The Scotsman Abroad | Speculative Fiction 2012

You're probably sick and tired of hearing about Speculative Fiction 2012 already, but you know what? I'm not. I'll talk about this collection of formerly online criticism and insight till the cows come home.

Indeed I have done. It's given me something tangible to point people towards when explaining what I do on a daily basis; here, finally, is a physical thing that showcases why being a blogger is so meaningful to me. What I take from the community, and what I like to think I give to it.

Which is to say, by God, guys: I've been published! And look at the stunning company I seem to be keeping:

How do you write female characters with agency? What did J. R. R. Tolkien learn from Attila the Hun? What is it like to be a dragon? Is science fiction stuck in a rut? The Internet has the answers. Speculative Fiction 2012 collects over fifty articles from some of the top bloggers and authors in science fiction and fantasy, including over two dozen reviews. Contributors include Joe Abercrombie, Daniel Alexander, Kate Elliott, N. K. Jemisin, Aidan Moher, Abigail Nussbaum, Christopher Priest, Adam Roberts, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Sam Sykes and Lavie Tidhar.

That's the product description of the first edition of this awesome annual anthology on Amazon, and if you look closely, you'll see I've been hybridised with Daniel effing Abraham, who said of this obscenity yesterday: "If I have to be transporter-mushed with someone like a postmodern remake of The Fly, Niall will do just fine."

To which I can only add... likewise! But let's not with all the horrible vomiting.

Restraining myself from blogging about Speculative Fiction 2012 till today has been torture of the highest order, so I'm beside myself with excitement to finally get this thing out of my system.

In case you were wondering why I've waited, well, I'm a believer in timely buying advice rather than getting my reviewer's foot in first, and the collection only came out today. I can't recommend Speculative Fiction 2012 highly enough... not because I'm in it, or because it features many much better bloggers and authors that I, but because it serves in a very real sense to legitimise what we have here.

In closing, I'm going to hand it over to Jared and Justin of Pornokitsch and Staffer's Book Review respectively—the fine folks who took it upon themselves to produce this pièce de résistance:

Let’s be honest, no one takes us seriously. ‘Blogging’ is barely reviewing and certainly never ‘criticism’. We’re not paid, so we’re amateurs. We’re doing it for love, so we’re fans. Our opinions are merely our own, and not on behalf of a higher authority, like a newspaper or magazine. While our work sticks around, you’re only as good as your last post. And once something is off the front page, it might as well be gone forever... 

Speculative Fiction 2012 is meant to showcase the best of that passion. We’re not journalists, scholars or authors. Or, even if we are (we’re not), we’re contributing to the discussion because we love it. From our perspective, this kind of work deserves to be collected, immortalised, and substantiated. Literally.

If you'd like to buy a copy of the anthology, here's a link to the product page on Amazon.co.uk. If you're based in the USA, this is the link to click.

Whatever proceeds there are will go to Room to Read, so the more, the merrier.

One last thing before I bid you adieu: if you're interested in talking to some of the bloggers and authors behind the scenes of Speculative Fiction 2012, there's going to be an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit on May 2nd.

I don't really know what that means, but I'll try to figure it out before next Thursday. It's for a fantastic cause, after all. Literally.

Book Review | The Machine by James Smythe

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Beth lives alone on a desolate housing estate near the sea. She came here to rebuild her life following her husband’s return from the war. His memories haunted him but a machine promised salvation. It could record memories, preserving a life that existed before the nightmares.

Now the machines are gone. The government declared them too controversial, the side-effects too harmful. But within Beth’s flat is an ever-whirring black box. She knows that memories can be put back, that she can rebuild her husband piece by piece.

A Frankenstein tale for the 21st century, The Machine is a story of the indelibility of memory, the human cost of science and the horrors of love.

***

Accidents... happen. Would that they didn't, but they do, and that's the truth.

Every day, mistakes are made—by every one of us, I warrant. Consequences follow; and often, they're awful, if not absolutely abhorrent. But in time, however hard the hardship, we come to see that what will be will be. After the fact, what torments us is the memory of what was, and is no longer; or the thought of things we would do differently, if only we could go back in time, with the benefit of hindsight on our side.

Of course we can't. That's not how the world works. The past is set in stone, and wishing we could change it won't get us anywhere. Regret, from a logical perspective, is entirely ineffective. That said, there's no getting away from it, is there? And it hurts just the same, even if it's meaningless.

But imagine there was a machine... a machine that could take the pain away, by meddling with your memories. Would you use it? And if you were to, what would you lose?

These questions get to the essence of those that have been playing on Beth's mind at the beginning of James Smythe's devastating new novel:

"She's thought about it, sometimes: as she's tried to get to sleep, lying in bed, thinking about how easy it would be to wear a Crown, to press the buttons and to talk about Vic and herself, and their old life together. To talk her way through everything that she's lost. To press the PURGE button and feel it all drift away. Vic used to say that it felt like when you take painkillers for a wound. He said that they gave him heavy stuff after the IED went off and put its shrapnel in his shoulder and his neck, and once he'd popped them there was a sense that it had once hurt, but that it was like an echo of the pain was all that was left, or the memory of the pain. Like it's been rubbed hard and then left alone. That's what the Machine did." (p.17)

Or rather, that's what the Machine was supposed to do. In practice, it broke its impossible promises. It took people like Vic—men and women who were damaged or disturbed in some way, as Vic was when he came home from the war to his woebegone wife—and extracted from them their most terrible memories; those that certain specialists decided had caused whatever trauma.

Predictably, perhaps, it didn't work. Certainly not like the Technicolor promotions promised. Instead, the Machine left a great many of those souls who used it lost, "like coma patients." Now, there's such a number of them that they've been cruelly christened the vacant, because "there's nothing inside them. They might look the same, they might smell the same, but they're different. The person that they were is gone. [...] So what's left?" (p.65)

Only a signature of sorts:

"The Machine, filling in the gaps with things that didn't stick, stories of its own creation to cover up the cracks. And what makes her think that it will be so different this time? Because the stories are Vic? From his own mouth, 100 per cent pure and unfiltered, every part of his life spilled on to digital tape? She doubts herself. She doubts the Machine." (p.123)

But what else does Beth have left?

These doubts discomfit her, but for better or for worse—what do you think?—Beth has already made her decision. From the very outset of this nightmarish tale, she systematically puts into action the plan she's dreamed of since the day the Machine took her husband away: she's going to evict Vic from the care home he's been wasting away in, and simply rebuild him, memory by individual memory... using a treasure trove of precious audio recordings, untested equipment bought at an exorbitant cost from an anonymous seller, and advice from the internet.

Easy to see where she might have gone wrong, isn't it?

Precise and provocative, The Machine is a powerful parable about memory and regret which grips from the get-go and refuses to let you loose until after its horrendous ending. Like The Explorer before it, it's a spare story—so short and sharp that it cuts into one like a blade through butter—that you'll have a hard time forgetting.

The narrative, for instance, is simple, yet insidious. Smythe divides it into three parts, each of which unfolds from Beth's relentless perspective. Before the treatment, there is hope: we glimpse light at the end of the tunnel, albeit fleetingly. But the path to that point is long and dark; accordingly, things get a tad desperate amidst the middle third, which chronicles the hasty recreation of poor, vacant Vic via the machine. After the treatment, at the last, it all starts to come apart—just as these characters should be coming together—when the walls Beth has built, brick by deliberate brick, are exploded. A terrific trick.

To his credit, Smythe isn't content to mess around, ever. He pursues the dreadful descent that awaits at the end of this novel doggedly, barreling headlong towards unconscionable horror—horror that the reader feels from early on, though we do not know what shape or state it will take until it is upon us, teeth bared and bloody like a beast from the deep.

Yet inevitably, it is no such thing. The horror of The Machine, despite its title, is all too human. Beth has been playing god. Giving life (and taking what remains away) when she has no business interfering with a man's mind—as her only friend takes perverse pleasure reminding her. But we are set against this self-righteous specimen, even as the depths of Beth's complicity are made plain, because our entire experience arises from her perspective. We have found shelter inside her head, as she has herself in a sense. We feel, finally, the same as she: the same terror, the same guilt. Her dreams and her doubts alike are ours, and this gives The Machine great power.

It's a morality play, in a way: a Frankenstein story for the 21st century, as the publicity puts it. But truer words have rarely been printed on a press release. The Machine is a phenomenal novel from the first, and this impression only grows as it goes, gathering gradually in advance of a finale which leaves the reader reeling, as if from a boxer's blow.

I have long thought of Adam Roberts as Britain's most overlooked genre author, but between The Testimony, The Explorer and The Machine—three tremendous texts published in quick succession—James Smythe has almost supplanted said in my estimation. Harrowing as it is, his latest is simply unmissable.

***

The Machine
by James Smythe

UK Publication: April 2013, Blue Door

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Book Review | The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz by Dan Simmons

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Jack Vance's stories of the Dying Earth are among the most indelible creations of 20th century fantasy. Set on a far future Earth moving toward extinction under a slowly dying sun, these baroque tales of wonder have exerted a profound influence on generations of writers. One of those writers is Dan Simmons, who acknowledges that influence in spectacular fashion in The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz, an informed and loving act of literary homage.

The narrative begins at a critical moment in the Dying Earth's history, a moment when signs and portents indicate that the long anticipated death of the planet is finally at hand. Against this backdrop, Simmons's protagonist—Shrue the diabolist—learns of the death of Ulfant Banderoz, ancient magus and sole proprietor of the legendary Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore. Determined to possess its secrets, Shrue sets out in search of the fabled library, guided by the severed nose of the deceased magician. The narrative that follows tells the story of that quest, a quest whose outcome will affect the fate of the entire dying planet.

The result is a hugely engrossing novella filled with marvels, bizarre encounters, and an array of astonishing creatures—the pelgranes, daihaks, and assorted elementals of Jack Vance's boundless imagination. Written with wit, fidelity, and grace, and rooted in its author's obvious affection for his source material, The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz is something special, a collaborative gem in which the talents and sensibilities of two master storytellers come powerfully—and seamlessly—together.

***

Truly few milieus stand the test of time in the way the wonderful, whimsical world of the Dying Earth has. It can be condensed to a simple premise—a planet about to expire—but exemplary execution, imagination and iteration made these stories something so much more; something elegant and indelible; something very, very special.

The many and various tales about this breathtaking place and its uniquely appealing people—and creatures!—have enthralled generations, and inspired, in the erstwhile, innumerable imitations. Jack Vance basically remade the face of fantasy fiction in one fell swoop with these books, and as The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz shows, there's a proliferation of life left in the Dying Earth yet.

Then again, the world is still ending. And this time, those who use magic are being blamed... quite rightly, as it transpires:

"The people, both human and otherwise, reacted as people always have during such hard time in the immemorial history of the Dying Earth and the Earth of the Yellow Sun before it; they sought out scapegoats to hound and pound and kill. In this case, the heaviest opprobrium fell upon magicians, sorcerers, warlocks, the few witches still suffered to live by the smug male majority, and other practitioners of the thaumaturgical trade. Mobs attacked the magicians' manses and conclaves; the servants of sorcerers were torn limb from limb when they went into town to buy vegetables or wine; to utter a spell in public brought instant pursuit by peasants armed with torches, pitchforks, and charmless swords and pikes left over from old wars and earlier pogroms. 

"Such a downturn in popularity was nothing new for the weary world's makers of magic, all of whom had managed to exist for many normal human lifetimes and longer [...] but this time the prejudice did not quickly fade." (pp.9-10)

Shrue the diabolist is "more sanguine than most" (p.11) about this mad panic, but he still takes steps to escape the reach of the people. He sinks "his lovely manse of many rooms" (p.12) into the surface of the earth, along with almost all of his equipment, his precious possessions, and twelve of his thirteen servants. With only Old Blind Bommp and KidriK—a gargantuan daihak whose binding would be the life's work of a less long-lived entity than he—Shrue quietly retires to his polar cottage to wait out the witch-hunt... and perhaps, if the pogrom goes on long enough, the end of everything; a prospect he rather relishes.

Alas, his peaceful, pre-apocalypse retreat is interrupted when a harvested sparling heart brings news of an unexpected death:

"Other magicians had suspected Ulfänt Banderōz as being the oldest among them—truly the oldest magus on the Dying Earth. But for millennia stacked upon millennia, as long as any living wizard could remember and longer, Ulfänt Banderōz's only contribution to their field was his maintenance of the legendary Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and earlier. The tens of thousands of huge, ancient books and lesser collections of magical tapestries, deep-viewers, talking discs, and other ancient media constituted the single greatest gathering of magical lore left in the lesser world of the Dying Earth." (p.20)

Visitors, however, are rarely granted entry, and even then, "some sort of curse or spell on every item in the Ultimate Library" (p.20) inexplicably inhibits the understanding of anyone other than Ulfänt Banderōz and his select apprentices... several of whom Shrue will meet when he takes it upon himself to explore Banderōz's booby-trapped collection.

Booby traps aren't the extent of what our diabolist and his cadre of his companions will contend with, of course. After all, Shrue isn't the only only magician with an interest in the lore Banderōz kept under elaborate lock and key. Enter Faucelme and his pet elementals, including two Purples and one incredibly powerful Red. These alone would be more than a match for KidriK... and they are not alone. Not at all.

"And thus began what Shrue would later realize were—incredibly, almost incomprehensibly—the happiest three weeks of his life." (p.64) It is Shrue who voices this thought, but I can only imagine Dan Simmons is speaking for himself here, equally, because this story must have been a blast to write; at the very least, it's an absolute treat to read. I only wish it had lasted for three weeks.

Regrettably, The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz is only the length of a novella, and though Simmons summons wonders enough over its extraordinary course to justify a markedly more substantial narrative, we must recall that this is a tale—however great—taken from the pages of the terrific 2009 tribute anthology Songs of The Dying Earth.

I'm perfectly pleased that the mighty minds behind Subterranean Press have broken it out into this beautiful, exclusive edition, with occasional illustrations by the World Fantasy Award-winning artist Tom Kidd. Indeed, I'd have dearly appreciated many more of these, given how gorgeous the cover and several small pieces decorating the interior are. Without any other added value—annotations, for instance, or a bonus story—I'm afraid this deluxe repackaging of The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz feels more like a collector's item than a opportunity for more readers to find and promptly fall for this fantastic homage.

Yet it is homage of the highest order. Simmons' prose is moreish in much the same way as Vance's words were in the originating stories. His vivid vision of the Dying Earth is as affectionate as any other I can recall, striking precisely the right balance between the playful and the profound. The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz was by a large margin the most absorbing story in the landmark aforementioned anthology—despite it featuring fiction from literary luminaries like George R. R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Jeff VanderMeer and Tad Williams, alongside an assortment of other awesome authors—and it has lost none of its power in the years since Songs of the Dying Earth.

It's rather staggering that in excess of half a century since its creation, the Dying Earth is not just alive, but thriving. Yet it is. The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz is all the evidence there needs be of that remarkable fact.

If "the memory of Jack Vance's expansive, easy, powerful, dry, generous style, the cascades of indelible images leavened by the drollest of dialogue, all combined with the sure and certain lilt of language used to the limits of its imaginative powers" (p.116) sounds good to you, then The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz is sure to see you through.

And say you haven't read the classic Vance... now's your chance!

***

The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz
by Dan Simmons

US Publication: June 2013, Subterranean Press

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Coming Attractions | Give Me More Than This

You can probably tell that I quite liked The Crane Wife.

There's no sense in repeating myself so soon after the review I published on Monday, but I'll admit, additionally, to keeping a provisional list of the year's finest fiction, and Patrick Ness' gorgeous new novel is up there right alongside Life After Life and The Best of All Possible Worlds.

To wit, I was surprised and indeed quite delighted to hear via Publisher's Weekly that the author will have another book on shelves shortly:

From two-time Carnegie Medal winner Patrick Ness comes an enthralling and provocative new novel chronicling the life — or perhaps afterlife — of a teen trapped in a crumbling, abandoned world. 

A boy named Seth drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying, his bones breaking, his skull dashed upon the rocks. So how is he here? And where is this place? 

It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighbourhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust, and completely abandoned. What’s going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? 

Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, that this might not be the hell he fears it to be, that there might be more than just this.

We only have the North American cover art thus far, but More Than This will be published there and in the UK simultaneously in September.

Obviously, this is awesome. By Crom, bring it on!

Quoth the Scotsman | Max Barry on Bias

I've been reading Lexicon lately: a blistering new literary thrilling from the mind behind Jennifer Government. I'll absolutely review the wild ride it represents closer to its release date in the UK—it's due out in June from Mulholland Books—but in advance of that, I wanted to whet your appetites a mite.

The following excerpt—one of a number of incisive interstitials foregrounded by Max Barry—purports to be a forum post... but just so you know, it's not. At the time of this writing, at least, the link leads nowhere. Just so you know.

That said, this passage captures the voice of the typical forum-goer fantastically:

From: http://mediawatch.corporateoppression.com/community/tags/fox 

I just think it's missing the point to get upset about bias in Fox News or MSNBC or whoever. I see this all the time: I mention to someone that I watch Fox and it's like I just slaughtered a baby. They ask how I can watch that, it's just propaganda, etc etc. And they know this not because they're ever sat down and spent any time with it but because their favourite news channel, i.e. a Fox competitor, sometimes plays a clip from a Fox show and it makes Fox look really stupid. 

Well, you know what, Fox does that, too. If I only watched Fox, I'd think you must be really stupid, watching that other show I see clips from on Fox sometimes. 

But I don't just watch Fox, because the way to beat biased reporting isn't to find the least biased one and put all your trust in that. First of all, they're all biased, from the language they use and the framing down to the choice they make about which stories to report. The gap between the most biased news show and the least is pretty small, all things considered. 

But more importantly, relying on a single source of information means you can't critically evaluate it. It's like you're locked in a room and every day I come in and tell you what's happening outside. It's very easy for me to make you believe whatever I want. Even if I don't lie, I can just tell you the facts that support me and leave out the one's that don't. 

That's what's happening if you're getting all your news from one place. If you stop listening to someone the second you hear a word or a phrase you've been taught belongs to the enemy, like "environment" or "job creators," that's what you're doing. You might be an intelligent person, but once you let someone else filter the world for you, you have no way to critically analyse what you're hearing. At best, absolute best case scenario, if they blatantly contradict themselves, you can spot that. But if they take basic care to maintain an internal logical consistency, which they all do, you've got nothing. You've delegated the ability to make up your mind. (p.219)

I'm going to have to start reading another newspaper—online, obviously—than The Guardian, aren't I? :P

I'm only half kidding, actually...

Look out for my full review of Lexicon to go live in late May.

Book Review | The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

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The extraordinary happens every day...

One night, George Duncan—a decent man, a good man—is woken by a noise in his garden. Impossibly, a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by an arrow. Unexpectedly moved, George helps the bird, and from the moment he watches it fly off, his life is transformed.

The next day, a kind but enigmatic woman walks into George's shop. Suddenly a new world opens up for George, and one night she starts to tell him the most extraordinary story.

Wise, romantic, magical and funny, The Crane Wife is a hymn to the creative imagination and a celebration of the disruptive and redemptive power of love.

***

Like George Duncan's daughter Amanda, who once managed, amusingly, to do the entire Louvre in less than an hour, I am not typically the type to be "Moved By Art" (p.152), yet The Crane Wife truly touched me. Which is to say—sure—I laughed, and I cried... but before it was over, I also felt like I'd lived another life, and died a little inside.

That's how powerful Patrick Ness' new novel is. And it begins as brilliantly as it finishes, with a minor yet monumental moment: a pristine prologue wherein we glimpse something of ourselves, alongside something utterly other.

Keenly feeling his advancing years, George awakens in the wee hours one night, naked and needing to pee. Whilst attending to his business in the bathroom, however, he is startled by an unearthly sound: "a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt." (p.5) Curious, he follows this call to its point of origin, only to find that a crane has landed in his garden; a wounded one, with an arrow, of all things, shot through one of its wings.

Shocked and appalled, George—a good man through and through—attends as best he can to the bird's injured appendage... then, leaving a sense of unadulterated wonder in its wake, the crane flies away.

The next day, just as our amiable narrator is putting the finishing touches to a paper crane to commemorate, in his way, the dreamlike encounter from the previous evening, an enigmatic woman wearing "a hat that looked both ninety years out of date and a harbinger of the latest thing" (p.67) walks into the small print shop George operates. He falls head over heels for Kumiko before she's even introduced herself.

So begins an uncharacteristically passionate affair between gentle George and this ageless, graceful lady. And when Kumiko sees the plain paper crane he has made, she demands that they collaborate on matters of art as well as the heart.

"On its own, her art was beautiful, but she wouldn't stop insisting that it was static. The cuttings of the feathers woven together, assembled in eye-bending combinations to suggest not only a picture (the watermill, the dragon, the profile) but often the absences in those pictures, too, the shadows they left, black feathers woven with dark purple ones to make surprising representations of voids. Or sometimes, there was just empty space, with a single dash of down to emphasise its emptiness. The eye was constantly fooled by them, happening upon shape when blankness was expected. They tantalised, they tricked. 

"'But they do not breathe, George.'" (p.89)

Oh, but they do when Kumiko starts incorporating George's occasional cuttings into her feathered flights of fancy! In a sense, then, she completes him, and he her, thus—as their star rises in certain circles—they embark on a sequence of 32 plates telling, in totality, the tale of "a lady and a volcano who were both more and less than what they were called." (p.250)

These the author relates as very short yet deeply surreal and equally endearing stories, which work to punctuate the chapters we spend in George's calming company and those in which we're with his rather more fraught daughter.

"Although he was the hero of his version of the story, naturally, he was also a supporting player in this same story when told by someone else. [...] There were as many truths—overlapping, stewed together—as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than the story's life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew." (p.42)

Undeniably, The Crane Wife is a greater, truer tale because of Amanda's part in it. She offers an alternate angle on certain events, yes, but her perspective also serves to enlarge and enrich the overall narrative. Via Amanda, the reader comes to realise that Ness' novel is so much more than just a witty twist on a tale as old as time—which, given its clarity and quality, I warrant would have been enough.

But The Crane Wife is that, and then some. It functions, over and above, as a fable about family, friendship, memory, age and the ways in which we change, all of which subjects the authors approaches with disarming frankness, acute insight and such a wealth of warmth and compassion that each chapter made me feel like a more complete human being. Through character and narrative, Ness is able to evoke bona fide emotion—with such ease it has to be seen to be believed—such that from the fantastic first part through the beautiful denouement, The Crane Wife is a revelation for the reader.

It is a novel at its most transcendent, I would add, when the author engages in some way with the extraordinary... however it his devotion to more quotidian moments which makes these passages so commanding. Cannily, this is a contrast Ness makes much of over the course of The Crane Wife.

"If it wasn't a dream, it was one of those special corners of what's real, one of those moments, only a handful of which he could recall throughout his lifetime, where the world dwindled down to almost no one, where it seemed to pause just for him, so that he could, for a moment, be seized into life. Like when he lost his virginity to the girl with the eczema in his Honours English Class and it had been intensely brief, so briefly intense, that it felt like both of them had left normal existence for an unleashed physical instant. [...] Or not the birth of his daughter, which had been a panting, red tumult, but the first night after, when his exhausted wife had fallen asleep and it was just him and the little, little being and she opened her eyes at him, astonished to find him there, astonished to find herself there, and perhaps a little outraged, too, a state which, he was forced to admit, hadn't changed much for Amanda." (pp.11-12)

Patrick Ness' profile has been growing slowly but surely since he debuted with The Crash of Hennington almost a decade ago. Having written awesome genre novels for an all ages audience ever since—excepting a single short story collection—he has earned a whole legion of younger readers... to whom I fear The Crane Wife may not immediately appeal. But those who don't demand that the world end endlessly are likely to find the supernatural normalcy of Ness' acutely observed new book as affecting as any apocalypse.

With finely, frankly crafted characters and a slight yet satisfying narrative, as well as wit, warmth, and oh, such wonder, The Crane Wife is simply sublime: a story as strange, ultimately, as it is true.

***

The Crane Wife

by Patrick Ness

UK Publication: March 2013, Canongate

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