TOP PICKS – May 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 Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan
This month was a bit mixed for me with a few disappointments. However I did have two highlights, the first being The Garden of Delights by Amal Singh which featured flowers that granted magic, a cursed Caretaker and a young girl with an impossible ability. This was beautifully written and wonderfully fantastical.
Yet My top pick goes to my second highlight, The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan, which is the second book in The Memoirs of Lady Trent series. This book had a little bit of everything from dragons to adventures, hostile environments to complex politics, but at the forefront is one woman’s mission to live out her dream. What’s not to love? This was truly amazing. You can read my review here:
Theo: Ninth Life by Stark Holborn
I’ve had a couple of fantasy reads this month. Having enjoyed Piranesi, I decided to dip into Susanna Clarke’s earlier and even more famous work Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I loved the historical verisimilitude with its insertion of magic into the Duke of Wellington’s peninsular campaigns. The period of the Napoleonic wars is one that has always interested me and the writing style – with its evocation of a near contemporary narrative voice – reminded me of Patrick O’Brian or Jane Austen’s writing set in the same period.
Ultimately though the ending was not quite happy enough for me, so – somewhat ironically – my top pick goes to Stark Holborn’s upcoming release Ninth Life a grim tale of interplanetary desperation, death and gritty struggles for survival. This is the third book in what one might assume is a trilogy that began with Ten Low and then Hell’s Eight. (Although one might note that other numbers are available). Structurally this was a fascinating tale delivered as an archive curated by an Accord historian Blake Idrisi tasked with piecing together the life of General Gabi Ortiz and her many close brushes with (dips into?) death. The archived evidence includes the testimony of an eye witness to the General’s last known journey – Havemercy Grey, and her record of the stories Ortiz told in the General’s own words. So this is not so much a central narrative with a framing story (a la Name of the Wind or Red Sister) as an onion narrative with three layered first person protagonists trying to make sense of the General’s turbulent life. Stark’s prose is as quicksilver as ever, the action brisk, the characters compelling and the settings both richly imagined and excitingly varied. I will put together a full review later, but this was an easy pic of the month.
Beth: Moonstone by Laura Purcell
This month was a super up-and-down month for me. I had two DNFs, and another book that I finished but was really disappointing. I read two non-SFF books; I’ve almost finished the Shardlake series, and I read Open Water for book club, which was absolutely sublime. Caleb Azumah Nelson has just won the Dylan Thomas Prize for another work, but his writing is beautiful so it’s no surprise.
Anyway, which leaves two books to discuss for Top Picks! I re-read Threadneedle ready to read the sequel Shadowstitch. I tried to listen to the audiobook, but I couldn’t get on with the narrator at all, so made time to read the physical, and I’m so glad I did – it’s a super twisty book and there were loads of important details I’d forgotten.
My Top Pick though goes to my other SFF read, Moonstone by Laura Purcell. This is her debut YA, and the start of the book did feel quite cliche, it really felt like Purcell was conscious of writing for a particular audience. However once she focused more on the story, the book really picked up and I really was swept away by this regency romance with werewolves!
Dorian: Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I feel like I ought to be embarrassed by how much of a Tchaikovsky fanboy I’m turning out to be, but my favourite book of the previous month was his standalone SF novel Cage of Souls. The idea is that the Earth is nearing the end of its life, and while humanity is wheezing out its last gasps in a paroxysm of all-too-familiar political squabbling, the planet itself is alive with evolutionary frenzy as it tries to find some sort of creature that can survive on its increasingly hostile surface. Like everything Tchaikovsky writes, this one is bursting with imagination and ideas and clever writing, and as a bonus features the Chekhoviest Chekhov’s Gun you’re ever likely to see.
Cat: In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran
It seems to have been a month of ups and downs for many of us! I’ve had a couple of books that I thought would be good turn out as DNFs (always sad to me), but my Best Pick was a total surprise. I hadn’t heard of Tobi Ogundiran before, but In the Shadow of the Fall sounded interesting… and I finished it in a couple of hours! Just a novella but so immersive, a tale based on African folklore that drew me in and surprised me several times as it turned in ways I didn’t expect at all. I’m eagerly awaiting the next part of the story and will be looking up the author’s other work, as I love finding new voices from underrepresented cultures – glad to sing the praises of this wonderful wee book!
Hil: Among the Living by Jordan Castillo Price
I’m intrigued by Laura Purcell’s Moonstone, but this month I’ve been mainlining the urban fantasy series Psycop, by Jordan Castillo Price. It’s a M/M paranormal mystery series, featuring a homicide detective in the Chicago police. Victor Bayne has an excellent clean-up rate because he’s a medium and can ask the victim relevant questions! I’m going to choose the first one, Among the Living, as my choice for the ninth. There is a series of very distinctive deaths and although there are witnesses of the victim with another person, no one agrees on what they look like. Curiously, and contrary to everything else in Victor’s experience, there are no spirits remaining to identify who did it. He rapidly realises that whatever it is has its sights on people close to his heart. I’ve maybe read the first 13 books in the series in the last couple of weeks. Hi, my name is Hil and I have a reading problem. In my defence they start short and get longer. Ok, that’s not much of a defence. Nonetheless, this is a good series to get into.
Kat: Slewfoot by Brom
While this month has been a fairly disappointing one overall for reading, I did manage to find three 5 star reads this month (a 300% increase on last month!) and the two fantasy titles of those three were The Sky On Fire by Jenn Lyons and Slewfoot by Brom. The Sky on Fire is a brilliantly fast-past heist novel full of dragon riders, queer polyamory, and fantastically rich world building. I loved every second of this standalone novel and it comes out on 9th July.
Slewfoot spent years on my tbr before I finally caved and bought it last month and reading it felt like consuming a real work of art. It’s a dark but hopeful story about power and ownership and it’s full of deliciously eerie and beautifully illustrated creatures all the way through. It could have easily fallen into the predictable twists and turns that other stories about witch trials tend to but it held itself proudly apart and I loved it all the more for it!
What was your favourite read of the month? Share with us in the comments!
