Jesse Bullington's latest! With each new book, Bullington's craft improves, honed by a formidably visceral imagination and what is clearly a passion for medieval European history not to mention an affinity for the lowly rogues, cheats and outsiders skulking in the shadows. Folly displays an impressively tight sense of plotting and place. The spooky and damp floodlands of Holland where terrible secrets linger amongst the reed and the mud and the drowned farms.

Jan, the con-man, recruits Jolanda, the swimmer, to recover an item from an underwater mansion. Sander, the burly thug perpetually on the brink of a violent psychotic breakdown, is muscle, if he can keep the schizophrenic paranoia at bay. This is a heist novel, of sorts, and as often occurs in heist novels, surviving the heist, no matter how badly it goes wrong, is a cakewalk when compared to surviving what comes afterwards. And, of course, the biggest danger usually comes from your fellow heisters. That's about as much as I'll say for the plot, as I wouldn't want to give too much away.

Interestingly, Bullington dials back considerably on the supernatural horrors, always front and centre in his previous two books. Such horrors and monstrosities as do appear are ambiguous, and though they provide a growing sense of unease and unreality, they are kept peripheral to the story itself, leaving the reader with much to ponder.

As usual, the characters are skillfully drawn, sympathetic even in their ugly depravity. Sander in particular is a creature of such violence, madness and appalling contradictions, you keep rooting for a redemption you know is impossible. Jan's smooth cruelty and Jolanda's growth from impoverished daughter of a dye-maker to an intelligent, albeit still ferocious young woman are equally strong and engaging.

Excellent.

Devi Morris is a space mercenary with an expensive power suit and a driving ambition, and to achieve that ambition she sign up with an outwardly unremarkable trading ship that nonetheless has reputation for getting into trouble that surviving a year on board could be enough experience to get her onto the elite Devastators. The crew is the usual bevy of misfits including two aliens and a sort-of psychic and a cook so handsome the hard-bitten Devi starts to drool all over her battle armour at the mere sight of him. Yes, it's sort of a mil-sf Fireflyesque space romance, girl in terrifying powersuit meets space cook and falls into the gravity well of his sheer awesomeness. At first fighting savage battles with alien space pirates barely registers as an inconvenience, but there are terrible secrets lurking in the nondescript spaceship and they start to take their toll and may threaten the universe and make carrying on a merc/cook relationship difficult-to-impossible.

All very entertaining and enjoyable. Unfamiliar as I am with the romance genre, I found those bits slightly more alien than the invisible space lobsters, but the whole thing was fun and intriguing.

I think there's a crucial point in this book, a subtle twist, and it's not the obvious one that comes a few chapters in, it's one that comes later, close to the end, when our narrator, Rosemary, discusses her childhood memories with her parents and discovers that her memories and those of her parents do not quite match. Things that have loomed large over her life suddenly take on a different aspect. We already know memory is mutable and subjective, in some ways the whole point of the book is Rosemary's version and how it shaped her life. Even knowing this, the scene leaves a quiet sense of shock in its wake.

Of course, the book is about an experiment. The experiment itself seems to do no real harm until it comes to a premature end, and in its ending it shatters a family, warps two young lives and damages two adult lives in ways that are only hinted at. A family is an experiment, of course, and damage is data. We're all primates and we barely understand each other let alone ourselves.

Fowler's writing is beautiful. The book is funny and sad and incredibly readable. It's beautifully constructed and wrestles delicately with big questions that affect us all, about being torn from our basic grouping, becoming alienated and ostracised, and the dangers of reintroduction.

I did not like this at all. So why the hell did I give it five stars? I'm an idiot. (Hey, you can change the star rating!) Well written, but weirdly alienating and not very interesting. A post 9-11 spy thriller that expects its audience to have faith in Intelligence is asking for a lot, and the awesomeness of the narrator was laid on a bit thick, and the first hundred pages is a lot of this happened and then this happened in my awesome history with a trip to a concentration camp and 9-11 itself there to reinforce his righteousness, followed by a hundred pages of villain history, the villain being an Islamic jihadist. Hard to argue with that as choice of villain in a modern thriller, but they're just, no matter how horrible and clever and dangerous they are, it's impossible to respect anyone who believes those horrible things as a human being so they become dehumanised even while filled with holy passion and reading them on the page is hard because they're so crushingly banal and apparently simple-minded in their evil no matter how devious their schemes. So, yeah didn't work for me at all.

Gaiman excels at short stories and this has the feel of one of them: tight, dark, focused and spare. Brilliantly written in that deceptively simple style of his, it feels like a personal evocation of childhood married to a dark and terrifying fairy story. Highly atmospheric, darkly witty and wittily dark, but with a real emotional honesty, this was a fast, easy, unputdownable read.

It's awesome. Better review to follow. Maybe.

A high concept in a book or a film is more likely to make me leery than excited, but there's no denying that when a talented writer gets hold of one and turns it upside down and inside out out it's a real thrill and a privilege to behold. Lauren Beukes has the high concept and the talent and thus we get Shining Girls, about a killer who stalks his victims through time and the girl who got away and devotes her life to hunting a man who does the impossible.

The exact mechanism whereby Harper Curtis departs from Chicago in 1931 to spread horror and grief across a century is left unexplained, but Beukes constructs an intricate ingenious tale around his depradations and his madness and the madness of time travel and the efforts of spiky and hard-edged Kirby Mazrachi to prove her killer has killed before and will kill again with evidence that is either contradictory or impossible. But Harper thinks she's dead, and when he discovers the truth, how will she hide from an impossible killer?

Excellent thriller, skillfully constructed, thoroughly researched filled with distinctive voices and mounting suspense.

When people talk about the great science fiction novels of human environmental destruction, they often talk about John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up. I wonder if one day the Southern Reach Trilogy will be talked about the same way? It's much more elliptical in its approach, but the three books are drenched in landscape and environment, in the atmospheric conditions of the natural world. All the more to accentuate the unnatural ecology of Area X, the eerie strangeness it exerts om all the characters and all the readers, but Area X is not just an invasive environment, it is a cleansing one, a transformative one. The inability to grasp the secrets of Area X matches the inability to act as custodians for our own world, even that failure is as destructive as anything Area X can do. Only Ghost Bird can operate without secret strategies or hidden agendas or fixed objectives. Without those the others - Control, Grace, the Director - are lost, struggling to grasp something that cannot be comprehended. Obsessed with conquering something that cannot be conquered, spying on something that can spy back, taking samples of things that takes samples of its own, obsessing over something that that barely notices them at all, instead of living with it. In the world that reads the Southern Reach trilogy from the outside, we are Area X.

Superb space opera about Breq, the last remaining fragment of an AI that once controlled a massive troop transport and thousands of ancillary bodies on behalf of an ever-expanding, ruthless civilising empire ruled by a single individual with thousands of bodies. Within reach of an object she has been searching for for nineteen years, she stumbles on a familiar person dying in the snow and, against her better judgement, rescues them for reasons obscure even to herself.

Leckie does any number of clever and interesting things in this volume, not the least of which is that the narrative is effectively a translation from a language and a society that does not acknowledge gender, so, because a neutral term would be the objectifying 'it,' the default pronoun for any individual is feminine, unless there is a specific reason for noticing gender or she is addressing individuals from societies a bit more prickly about the subject. It's a clever conceit, and eliminates gender inequality from a society with plenty of other social inequalities to contend with.

Ancillary Justice reminded me quite strongly of the work of both CJ Cherry, though not, perhaps as intensely psychological and claustrophobic, and Iain M Banks, though a little more restrained in its baroque expansiveness. Excellent.

Control is not his title, Control is a nickname given to him by his grandfather in a moment of mockery or affection, he's not sure which, but when he takes command of the Southern Reach facility he tells his subordinates to address him by it, and it becomes a name and a title and an ironic signifier. In the first Southern Reach volume all the members of the expedition were referred to only by their professional title. So this seems significant. Control is taking charge of a facility in mired in disastrous failure and ramshackle decline. Established to examine the sudden appearance of Area X thirty years before, it has gained a lot of data and lost a lot of lives and accumulated many mysteries but answered none, and now the previous Director has vanished having placed herself incognito on the most recent expedition and Control is there to take control. Or is he on an expedition into the heart of a strange, corrupted, decaying institutional landscape that will transform him or destroy him?

This is a kind of spy novel, about a technocratic intelligence agency spying on something incomprehensible and alien, something that spies back with its own assets and agents. Control must spy on both as he is opposed and undermined by his deputy director and finds an array of vague, eccentric scientists burned out by years of futile study. But this is a strange, haunted place, with walls behind doors covered in writing and strange things in locked drawers and mountains of intelligence but no clear answers.

Superbly written, spooky and strange with a sense of impending catastrophe and reality out of joint, this isn't as incisive and lean as Annihilation, but it sets the scene for the third and final volume which I can't wait to get my hands on.