This book begins scrabbling for something that seems unremarkable. No one seems particularly kind or compelling; interesting, maybe, but little more than intriguing. I picked it up for a take on a speculative future historian of our modern day. It's so, so much more.

I consider myself someone who dislikes post-apocalyptic fiction. There's something I fear in the desperate anger of a world of scarcity and loss. Notes from the Burning Age is neither and both of those things, and I adored it. 

It feels hard to say much about what sits at the heart of this novel without unveiling the way it reaches its core. It's very unlikely this book is what you will think it is for the first fifty, or hundred pages. It blossoms into something brutal and endlessly special. Filled with pain, it carves out hope. It breathes meaning into the lost and love into despair without trivialising what is lost and gained.

This is the best book I've read this year. It's a hard read - not snappy, not fun, careening endlessly towards ever deeper horrors. It's unflinching but avoids gratuitousness. For me, I think its meaning will stick.