

Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others . . .

Here’s another one. Another book with such a great premise that you wished you’d thought of it yourself. It’s kind of like Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap meets Freaky Friday meets Miss Marple. What a film that would be. And what a book this is. I read somewhere that it took Stuart Turton three months to plan out the book on a huge spreadsheet where he detailed every two minutes of every character’s day and their location in the house at each point and when you read the book you can easily understand why he needed to do this.

This is literally a book to get lost in; a book that needs 100% of your attention every time you pick it up as the term ‘labyrinthine plotting’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. The real genius, however, is that Mr. Turton pulls it off with aplomb. Absolutely perfect reading escapism.

Psalms For The End Of The World by Cole Haddon

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PREMISE: It’s 1962 and physics student Grace Pulansky believes she has met the man of her dreams, Robert Jones, while serving up slices of pecan pie at the local diner. But then the FBI shows up, with their fedoras and off-the-rack business suits, and accuses him of being a bomb-planting mass-murderer. 

Finding herself on the run with Jones across America’s Southwest, the discoveries awaiting Gracie will undermine everything she knows about the universe. 

Her story will reveal how scores of lives – an identity-swapping rock star, a mourning lover in ancient China, Nazi hunters in pursuit of a terrible secret, a crazed artist in pre-revolutionary France, an astronaut struggling with a turbulent interplanetary future, and many more – are interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.

Yeah, I know…what a premise. That’s exactly what I thought. Man, when I stumble across books like this on Goodreads or Amazon I swear a little bit of ‘man wee’ leaks out. This is my reading sweet spot, my narrative nirvana. I love stories with multiple strands, narrators, viewpoints etc that all come together (and sometimes don’t) at the end. And this one is an absolute beauty. His first novel, I believe (I should really research and confirm that but that sounds like something a more professional blogger would do) and hopefully the first of many. It’s such a fantastic book.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

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PREMISE: Harry August is on his deathbed. Again. No matter what he does or the decisions he makes, when death comes, Harry always returns to where he began, a child with all the knowledge of a life he has already lived a dozen times before. Nothing ever changes. Until now. As Harry nears the end of his eleventh life, a little girl appears at his bedside. “I nearly missed you, Doctor August,” she says. “I need to send a message.” This is the story of what Harry does next, and what he did before, and how he tries to save a past he cannot change and a future he cannot allow.

Claire North is a genius in my eyes. Not only is she a fantastic writer and storyteller but she comes up with just the best story ideas; a man who lives multiple lives, a person who can move between bodies just by touching them, a girl who nobody can remember, the Harbinger of Death. She also has such a ‘smooth’ way of writing, which I realise is just a fancy way of saying that she’s a really good writer. I mentioned it in a previous post; some writers words you can just swallow like soup whereas others might contain a few small croutons or large chunks of Ryvita. Ultimately tasty but might take a bit of work to get there. Claire North to me is the Heinz Oxtail of writers. Gloriously good.

Follow Me To Ground by Sue Rainsford

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PREMISE: Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals—or “Cures”—by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson. When they strike up an affair, to the displeasure of her father and Samson’s widowed, pregnant sister, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover—and eventually comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.

This book blew me away (so much so that it’s my Portland Award winner for 2020). Sooooo (the more O’s, the bigger the emphasis) beautifully written and a really unique premise and story. It stayed with me for ages afterwards too, floating around the largely blank space of my mind and coming to the forefront every so often. It’s one of the few books that I know I will find time to read again at some point when all this ‘new novels’ malarkey calms down and there’s no new releases for a year or two. Bound to happen at some point, surely.

We Eat Our Own by Kea Wilson

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PREMISE: When a nameless, struggling actor in 1970’s New York gets the call that an enigmatic director wants him for an art film set in the Amazon, he flies to South America, no questions asked. He quickly realizes he’s made a mistake when it becomes clear that he’s replacing another actor who quit after seeing the script—a script the director now claims doesn’t exist. The movie is over budget. The production team seems headed for a breakdown. The air is so wet that the celluloid film disintegrates.

But what the actor doesn’t realize is that the greatest threat might be the town itself, and the mysterious shadow economy that powers this remote jungle outpost. Entrepreneurial Americans, international drug traffickers, and M-19 guerrillas are all fighting for South America’s future—and the groups aren’t as distinct as one might think. The actor thought this would be a role that would change his life. Now he’s worried he won’t survive it.

Best book name ever? Maybe not, but it’s certainly up there. I like to think that Kea Wilson originally had an extra word at the end of the title but decided to drop it last minute. We Eat Our Own Biscuits? Pets? Faeces? Assholes? There’s a novel in each one of those. I imagine We Eat Our Own Biscuits is an historical drama written by Hilary Mantel. We Eat Our Own Pets is obviously a Stephen King novel; he’s got that whole pet thing sewn up. We Eat Our Own Faeces is probably a Gwyneth Paltrow self-help book. And We Eat Our Own Assholes by Ivana Sukyuov, the Russian contortionist gymnast turned porn star.

Anyway, back to the book with no fifth word in the title. It’s fantastic. I get a real joy discovering books like this. An author I’ve not heard of, an intriguing premise, a rivetingly addictive read. There was something really fresh and unique about this book that I’m not a good enough writer to explain so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

XX by Rian Hughes

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PREMISE: At Jodrell Bank Observatory in England, a radio telescope has detected a mysterious signal of extraterrestrial origin—a message that may be the first communication from an interstellar civilization. Has humanity made first contact? Is the signal itself a form of alien life? Could it be a threat? If so, how will the people of Earth respond?
           
Jack Fenwick, artificial intelligence expert, believes that he and his associates at tech startup Intelligencia can interpret the message a find a way to step into the realm the signal encodes. What they find is a complex alien network beyond anything mankind has imagined. 

I love books like this; this, House Of Leaves, S, The Raw Shark Texts, Bats of the Republic. Books that don’t just contain ‘normal’ text, but use a variety of different ‘things’ to tell the story. I’m assuming it’s some sort of regression back to my youth and my immature need to have pictures (or something more than words) in a book. Whatever it is, I like it.

This book is magnificent. Really pretty breathtaking in it’s scope and how it’s put together. Not to mention the level of intelligence and creativity it takes to come up with something like this. Stunning…