I was all set to take a summer vacation from blogging when I came across this gem by Andrew Knighton. Ashes of the Ancestors is a slim novella that manages to immerse the reader in a vaguely European medieval fantasy world in an original way and pose telling questions about power, friendship and love. We […]
We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed
We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed is the second part of the story she began a couple of years ago in The Annual Migration of Clouds. It’s another strong novella that continues the story of nineteen year-old Reid, surviving in a post-apocalyptic western Canada. The story picks up directly from where the last […]
In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran
Tobi Ogundiran, the award winning short fiction author, has produced his debut epic fantasy, the first part of which is the novella, In the Shadow of the Fall. It is a beautifully rendered story about a young acolyte of the orisha whose attempt to commune with the gods triggers a sequence of events that almost […]
Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
Brace yourself for a wild ride through cascading realities, where the dead and living intermingle in daily life, and exploding time scales from Sri Lanka’s present and recent past to the far, far future of an earth boiling under an expanded red sun. This is the world and universe of Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall. It offers […]
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I once read that most novel plots could be reduced to two great starting points: a stranger comes to town, and someone goes on a journey. In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s comic and thought-provoking Service Model, the one-time valet robot named Charles embarks on a journey to discover the source of a fatal error in his routines. […]
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
While reading Nghi Vo’s beautifully crafted and deeply imaginative The City in Glass, I kept wondering where the story was going, even what it was for. Don’t get me wrong, this short novel is completely enjoyable and brilliantly written, but I was missing something that was hard to pin down. On one level it is […]
Taking on My Fantasy TBR – Assassin’s Apprentice and The Book That Wouldn’t Burn
With ever less time for blogging due to various physical annoyances, I’m limited in what I can contribute to Wyrd & Wonder this time around and so decided to offer an overview of two books in my stretchable comfort zone. I may return to one or both of these for fuller discussion at some point, […]
Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi
Wole Talabi, in his brilliant story collection Convergence Problems, offers an intriguing idea about how stories can be told. It contrasts sharply with the method made famous by James Joyce in Dubliners where characters reach a climactic moment of epiphany in which they grasp some great truth about themselves. That approach has been done to […]
