Helloooo!!

Brain has been a bit scatty the past few months thanks to work which has also soaked up a lot of time mid-week (plus the joys of 2020 part deux) so I’ve been remiss in not giving you as many advance booktemptings as I’d used to

So let’s make amends

First up some books you may have missed this summer: -

A Universe of Wishes: We Need Diverse Books edited by Dhonielle Clayton - £8.99  paperback £4.68 Kindle eBook – Out now from Titan Books

From We Need Diverse Books, the organization behind Flying Lessons & Other Stories, comes a young adult fantasy short story collection featuring some of the best own-voices children's authors, including New York Times bestselling authors Libba Bray (The Diviners), V. E. Schwab (A Darker Shade of Magic), Natalie C. Parker (Seafire), and many more. Edited by Dhonielle Clayton (The Belles).

In the fourth collaboration with We Need Diverse Books, fifteen award-winning and celebrated diverse authors deliver stories about a princess without need of a prince, a monster long misunderstood, memories that vanish with a spell, and voices that refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice. This powerful and inclusive collection contains a universe of wishes for a braver and more beautiful world.

A cause close to my heart is showing that this genre has moved on to reflect the people who read and enjoy it. I hope to get to this in the next week or so. Oh and did I mention it has a tale from V E Schwab’s Shades of Magic series. Yes I tempt you…

A Strange and Brilliant Light by Eli Lee - £16.99 hardback £8.99 Kindle eBook – out now from Jo Fletcher Books

Lal, Janetta and Rose are living in a time of flux. Technological advance has brought huge financial rewards to those with power, but large swathes of the population are losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, or auts, as they're called. Unemployment is high, discontent is rife and rumours are swirling. Many feel robbed - not just of their livelihoods, but of their hopes for the future.

Lal is languishing in her role at a coffee shop and feeling overshadowed by her quietly brilliant sister, Janetta, whose Ph.D. is focused on making auts empathetic. Even Rose, Lal's best friend, has found a sense of purpose in charismatic up-and-coming politician Alek.

When vigilantes break in to the coffee shop and destroy their new coffee-making aut, it sets in motion a chain of events that will pull the three young women in very different directions.

Change is coming - change that will launch humankind into a new era. If Rose, Lal and Janetta can find a way to combine their burgeoning talents, they might just end up setting the course of history.

I picked this up as tales that examine how work changes in SF are a lot rarer. I heard some good things so expect me to report back soon

 

 

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix - £17.99 Hardback £6.99 Kindle eBook – Out Now from Titan

In horror movies, the final girl is the one who’s left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?

Lynnette Tarkington survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she's not alone. For more than a decade she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette's worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about these final girls is that they have each other now, and no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

I like Hendrix’s mix of horror and social commentary with a side of black humour thrown in. Autumn is perfect for horror and this is a calling me!

The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – The Back To Front Murder by Tim Major - £8.99 paperback £6.64 Kindle eBook – Out Now from Titan

May 1898. A new client arrives at Baker Street - Abigail Moone, a wealthy, independent writer of successful mystery stories under a male pseudonym. She presents an unusual problem. Abigail claims that she devised a man's death that was reported in that morning's newspaper: that is, she planned his murder as an event to be included in one of her mystery stories. Following real people and imagining how she might murder them and get away with it is how Abigail comes up with her plots, but this victim has actually died, apparently of the poison method she meticulously planned in her notebook. Someone is trying to frame Abigail for his death, but with the evidence stacking up against her, she turns to Holmes to prove her innocence.

Spoilers! I will have a review on this out Friday and it is a lot of fun with Watson finding himself with another writer of crime stories in the picture.

Then coming soon

Gigantic by Ashley Stokes – Out 2/8 - £9.99 paper £4.99 Kindle eBook – Published by Unsung Stories

“I wasn’t sure you would get this far, so thanks a million already. You opened the mystery bag… Inside the bag, along with this letter, is a dossier that describes the whole story.”

Kevin Stubbs is a Knower. He knows life hasn’t always treated him fairly. He knows he wants to be allowed access to his son again. But most of all, he knows that the London Borough of Sutton is being stalked by a nine-foot-tall, red-eyed, hairy relict hominid – the North Surrey Gigantopithecus.

Armed with a thermal imaging camera (aka the Heat Ray) and a Trifield 100XE electromagnetic field reader (aka the Tractor Beam), Kevin and his trusty comrades in the GIT (aka the Gigantopithecus Intelligence Team) set out to investigate a new sighting on the outskirts of Sutton. If real, it will finally prove to the world that the infamous Gartree-Hogg footage was genuine, and a British Bigfoot is living in suburban London: FACT. But what he discovers undermines everything he believes in – and forces Kevin to face up to his own failures, and the very real, very scary prospect that he might have got it all terribly wrong.

Spoilers! My review of this novella is out tomorrow and it is very very funny and smart.

 

The Art of Space Travel by Nina Allan – Out 7/9 - £8.99 paperback £6.64 Kindle eBook – published by Titan

A collection of short stories from the award-winning author of The Rift and The Dollmaker, Nina Allan. This compilation brings together rarely seen tales spanning the vast breadth of Allan's writing career for the first time. It also includes a brand-new introduction and one never-before-published story. Locus has described Nina as 'a subversive writer… playing with both the familiar protocols of genre and with the nature of the reading experience itself.' This is a stunning collection from one of the most astute and innovative voices writing today.

I’ve not read much Nina Allan but the stories I have tried have all been interesting and ones that play with time and memory always appeal to me. Hopefully will review next week.

My Heart Is A Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones – Out 7/9 - £8.99 paperback £6.64 Kindle eBook – published by Titan

Jade is one class away from graduating high-school, but that's one class she keeps failing local history. Dragged down by her past, her father and being an outsider, she's composing her epic essay series to save her high-school diploma.

Jade's topic? The unifying theory of slasher films. In her rapidly gentrifying rural lake town, Jade sees the pattern in recent events that only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror cinema could have prepared her for. And with the arrival of the Final Girl, Letha Mondragon, she's convinced an irreversible sequence of events has been set into motion.

As tourists start to go missing, and the tension grows between her community and the celebrity newcomers building their mansions the other side of the Indian Lake, Jade prepares for the killer to rise. She dives deep into the town's history, the tragic deaths than occurred at camp years ago, the missing tourists no one is even sure exist, and the murders starting to happen, searching for the answer.

As the small and peaceful town heads towards catastrophe, it all must come to a head on 4th July, when the town all gathers on the water, where luxury yachts compete with canoes and inflatables, and the final showdown between rich and poor, past and present, townsfolk and celebrities slasher and Final Girl.

This should make an interesting contrast to the Hendrix book on a similar subject and The Only Good Indians was a horror masterpiece last year. I’m very keen to see what Jones has in store for us next.

Right that should help you do some reading. I’ll be back in a week’s time…it is nice to be back