Paolo Bacigalupi’s Water Knife will cut into your life

Paolo Bacigalupi is a mystery to me. He is a writer that I don’t really know anything about. One thing I do know about him is that he wrote a book called The Windup Girl. I also know that I absolutely loved it. So when I saw The Water Knife it became an instant buy for me. The only question I had at the time was whether it would live up to my lofty expectations following The Windup Girl.

You Must Read The Passage Trilogy

The Passage series of books by Justin Cronin is the best trilogy in fiction today. There, I said it. Cronin’s post apocalyptic American vampire epic is one of the most staggering literary achievements I’ve encountered. The strength of the characters, the clarity of the prose and the immensity of the story from beginning to conclusion are incredible accomplishments. I finished The City of Mirrors, the third and final instalment last night, and I’m still thinking about it. It was a sobering, breathtaking and harrowing conclusion.

The story isn’t so much a window into the narrative of a certain place, at a certain time like most fiction; this series gives the sense of a continued presence, as we watch the course of lives and even civilisations play out on the pages. The scope of this series and the fullness of these events are something that few books manage to achieve. Cronin writes vividly, generously and with a clarity that makes building a rapport and emotional investment effortless. It makes you a part of it, involved as an observer of a living breathing world.

The problem with The Three Body Problem

This post is going to be about The Three Body Problem, a novel by Liu Cixin. If you haven’t read it and want to go into it free of spoilers, please don’t read any further.

The novel is incredibly celebrated; it won the Hugo award for best novel in 2015, and was nominated for a Nebula award in the previous year. It’s a great book, and it nearly beat me. I almost gave up on it, despite its many compelling qualities, and it isn’t anything you can fault the writer for. No, my grudge lies with a character in the prologue. Which, if anything, is a compliment.

Why should you read All the Birds in the Sky?

I’m coming late to the party on Charlie Jane Anders’ new novel All the Birds in the Sky. Things that are heavily acclaimed and lauded by critics can sometimes call on the cynic in me and I’ll dismiss it, but I’m glad I didn’t avoid this one for too long. The story to me is about two outcasts finding solace in one another. The rest is just window-dressing. This is all about Laurence and Patricia. It’s a twisty, weird love story.

This is going to be a strange book for a lot of people. It’s marketed as genre fiction and you could argue for its position as fantasy or science fiction but I would argue that this isn’t genre fiction at all. The core of the story is about the dynamic shared between Laurence and Patricia. Their relationship is the central catalyst that drives the plot.