TOP PICKS – March 2024
Welcome to this month’s Top Picks!
Every month, we’re going to share with you our favourite reads of the month. We’ve rounded up our contributors and asked them each to recommend just one favourite read of the month.
A big thank you to Nils for coming up with this feature, and our contributors for taking part!
Let’s find out what the team has read this month…
Beth: Morgan is my Name by Sophie Keetch
It’s going to be a struggle picking a top pick this month, as I’ve read my top three authors all in the same month together – Jasper Fforde, Anna Stephens, and Jen Williams!
After a 13 year wait, Fforde finally rewarded our patience with a sequel to his chromatic dystopia Shades of Grey, Red Side Story. I loved being back with Eddie and Jane as they avoided getting murdered at every turn. The revelations were worth the wait!
Stephens once more dragged my emotions through hell in The Dark Feather, the final instalment of her Songs of the Drowned trilogy. I’ve been following Stephens’ work since debut novel Godblind and it’s a joy seeing the progression of Stephens’ craft. (Review)
And then Williams treated us to a brand new supernatural thriller featuring ghosts, murderers and the Lake District in The Hungry Dark. It’s not out til next month, but I can’t wait for you all to be creeped out by this one. Williams does many things well but especially suspense.
Seeing as I can’t possibly choose between my three favourite authors, I’m going to go with a debut novel I read this month which absolutely deserves to be a Top Pick on its own right, and not just because I’m copping out (yes, I read a fair bit this month). Morgan is my Name is an Arthurian retelling by Sophie Keetch, taking the traditionally villainous character of Morgan le Fay, half-sister of King Arthur, and stripping away the male perspective to reveal what she might have been beneath. It’s beautiful and enchanting and I’ll waffle on more about it in my upcoming review, but for now Morgan can most certainly have my Top Pick spot.
Nils: The Secret Service of Tea and Treason by India Holton
This month I read an ARC of the upcoming The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, a time travel, historical fiction, comedy romance, which I thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated more after I’d finished it.
I then finally dived into The Memoirs of Lady Trent series and read A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan which ticked all the right boxes for me – a female scholarly character and the study of dragons, oh my! (Review)
Yet my favourite read goes to The Secret Service of Tea and Treason which is the last book in India Holton’s Dangerous Damsels trilogy. I just loved following two rival spies, all the lady pirate shenanigans with flying houses and I adored the wholesome ending where our main protagonists from each book come together.
Jonathan: Song Of The Huntress by Lucy Holland
A slow reading month for personal reasons, but I did get to read Lucy Holland’s wonderful Song Of The Huntress.
As a huge fan of her previous book Sistersong I was very much looking forward to it, and it did not disappoint – the novel is another masterpiece of modern fantasy, combining the brilliant character work, imaginatively rendered historical setting, and numinous magic I’ve come to expect from Holland.
Theo: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I’ve got a bit back on track with my reading – partly because I picked up a Dr Who graphic novel which was easy to blitz through. It referenced a Tom Baker story – the Pyramids of Mars that made an impression on me – mostly because of the vision of a poacher being crushed to death by some implausibly buxom robots dressed as Egyption mummies. Reading the backstory on wikipedia helped make sense of the novel, while also emphasising how fatal any association with the Doctor seemed to be for extras in the original series.
However, my actual pick for the month is between Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay and Manda Scott’s Any Human Power, which were both hugely entertaining while also giving my progressive political perspectives plenty of Yee-Ha moments.
Tchaikovsky gives us a first person protagonist in media res plunging towards the surface of an alien planet with an exotic biosphere. Organisms that refuse to be categorised as Flora or Fauna – one might even say they are genus-fluid – and which have a capacity for assimilation that makes the Borg look as isolationist as 19th century Japan. Arton Dadhev makes an entertaining narrator, sort of like Rincewind but with brains and morals, and the themes of connectivity and interdependence are surely more relevant today than ever.
Manda Scott’s sort of cli-fi novel is set in contemporary times, well a different version of 2023 to be exact with the protagonist Lan a ghostly presence haunting and striving to protect and guide her extended family and friends. I loved the mix of fantasy and myth in Lan’s interactions alongside a purely political thriller as the wide collective activists seek to sever the connection between wealth and power that corrupts contemporary democracy. I love seeing how a wide range of characters working together in a book that is more model/instruction manual than the dire warnings and “doomism” purveyed by early cli-fi. And I say it’s a “sort of cli-fi” novel because Scott recognises that the climate crisis is not simply about climate, it is the entanglement of vested interests, toxic inequality and human vulnerability to emotive messaging that means we need systemic change. However, it would be wrong to describe the book as purely political – it is a hugely entertaining read with compelling characters, elegant prose and a story where we really want to find out what happens (and indeed feel it might be happening to us now).
Tough one to pick a favourite, so I’m not going to – these two are my equal first choices for March. You can read my full review of Alien Clay here, and my full review of Any Human Power will go live nearer the books 6th June 2024 launch date.
Dorian: The Sea Watch by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My runner-up for March is John Scalzi’s Starter Villain, a popcorn thriller with a sci-fi twist about an everyman who inherits a Bond Villain’s “evil” empire, complete with volcanic fortress headquarters. It’s full of humor and wit, with some well-aimed political barbs as well as brilliant take on the talking pet companion. Also, some wonderfully profane dolphins.
But my favorite book for the month was Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Sea Watch, which is book 6 in his 10-book epic fantasy series Shadows of the Apt. Like the five books before it, this one is beautifully written (and equally well narrated, by Ben Allen) and absurdly imaginative. Unlike some of the previous books, this one is centered around political intrigue and a missing heir, rather than battlefield clashes and city sieges.
It’s too early to tell (since I’m only 60% way through), but this series is shaping up to be my second favorite all-time of the epic fantasy genre, behind only Lord of the Rings. Its world-building and characters are phenomenal, and it has the best take on fantasy races you’ll ever see. (No elves or dwarves, here – all the races, while technically human, are based on bugs. So, you have the industrious and tech-savvy Beetle-kinden, the mysterious and magical Moths, Spider-kinden with their political intrigues, the militaristic and hive-minded Ants, hostile and expansionist Wasps, and many, many more.) Can’t recommend this series enough, really.
Kat: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P Djèlí Clark
I’ve read a whole slew of ARCs this month but the real stand-out was P Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins which was a delightfully violent romp of a novella that had me chuckling all the way through – review to come in August when it releases!
The runner up for best ARC this month has to be Court of Wanderers, the second in Rin Chupeco’s Reaper duology that delivered exactly the same amount of tension, romance, and chaotically pleasing plot that the first novel did. Not a trace of second-book syndrome in sight!
I’ve also been plodding my way through Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett which hasn’t disappointed and has been a comforting and reliably enjoyable background book while dragging my way through some less enjoyable reads. I wholeheartedly love the golems and the ridiculousness that the Night Watch gets up to. Pratchett will always be a comforting presence in the background of my tbr and I’ll be very sad when I eventually run out of new Discworld books!
Cat: Eye of the Ouroboros by Megan Bontrager
This month feels like it’s been busy, but so many titles aren’t being released for a long while yet! So here’s my pick (coming very soon): Eye of the Ouroboros by Megan Bontrager. It starts like an odd Twin Peaks tale of a park ranger searching for her sister, who vanished years ago in the dark forest. It’s a tale of managing grief and loss, estrangement from family and small-town life… before quickly becoming something much much weirder.
What resonated with me was how painful-but-familiar human feelings were described so beautifully, before that realism flowed into what truly lives in those dark places of our experience. Why we tell tales of ‘beware the woods.’ And if you find a staircase that seems to lead nowhere, or random doors amongst the trees, do NOT explore them.
I’m so glad I discovered this book-door, and that I can safely recommend it to others!
What was your favourite read of the month? Share with us in the comments!