Damascus: Taste of a City
Some time ago I got a bit carried away: I discovered Haus Publishing and their astonishing range of “travel” books, and it’s fair to say I bought quite a few. This is one of them. I had never heard of Scami before, and I didn’t really know what this book was about, but I figured someone talking about Damascus was likely to be fascinating.
Schami is an author, and Syrian, and (at time of writing) had been living in exile in Germany for decades. This book is (he says) essentially transcriptions of phone conversations he had with his sister, Marie: she wondered around their part of Damascus – the Old City, the Christian Quarter – and described what she was seeing, hearing, smelling, remembering. Alongside that are the recipes. Apparently Damascenes are well known for their cooking. The book collects recipes from friends, relatives, and associates of Schama’s family, alongside incidental details about how it can be served, why this person makes the best one, and so on.
It’s very close to walking with a resident, which of course is the point. It’s also an insight into familial and friend relationships – people that I will never know, with complexities I can never understand and which can only be hinted at here, but which speak to a vibrant city that is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet. It’s almost but not quite voyeuristic – it’s gossipy, for sure, but for me it stops short of being intrusive, so I didn’t feel uncomfortable about knowing these details of people’s lives.
I can’t wait to go back through the book with sticky flags, figuring out what to cook from it.
A Letter to the Luminous Deep, by Sylvie Cathrall
I picked this up because someone mentioned the sequel, and I thought it sounded amazing. And because it turns out I’m a bit of a sucker for the epistolary novel.
There’s a tangle of letters here. Henerey Clel and E. were writing to each other for some months… and then they disappeared, presumed drowned. Their correspondence is pieced together by Henerey’s brother and E.’s sister, some months later again, through their own correspondence. And notes from other people are also included, to flesh out various issues along the way.
Why are Henerey and E. presumed drowned? Because the world they live on has almost no land above the ocean; because E.’s house is literally underwater – and there was some sort of disaster while they were outside, near that house. The world itself is one of the most wonderful and intriguing parts about the novel; exactly how it works is gradually – very gradually – teased out over the course of the entire book, and piecing together its history is almost as much fun as learning about E. (reclusive, highly intelligent and curious, anxious, probably has OCD) and Henerey (scholar, slightly awkward, frustrated by academia, highly intelligent and curious), and of course about Sophy and Vyerin.
The language won’t work for everyone: it’s a bit on the highly-stylised end. “O dearest E.!” and so on. But for me, I felt it was done with such love – Cathrall isn’t making fun of the language, but writing it with immense enjoyment – that I was prepared to go along with it, and even enjoy it most of the time.
I must admit that I put a hold on the second book… and then let it lapse. I read the blurb, and I’m not really convinced that it sounds as compelling as the first book. At least, not enough to read it immediately. Does this first book need a sequel? I think it probably does, but also I’m willing to let the mystery just sit, at least for now.
Fulvia: The Woman who Broke all the Rules in Ancient Rome
THIS BOOK.
Argh, this book. I have been waiting to get my hands on this book for… I dunno, a year or something? And now I have read it and it was wonderful.
I have enjoyed Jane Draycott’s work since reading Cleopatra’s Daughter: she has a wonderfully engaging style, she makes it clear when she’s making educated guesses but doesn’t shy away from them, and she’s determined to excavate interesting women out of either being completely ignored (Cleopatra Selene), or mostly ignored except when they’re excoriated (Fulvia).
Had I completely forgotten that Fulvia was married to Marc Antony? Uh, oops. I KNEW there was another reason that I was dead keen on learning more about her.
So little is known about Fulvia as a person that Draycott has to spend quite a lot of time going over what is known about OTHER Roman women in order to a) have a stab at discussing what most of Fulvia’s life was like, and b) putting her in context for both why some of the things she did were so unusual, and why some of the things she did were NOT unusual but still got maligned. While I already knew a lot of these things it was still great to see it all put together like this, and particularly in conversation with the life of one particular woman – for someone coming to the book with zero knowledge of Rome, I think it would be pretty accessible. The main thing that isn’t all that accessible, and which there is no getting away from, is the names. My goodness, Romans, could you not have had more imagination in your nomenclature? Gets me every single time.
Anyway. This book is a delight. It’s the best sort of revisionist history: not just accepting what ancient sources say, but examining their reasons for doing so; adding in the archeological evidence, as well as other source material; and bringing a trained feminist idea to persuasively make the case for how misogyny has worked over the centuries to write Fulvia’s story.
Look, it’s just really good. Highly recommended for anyone interested in late Republican Rome, and/or women’s history in general.
The Greatest Fight of Sunny Granada, and other stories
This is another of the book sent by a Filipino friend. You can buy it over here.
I’d not come across Kenneth Yu’s work before, but apparently this is his second collection of short stories. There’s a really interesting variety in the stories presented here.
The eponymous story is very clearly science fiction, and told non-linearly, about a man who starts off as a boxer/MMA etc on Earth and then leaves the planet to find more career options fighting aliens in the arena. Certainly on one level it’s about fighting as a sport and sport for money, but of course it’s also about family and inheritance and Place as home.
Then there’s “Spider Hunt,” which feels more like fantasy; “The Probe” is maybe SF, maybe fantasy, and works by muddying the lines. “Beats” is also genre-defying, intriguing and mysterious.
While I can see, and appreciate, what “Operation: Bleach” is doing, I’m as white as they come; I suspect it hits far harder for folks with browner skin than mine and who live in a society that upholds my sort of skin as somehow preferable. It’s another story told inventively – a series of newspaper articles and comments – and it’s probably my favourite story of the collection.
I found “Lost for Words” a bit confusing, to be honest – it’s very short, and I don’t think entirely works as a story. Then “All That We May See” tips into horror, “One Morning at the Bank” is a superhero story, and “Blending In” feels basically like realism.
And then “For Sale: Big Ass Sword” is told entirely as an ad on Talipapa, which I understand to be an online trading site for the Philippines; the story leans into folktales/fairy tales, and is a really solid conclusion.
It was never predictable what the next story would be like, and I really enjoyed that aspect, as well as the stories themselves.
Olympus Inc novels
Kate Healey says that the Olympus Inc books are finished (for now??) so I felt I should write a brief note about them.
Take Greek mythology. Bring it into the modern world. Remove the supernatural. And remove all of the coercion and ick-ness from the love stories, while keeping (and often revealing) the ick-ness of many of the other relationships. This gives you the basic premise of the Olympus Inc stories.
The first set revolve around Olympus Inc, a publishing powerhouse, and the people who work there. The very first novel makes the Hades/Persephone story an actual delight, and you may be able to imagine just how very weird that is. It also shows up Demeter as basically a monster, and as far as I’m concerned this is now canon. We then get Aphrodite and Hephaestus, and Hera and… well. Spoilers. Around them are Odysseus and Penelope (who actually appear in an adorable prequel novella), Hermes, Hestia, and a bunch of other hilarious nods that you will get if you’re deep into the mythology and otherwise work perfectly well as side characters. You can read these novels as pure (adorable) romance novels, of course, but being able to shriek “I see what you did there, Healey!!” was a large part of the joy for me.
The second set of stories are, I think, a taller order: Healey takes three of the Trojan women and gives them happily ever afters. Which is honestly a big call, and it works incredibly well. Cassie, Xena, and Laodice all famously came to bad ends in the myths, but Healey takes their stories and writes wonderful romances.
All of these books are very, very readable. The characters are a delight and the romances make sense. They do all include some distressing things – mention of abuse, for instance, and disability-shaming, and so on. Healey deals with all of these with compassion and makes it very clear that they are Not OK.
You can find information about the books over at Kate Healey’s website.
Brigands & Breadknives
I received a copy of this book from the publisher, Tor Books, in exchange for a review. It’s out in November.
I was a few months late to the Legends & Lattes party, but I don’t regret getting there; sometimes, what I need is exactly that sort of low-stakes cosy fantasy. If you are of similar mind and want a near repetition but with different characters, this book… is not quite that. Note: you can read this without having read Legends, I promise!
Where Legends was about knowing both that you want to change career and how you will go about doing that, Brigands & Breadknives is the opposite: thinking that you’re content with your career and then realising how terribly wrong you are – but having no idea what to do instead. And that, too, can be okay.
The rattkin Fern thinks she is perfectly happy as a bookseller; she’s had a small adventure by moving cities to set up a new shop, and when she arrives it all seems very promising. But she realises she isn’t happy at all. Then, she gets drunk one night, falls asleep in a wagon, and ends up in a completely unexpected adventure: Astryx the mighty elf warrior and bounty hunter, is travelling across the Territories to collect the bounty on Zyll, a goblin with a remarkable talent for chaos. Numerous adventures ensue, some because of other bounty hunters and some not. And throughout it all, Fern is struggling with her own sense of purpose and self – and guilt, since she left her friends with no warning.
The comparison with Legends is, of course, inevitable. The stakes are higher here: many more sword- and knife-fights, people actually getting hurt, the moral quandary of a bounty when you’re not sure it’s valid. And arguably the stakes are personally higher for Fern, too, as she struggles with her own identity and purpose in life. (I’m not saying Viv doesn’t struggle with this, but it’s different when it’s something you’ve chosen, I think.) Plus, where Legends is set entirely within one town – in fact almost entirely on one street – Brigands ranges over a broad swathe of the Territories.
The book doesn’t need these comparisons, though. You can come to Brigands & Breadknives without having read Legends (or the prequel, where Viv meets Fern). All you need is an interest in a world with a huge variety of sentient races all living together (companionably, for the most part), grace for the occasional pun, and a desire to read about characters who have both fights and personal conversations. It’s a fast read, I enjoyed the characters a lot (Zyll is glorious), and this is going straight to my Comfort Reading Pile.
Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction
Available to buy from The University of the Philippines Press.
This is another book sent to me by the wonderful Charles Tan, who knows that I have an abiding interest in non-fiction about science fiction and fantasy…
I love that this book exists. The Philippines as a modern nation has such a fascinating (note: not necessarily a positive term!) and tumultuous modern history – the various waves of colonisation and everything that goes with them – that to begin unpicking influence and purpose and consequence is a hard thing. What I hadn’t realised and should have is that, as with so many groups (thank you, Joanna Russ and How To Suppress Women’s Writing, for always making me think about this), modern Filipino authors may not necessarily know all of the history of speculative fiction in their country, for one reason or another.
So the historian and SFF fan in me is both fascinated and thankful for the editors and authors of this book: the first half, “Reading Philippine Speculative Fiction,” is literally tracing some of the histories and places where it has developed and thrived. Two chapters in this section are in Tagalog, so I can’t speak to what they’re about; but the others were really fascinating, especially that on Komiks and the way Filipino authors have used external and local influences to create stories.
I will admit that I only flicked through the second half of the book: I don’t write fiction, so “Writing Philippine Speculative Fiction” is not for me. I do love that Emil Francis M. Flores wrote on “First World Dreams, Third World Realities: Technology and Science Fiction in the Philippines,” since this conjunction is one that I think has enormous potential for authors to explore.
This is a great book. Props to the University of the Philippines for publishing it.
To Ride a Rising Storm
I read this courtesy NetGalley and the publisher, Del Rey. I’m really sorry: it’s not out until January 2026.
There’s a social media joke that does the rounds occasionally, where an author is asked to explain their work in the most boring way possible. So: small fellow goes on long journey, loses family heirloom (LotR). If Moniquill Blackgoose played this game, she’d say something like “young woman goes to boarding house, makes some friends and enemies.”
It’s silly because of course there’s more to it than that. Superficially, that’s what this book – and the first in the series, To Shape A Dragon’s Breath – is about: a girl bonds with a dragon and must therefore go to a dragoneer boarding school to learn what it means to be a dragoneer. So far, so somewhat recognisable. But the world is an alternate one where Vikings took over in what we would call Britain; the story is set in what we would call North America, but it’s very different in a lot of ways. Like, for instance, the presence of dragons, and the fact that amongst other things their breath can be “shaped” in order to do some intriguing (al)chemical things. So Anequs has to go learn about all of that. But she’s not Anglish, or from another European background; she’s a “nackie” – one of the Indigenous folk of the area – and, in one of the very familiar turns Blackgoose employs, she and her people have in no way been embraced by the colonisers.
All of this is what happens in the first book. As with many boarding school books, this second one is in the second year of school – Anequs is 16, her dragon Kasaqua is big enough to ride but not fly, and society is starting to come to turns with two nackie dragoneers. The book is concerned with both personal and political issues – although Anequs, as with many in a position like hers, would recognise “the personal is political” as being a lived reality. So Anequs must navigate friendships that don’t always make sense and people who don’t rate her abilities and Anglish expectations of how she will comport herself, and what is respectable. At the same time, there is a growing group of people in wider society who are unhappy with how their state is being governed (ie too leniently for their tastes), and Anequs becomes something of a symbol they can oppose.
As with the first book, this one is easy to read: the pacing is perfect, the conversations are believable, the characters are engaging. There are parts where I was very angry about what was being said and done, and I’m not going to lie: it feels like a particularly apropos moment for this novel to be coming out. Highly recommended.
Black Convicts, Santilla Chingaipe
I came across this book because I heard Chingaipe at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. She was personally compelling, and the story she told of learning about the Black convicts who came to the east coast of Australia over the first few decades of “white” settlement was intriguing. So I picked it up, and have finally got around to reading it. To be honest I was putting it off because I knew it was going to have some harrowing bits – and I was right – although I also expected it to be gripping, and rewarding. On those counts it was more than I expected, because Chingaipe is an excellent author.
Chingaipe is doing two things here. On the one hand, she is writing about the Black people who were brought, or in a couple of instances came under their own steam, to the country we now call Australia (which wasn’t a country during this period and wasn’t always known as Australia). Often she’s talking about people whose names have never been mentioned in histories before, which is amazing in its own right. Some of these people were part of the standard “convict comes to Australia” story that tends to be discussed – do some minor crime in England, get sent to the colony for 7 or 14 years, live life here after. Many of the others, though, did their “crime” (a category explored extensively) in one of Britain’s other colonies – various sites in the Caribbean, or Mauritius, for instance – who then got shipped to England and then to these shores. Which I had no idea about.
On the other hand, she is also exploring the links between slavery, its systems and language and attitudes, and the convict system. What she points out are some things that I had previously considered, especially with the language, but a whole bunch of things that I was completely unaware of. She makes a compelling case for the convict system in Australia owing a great deal to the structures developed for and around slavery in North Americas and the Caribbean by the British. Which shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, when it’s laid out… but that’s often the way with a history like this.
One of the things that I really enjoyed about Chingaipe’s style is her presence within the book. I have noticed this happening more frequently in history books, especially with very deliberately and self-consciously political books: a refusal to pretend that the historian is objective, or even absent from the story they’re telling. So we get the story of Chingaipe visiting Hobart and Barbados, Zooming with historians around the world, her own emotional reaction to various stories. Far from detracting from the history, as would have been suggested decades ago (and probably still is by some today), this highlights the importance of the topic being discussed, and the fact that history is not/never is “past.”
I really think that anyone interested in Australian history, and probably also African diaspora history, would benefit from reading this.
Doomsday Dance Party, Nikki Alfar
A friend in the Phillipines sent me a copy of this, thinking I would like it. They were, of course, correct; you can get it from the publisher.
I’m not sure if I’ve come across Alfar’s work before – possibly in anthologies? – so it was intriguing to see the variety of short stories she presents here. Some are realist fiction; more are science fiction or fantastical. Most have clear Filipino connections – set in the ‘real’ Philippines or an alternative version – with a couple of exceptions, most notably “The Riddle of the Great Khan’s Great-Great-Granddaughter,” which I loved and is not connected to the Philippines at all. As well, many have elements of Filipino mythology, like the tikbalang and ‘fey folk’ (in English) at the wedding in “Destination: Wedding,” which was absolutely one of my favourite stories. Sometimes, as with that one, it’s because the story is specifically about an experience in the Philippines; other times the Philippines is the setting because it’s the setting, not because Alfar is making a specifically Filipino point (I hope that makes sense). Styles changes across the stories, from relatively straightforward to the more lyrical styling of stories like “El Legado de Lana (Lana’s Legacy)”.
It’s a compact collection, at 155 pages of story. I’m glad it exists and that I got to read it: the stories are a delight and I hope Alfar gets ever more notice, both at home and abroad.
Randomly Yours, Alex 