The Book of Records
I feel like a fraud even trying to write a review of this book. I don’t think I have anything particularly coherent to say – I’m sure that since it came out last year, people who actually know something about Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza and Du Fu have made all sorts of thoughtful, insightful, comments about how they’re portrayed there. And I’m sure literary critics have written fabulous words about how the book is structured; and philosophers have examined what it has to say about time, and love, and freedom, and choice.
I don’t really have anything to add. But I do want to add my tiny little flag, waving, to say that this is an amazing book and people should read it.
Somehow this passed me by last year – I hadn’t heard of it until I came across the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize 2026, for which the book was shortlisted this year. This prize is for a book that does clever things with nonfiction, and that’s exactly what Thien has written.
A young girl and her father, fleeing Foshan in China for environmental reasons, arrive at a liminal space called The Sea where people from across the world end up as they leave one place and go somewhere else. They stay much longer than most, however, because of her Lina’s father’s illness. As she tries to understand this new place, she has little to comfort her, except for three books her father snatched up as they fled: biographies of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu. Eventually she meets three adults who are prepared to spend time with her, and tell her stories – especially when they see these books, because (and it’s a slight spoiler, but I already knew it going in and it actually improved the reading experience for me, so there you are) these three are Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu. And they share the stories of their lives and fill in what those books missed.
The choice of these three people is a fascinating one, and one that I am not fully equipped to analyse. Arendt and Spinoza in particular have some similarities that require more understanding than I have to untangle, in their approaches to life and philosophy – plus, Arendt studied Spinoza herself. The inclusion of Du Fu is probably a more surprising choice from the point of view of most Western readers… actually who am I kidding, lots of Western readers haven’t heard of Arendt or Spinoza either, or know basically nothing about them (and I know only slightly less than nothing, so I’m not exempt from this criticism!). Anyway, they all faced immense trauma – the Holocaust, the plague and being exiled from your community, famine and civil war – and all created art before, through, and after. One of the balancing acts Thien manages here is not minimising any of those horrors, but also not making the book only about them; instead she keeps pointing to the living that goes on around them.
All of this is also relevant to Lina, whose own life has been upended – her family torn in half – for reasons she really doesn’t comprehend.
This is, at best, a surface level explanation of the novel. It sounds weighty and I guess it is; there are definitely bits that I didn’t understand because I just don’t know enough philosophy. But it was still a remarkable book, and I hope lots of people will come to it.
The Old Drift
I believe I bought this when it won the Clarke Award, so late 2020. I didn’t read it then – I think I assumed it would be too heavy for that particular year, and then that assumption has coloured my way of thinking about it ever since. I finally picked it up this week: partly gesturing to my endeavour to at least read the oldest books in my TBR pile.
This is not the book I expected it to be, given the Clarke Award. It definitely has SF elements towards the end, when it’s projecting into the future – and goodness it’s weird, in 2026, reading a book that was published in 2019, therefore written the few years before that, and/but has significant things happening in 2020 that are not Covid.
Rather than feeling like “a science fiction novel,” the connections I more strongly made for The Old Drift are the works of Edward Rutherford – his place-based historical novels that followed a few of families through many, many generations. Serpell does that here, following three main families as they interact across four generations. The central location is (what is today known as) Zambia, and in particular Lusaka. As befits modern Zambia, some characters are descended from pre-colonial inhabitants of the area; some are descended from British migrants, some Italian, and some Indian. Some of the actions happens in England, some in Italy, and some in India, as well as a couple of other sites in Zambia.
Across the novel – around 550 pages – Serpell traces the fortunes and misfortunes of the families. Marriages and births, infidelities, education, employment, tragedy – and only rarely triumph; illness (the last third or so revolves significantly around “The Virus”) and cleverness and revolution. Some of what Serpell portrays is based in truth: Edward Nkoloso plays a role – a real figure in Zambian independence, who proclaimed the country would send “Afronauts” to the moon and Mars; and one of the characters is Matha Mwamba, one of those Afronauts. Percy Clark, one of the progenitors and an early British colonialist, was real; and the fictional characters interact with some other historical figures. I don’t know much about modern Zambian history, but I know that a lot of the moments that appear in the background – like the issues around Northern Rhodesia becoming part of the Federation and then eventually getting independence; “Rhodes Must Fall,” the fight to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Cape Town University – are real.
What Serpell does in this novel is show both how individuals can be deeply affected by larger historical moments, and how sometimes personal issues are far, far more important. And neither of those experiences de-legitimises the other.
It’s fair to say that this isn’t an easy read. None of the characters do not spend their lives in comfort and ease, with no problems beyond what to have for dinner. They experience heartbreak and personal tragedy; families are difficult, opportunities are lost, life simply doesn’t go the way they hoped. Racism and misogyny play enormous roles – unsurprisingly. While there are moments of triumph, and doggedly continuing despite setbacks, Serpell has not set out to write inspiration porn. It’s much more real than that.
A connecting thread across the generations is a plural first-person narrator: mosquitos. Which, of course, have an important role to play in disease transmission; I’m fairly sure characters comment on their pesky existence in every section of the novel. Precisely why mosquitos are used as an almost Greek chorus isn’t entirely obvious, except for the fact that they’re ubiquitous – which I guess is enough.
The Old Drift is by turns bawdy, clinical, grim, lighthearted (occasionally), earnest, and reflective. It’s also beautifully written – while I wouldn’t say easy to read, it doesn’t require a quiet room and intense concentration to follow. I’m glad I bought it and have finally read it.
33 1/3 Africa: Graceland
I read this courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury. It’s out today.
Graceland is a really important album to me. When I was in my teens, it was one of my favourite albums – it was different from other things I had been listening to, it had such a brilliant beat, I was already a fan of Paul Simon’s, and it just really clicked for me. Reading this consideration of the album – musically, historically, politically – has deepened and complicated (complimentary) my relationship to the album.
I had no real knowledge of the background to the album, aside from the fact that it’s Simon working with groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo at a time when bands from Africa in general weren’t particularly well known outside of the continent (what am I saying, that’s still the case today). Dinh does a particularly good job of briefly setting the political scene – foreign attitudes towards the Apartheid regime, questions about the cultural embargo – and also refers back to related issues as they arise across the book.
I enjoyed the structure of the book a great deal. The introduction and first chapter set up the history – Simon’s experiences with African music, in particular, and his own musical history. Four of the next five chapters look at specific tracks from the album as a way of exploring how the album was put together in time and space, what can be understood about music and history and politics from both the lyrics and the music, and some of what is known about the personal experiences of the musicians. As someone who has read very little musical history, this approach was fascinating. It’s made slightly more difficult by the fact that Dinh wasn’t allowed to quote slabs of lyrics, due to copyright issues – which I frankly find amazing, that the copyright holders weren’t able to come to some reasonable agreement rather than charging standard rates, but what would I know. For someone like me, who basically knows the album off by heart, it wasn’t as annoying as it will be for folks who only know it in passing! The other chapter in this middle section looks specifically at South African popular music – about which I previously knew nothing, and now have some appreciation for the layers of influence going on there.
The penultimate chapter looks at “the politics of collaboration” and picks up on issues that have been touched on in other chapters too – about the power imbalance of Paul Simon, the white American pop star, working with lesser-known, brown- and black-skinned musicians, sometimes also American but many from various African countries. Dinh comes to no easy conclusions here: some folks have spoken up about being disgruntled for the way they were treated; others have remained steadfast in saying it was a good experience. Presumably both are telling the truth. I appreciated that across the whole book, Dinh is interested in neither maligning nor lionising Simon – or indeed any of the others. They’re just humans.
Finally, the last chapter looks at one of the weirdest aspects of the album – the cover art: St George. It’s always just been ubiquitous to me; I didn’t pay much attention to it as a kid, and as I got older it was just… the album. Now? Well, the image is based on a painting by a medieval East African artist, and George himself is an important figure across a sprawling set of cultures. So he does sort of make sense.
There was always the potential for a book like this to ruin a favourite album. It’s true that I can’t listen to it now without feeling a degree of discomfort, knowing that some musicians felt taken advantage of; that there were political questions around whether it meant Simon was crossing the embargo line; and some of the other political questions around the music. However, Dinh in no way wants to stop people from listening to the album – my sense is that he wants people to appreciate the issues, as well as many of the intriguing lyrics, more deeply. Which is good because I’ve had “Boy in the Bubble” stuck in my head for days.
The Mortons
Back in the mists of time, when Justine Larbalestier’s Liar first came out, we on Galactic Suburbia invented the Spoilerific episode just to talk about it in all its glory.
The Mortons isn’t as tricksy as Liar was. It is, however, a book to talk about, chew on, examine the bones of… and those metaphors get really uncomfortable when applied to this book.
The sprawling Morton family are not a family that ordinary people will have heard of. But if you have money, or power – or your family might one day have those things – you may well hear from them. They can help. They can get things done, smooth paths, remove obstacles. And all you have to do is sign a blank piece of paper.
The Mortons aren’t just killers, although that’s a significant part of their brand, if you like – just take a look at that cover. They also work in other ways to make the correct outcome occur; torture, accounting, social manipulation, and so on. They have been doing this for generations, because their children are taught – pretty much from infancy – how to Be A Morton. And sometimes they adopt children, too.
If you’ve Seanan McGuire’s InCrytpid series: imagine if the Price family were actually like the Covenant. And now make them the actual Covenant.
Jessica Morton is the prodigy of her generation. She is nearing the end of her schooling at Helshire College – along with her Morton cousins, the offspring of the other three legacy crime families, and a large number of children from wealthy ‘ordinary’ families… some of whom will end up being incorporated by the Mortons. She is eager to be blooded, and be acknowledged as an adult Morton. Fer first kill isn’t quite what she expected, though; and then her summer internship isn’t either. And then things escalate, and… well. Life can’t be the same again. Probably.
This is the author photo at the front of the book. When I first saw it, I thought it was Larbalestier and Westerfeld having a fun photo shoot. And it is. And then you get to a certain point in the book and you realise that they’re cosplaying, and it’s still a fun photo shoot but also just a little uncomfortable.
This novel is vicious. The characters aren’t spending their time asking whether killing is evil; the only questions are around motive. If you’re very squeamish, you’ll probably want to avoid it; there are a couple of bits that were a bit gruesome. Having said that: I read this very quickly. It was un-put-down-able. The writing itself is a delight: evocative, smartly paced, leavened with a touch of humour. The characters are really where it’s at. Jessica is an intriguing character to sit in the head of. She is completely committed to her family, and the family legacy. She has experienced trauma, and uses it to feed her desire to be excellent. Even when she is tasked with doing terrible things – things she actually doesn’t want to do – the family comes first. I had no idea where the authors could possibly be going with the story for a long time. When a change does occur, it blindsided me – it’s such a good twist – and of course it didn’t just stay as one thing, either. No, I am not going to put more spoilers here, this is a book where you do not want to know more than the minimum before going in.
The short version is that this is a brilliant book and I hope a lot of people read it. The main characters are in the late teens but I really hope it doesn’t get classified as ‘young adult’ – I might give it to a mature late-teen reader, but no younger than that. I would not recommend it, as noted, for those who are very squeamish (no shade!), or if you’re not prepared to read about children and adolescents happily considering (and undertaking) murder.
Wickhills
The short version is that if you enjoy a thoroughly realised fantastical city, and you like spies and mystery, you should probably just stop reading this review and go get this.
And if you’ve heard of Mohamed as a predominantly horror writer, don’t worry; while there are certainly unpleasant things happening in this novel, I don’t think I’d classify it as horror. (I say this as a mostly non-horror reader.)
If you’re still here… this review contains some minor thematic spoilers, but nothing major.
There’s something about a novel that loves a city that tends to delight me. Sometimes it’s a real city — China Mieville’s Kraken loves London; sometimes fantastical… to make a similar point, Mieville’s The City and the City. Tolkien’s Minas Tirith has elements of this; Grace Chan’s Melbourne in Every Version of You; Makana Yamamoto’s space station in Hammajang Luck has some of the same vibe. And when that city has weirdness as well… you’ve got me. And I say that as someone who is distinctly not good at directions; if the clue to who the murderer is relies on knowing what’s west and what’s east, from a comment ten pages ago, I am not going to pick up on it.
Wickhills the city is a significant character in its own right in this novel. We’re thrown into it, and its fantastical nature, very quickly: the Market Street Wyrm is on the first page; we have windmills and museums, banks, a busy port, child labour. Across the novel we learn about omnibuses, a variety of options for artificial light, and the fact that humans are only one of the sentient species inhabiting the city. Wickhills is unstable – its geography can change in an instant; Wickhills is a version of democratic; and Wickhills is impossible to know completely.
The main narrative character is Ferec, which is fitting as he has made it his goal in life to try and understand Wickhills as best he can. Unconnected – except insofar as his obsession is useful on-the-job knowledge – for nearly ten year he has worked for Seaborne, a highly secretive counter-terrorism organisation. His jobs have ranged from assassination to seduction to infiltrating and undermining seditious groups. As the novel opens, he and his partner are waiting for a ship to arrive, so that they can locate and procure a particularly valuable asset.
And it all goes downhill from there.
This sort of novel will often feature a ‘getting the band together’ section – which I usually enjoy; I love some repartee and squabbling to figure out team roles. Mohamed, however, largely eschews that. Ferec doesn’t get to pick most of his team; they spend very little time on bonding or coming to know one another. Instead, the entire focus is the mission. Because that asset Ferec lifted off the boat turns out to be wanted by some very serious people (of course) and is far more dangerous than anyone had understood (of course).
Much of the novel is the action of Ferec securing the asset (and losing it and retrieving it etc). But there’s a philosophical aspect to the novel as well, which for me puts the novel in quite a different light. Ferec himself is not an innately moral man, but he does believe in the importance of Seaborne and its place in the city. Over the course of the novel, however, the place and use of Seaborne — effectively a secret police — is brought into question by various characters. Ferec is made to look at how his world works, and where it fits with what he understands of the city. And these questions — of how societies function, the role of secretive power structures, where and how power is exercised — they’re always important to ask; they feel vital at the moment.
Mohamed writes beautifully; her descriptions are evocative, her conversations often tantalisingly full of ellipses but conveying just enough information. The novel provides some answers, but nowhere near all of them — I could imagine at least half a dozen more novels just picking up on some of the points mentioned here. I haven’t even mentioned that Ferec’s boss is a manticore.
Some people are going to find the lack of clarity around some points very frustrating. But no one ever knows their city completely, so what makes you think you would know Wickhills — a much weirder city than the one you live in — any better?
Highly recommended.
Sugar, season 1
I was spoiled for The Big Reveal before I started watching Sugar. I’m a bit mad about it, I’ll admit – it would have been tantalising; it was still tantalising enough; but it did also make me move watching the show further up the list. So there’s that.
ALL THE SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1, stop reading now.
Seriously.
Continue reading →The Missing Thread
A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It.
I am so conflicted about this book.
The theory: absolutely up my alley. Writing women back into the (hi)story they were always a part of? Of course that’s a good idea!
And yet… I can’t help but feel this book isn’t quite the right way to do it.
Some of the good things first:
It is great to have women like Atossa and others who get one line as a wife or a mother brought to the forefront. Discussing Fulvia and Octavia a lot when discussing Marc Antony and Octavian? Brilliant! Not to mention Olympias when you’re discussing Phillip and Alexander of Macedon. There’s a nice amount about women like Sappho, too, so it’s not just all fighting – and the book opens with what we might be able to understand about Minoan culture, which probably had important roles for women, so that’s also excellent.
And yet. I have reservations.
One issue is that it’s still trying to tell exactly the same story of battles and political intrigue, just with women in it. Sometimes the women feel shoehorned in – this is a story the author wants to tell, and has to fit in the women to justify the story. So that’s frustrating. Partly this is a result of my own expectations: I was hoping for some new stories, making “history” not just about battles.
A large part of my problem is that the author doesn’t make much attempt to differentiate hearsay, calumny, and verifiable stories. There’s occasionally a gesture at that – “oh, these words were used to make the woman / man associated with the woman look bad” – but it’s usually after the story has been presented as legit. And sometimes the stories are just presented as fact: Cleopatra in the rug to sneak into Caesar’s room, for example. So in some instances, the worst stories about women’s roles are blithely repeated.
And then there’s the fact that this is presented as a history “of the ancient world.” Which, to me, suggests “of the world.” The occasional reference to China – with no context at all – does not make a global history. This is a history “of the Classical world” with very occasional reference to things in “the Near East” and about three sentences about China. Which would be fine if the book had made it obvious that’s what it was doing.
So. Yes. I am disappointed. As someone with knowledge of most of the general stuff discussed in the book, I could contextualise what was being presented and it did indeed give me info about women’s actions I hadn’t come across before. But I would not give this to someone with no prior knowledge.
As You Wake, Break the Shell
I read this courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley. It’s out in October (sorry).
A more complete review of this will appear in Locus eventually, but: it’s brilliant.
I read Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet when it first came out, I think, and I bounced off it hard. Why? I do not remember. Not a jot. Probably I was in the wrong frame of mind – at least, I can only assume so; after reading this I wonder if actually I was too much in a ‘big space adventures’ mode.
Chambers does some clever narrative things across this novel. Firstly, the chapter sequencing: it starts with Chapter 1… but then all of a sudden you’re in Chapter 764, and no you didn’t skip a lot of pages. So there’s two parallel timeframes. Which means one of the big character questions is resolved very quickly, which means that you can get on with looking at the other questions: how do the characters get from here to there? What changed?
It would be easy to read this mostly as an almost domestic novel, focused on two people and their experiences; there are even recipes! But the reality is that Chambers is doing some really cool political stuff here. The reality of the initial planet’s colonisation, the way the two societies structure themselves, how difference is viewed… yeh, there’s a lot going on.
It’s really good.
Object Lessons: Laboratory
I read this courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic. It’s out in September.
I have said this before and I say it again: I love the Object Lesson series. Sometimes the Object in question seems relatively simple – a skateboard! – but sometimes it’s a bit more abstract: like The Laboratory. (One of those words where you can hear an Aussie / Brit vs US accent difference.)
As is so often the case, York uses her own experience – of sort of working in a lab, and sort of not; being science-adjacent – to illuminate all sorts of interesting aspects of the lab, and along the way varying reactions to science as a discipline. She looks at labs in science fiction – in film, in particular, since that informs so much of what non-scientists think of as “a lab” (ask me how I feel about the lab in Fringe).
I enjoyed the expansive view of “the lab” that York brought in this book, and how passionate she clearly is about communicating the realities of scientific research to a broad audience – that it’s piecemeal, that it involves many, many contributors, that it’s usually safe! She has a good section on the development of scientific rigour, and laws around things like animal experimentation – and, of course, given it’s Now, touches on some of the issues around Covid and its genesis.
This is a really great intro to the idea of “the lab” for the non-scientist, but I suspect it might also be a nice thought-provoker for those who work in science to think about how the rest of the world views their work, and their world.
Bodies of Magic
I read this in ARC. It’s out in September. (And it’s worth waiting for.)
A proper review of this is forthcoming in Locus, but the TL;DR is I loved it. I’ve loved everything of Marske’s I’ve read so far, so that’s not a huge surprise – but this is quite different from her other books in some ways. Some similarities, though, too.
Set in secondary world, where some people are born with magical ability and that’s no real big deal. You get tested, you see whether you might have a gift. If you live in Sieuxerr, though, you might have the ability to be a healer – in which case you have no choice but to be a healer. And after five years of study you undertake five days of exams with four other students – not of your choosing – before you graduate. And then you have to go off and be a healer, either in whatever place paid for your training (because of course it costs), or at home if your family is rich enough to have paid upfront.
Sounds familiar, really, doesn’t it.
The book focuses on five students in those final days. All of the characters are beautifully developed. They all have their struggles, and their achievements.
Did I mention there’s a death? There’s a death. Finish your medical exams AND figure out whether the death is a murder or not! No drama! So there’s investigatory shenanigans; there’s falling in love, arguing with family, making your place in the world, defying expectations, etc etc. It’s a lot of fun. I did get about 4/5 through and have to go stare at a wall, For Reasons.
This is such a great book.
