TOP PICKS – April 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…
Nils: The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu
My three fantastic reads this month focused largely on fantasy tropes! First up was The Company of the Wolf by David Wragg which is the upcoming sequel to The Hunters. This second instalment explored the found family trope through a set of brilliantly developed characters and took a look at the nature of violence from all angles. Wragg also added in his trademark humour and wit and I had a great time with it.
My second read was the superb Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan which isn’t out until August but I had to dive into the ARC immediately. This book explores villain tropes and characteristics in such fascinating and deliciously dark ways making this altogether a rather charming and alarming read!
My top pick has to go to The Art of Prophecy by Wesley Chu because I fell utterly in love with a war arts grandmaster with the ability to command wind currents—Ling Taishi. This book also included so many of my favourite fantasy tropes such as prophecies, the chosen one, training school and quests, we are also treated to martial arts and unique worldbuilding. It was a joy to read from start to finish. The Art of Prophecy and its sequel are out now.
Beth: A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall
I’ve not had a great reading month for April, it’s felt quite “bitty”? I finished two books I’d started last month, neither speculative. I only managed to get half way through my book club read (a non-fiction about romance fraud (online scammers), Keanu Reeves is Not in Love with You, extremely funny and eye-opening), and Nils and I DNF’d a buddy read we’d really been looking forward to, but the writing style just really disappointed me and I couldn’t click with it. I have now started Le Fay by Sophie Keetch, the sequel to my Top Pick for last month Morgan is my Name, so I’m feeling a little better now after the slump brought on by DNF’ing.
The one book I read in its entirety this month was A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall, and I very much feel like it came to the rescue of my month. It’s an epistolary novel, made up of letters and journal entries, and it has quite a distinctive tone; both these elements took me a little while to get used to, but once I did, the story utterly swept me away. There’s a gentle, heart-warming romance between two anxious people (E. in particular has quite extreme anxiety, it’s an excellent examination of mental health), and it’s a beautiful celebration of friendships and familiar relationships.
Theo: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
I’ve had three good reads for which I will do fuller reviews next month.
I began with another Adrian Tchaikovsky ARC Service Model which is scheduled for release on the 4th June. With a book out in March and another in June, one has to admire not just Tchaikovsky’s work rate but also the quality of his output and the range of his protagonists. In March in Alien Clay we had the sardonic first person protagonist Dr Arton Daghev with some challenging ideas about alien-ness and connectivity with the world. In Service Model we have as a third person and somewhat unreliable protagonist the valet unit Charles. I’ve seen various forms of AI in fiction – particularly Martha Wells’ Murderbot and Anne Leckie’s Justice of Torrens – but Charles, with his desperation to serve in an appropriate manner, has a more of an aura of Red Dwarf’s Kryton about him. Ultimately, in another sharp sideswipe at contemporary issues, Tchaikovsky seems to suggest we have more to fear from those who programme AI, than AI itself.
My second speculative fiction read for April, is Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi which was elegantly entertaining in its desperately sincere and yet terribly unreliable narrator. I find it interesting that Clarke went back to an earlier work to try and break free of the writer’s block that encumbered her after the success of her debut Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Maybe there is hope for other abandoned trunk novels whose central premise still has legs (see also Terry Pratchett and The Carpet People). A friend mentioned that she’d come to Piranesi in the midst of the pandemic and found it particularly appropriate for that time. Certainly I can see the resonances with the idea of being trapped in a strange world that you don’t properly understand with only one other person – someone that you can’t entirely trust – for company. But it is a delightful, soulful and satisfying read that proves even the strangest of worlds doesn’t need a door-stopping tome to develop a rich full narrative.
And I finished off with Mark Lawrence’s The Book That Broke the World – the sequel to The Book that Wouldn’t Burn. Within Lawrence’s usual organic approach to plotting there are plenty of lines of luscious prose and inventive imagery. There are also some sharp observations of contemporary relevance around the nature of knowledge, how we use it and whether ultimately access to all knowledge via an infinite library (or the internet) is a good or a bad thing. In a restrained and Socratic approach, Lawrence’s story poses these questions rather than answering them. There is also an interesting connection with Piranesi, in that both books draw on C.S. Lewis’ idea of The Wood Between the Worlds, introduced in The Magician’s Nephew and reflected in Lawrence’s ‘The Exchange’ and Clarke’s ‘The House.
However, my top pick (yes I will settle on one this Month, Beth!) is Piranesi.
Kat: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
My reading swerved away from fantasy for a good chunk of this month but I think it says a lot about my reading habits that my best reads were the fantasy books I eventually returned to.
Sunbringer by Hannah Kaner and The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett were the big headliners this month: I was very worried that Sunbringer would fall foul of the sequels curse but it took the story of Kissen, Inara, and Skedi to new heights. The Tainted Cup was a pleasant surprise of a book and the biochemical, feudal Japan-esque fantasy setting had a good go at outshining the twisty Holmes-y mystery but one last twist got me in the end.
The two newbies on the scene were Yoke of Stars by R B Lemberg and Black Shield Maiden by Willow Smith & Jess Hendel. Yoke of Stars is a beautiful novella that tells a story within a story and covers heart-wrenching themes of language, gender, coercive relationships, and bodily autonomy. And Black Shield Maiden is a brilliant YA book with the gravitas of an adult one that tells the story of Yafeu – a black girl rescued from slavery only to become a thrall in a Viking settlement where she stands her ground and carves out a place for herself and fights for her freedom with the help of the Viking princess.
Overall, I think The Tainted Cup was my favourite read of the month!
Cat: Threads of Ash: South by S H Cooper
I’ve nominated this author in the past,, but they really have become an easy Must Read. It’s SH Cooper with her upcoming short novel Threads of Ash: South. The first in a series, it’s a post-apocalyptic journey across a fantasy land full of monsters. This may sound fine and standard, but from the first chapter I understood that this would be an emotional one. It reminded me of the Witcher series, but much stronger in its humanity – our heroine feels and cares, but makes mistakes because of those things. I felt myself welling up more than once for her. Because if you can’t have heart in the worst of times, are you even alive?
Oh, and the monsters were terrifyingly brilliant!
What was your favourite read of the month? Share with us in the comments!
