2010

The City & The City by China Miéville
reviewed by Rich Horton
Beszel and Ul Qoma are two cities that occupy the same geographical space. They are intricately interwoven, such that some areas are "total" -- all one city or the other -- but some are "crosshatched," so that one building might be in Beszel and its neighbor in Ul Qoma. The residents have been trained to "see" and "unsee" their surroundings. Tyador Borlú is an Inspector for Beszel's Extreme Crime Squad. His new case is the murder of a young woman who turns out to be an American graduate student in archaeology with an interest in the theory, generally regarded as crackpot, that there is a third, invisible, city occupying the same area as Beszel and Ul Qoma.

2009

Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
and
The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

2008

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay
reviewed by Alma A. Hromic
Reviewers are saying wonderful things about this book -- and they are right. His writing, as always, is luminous -- in fact, the prologue is a poem told in prose, a love letter to Provence and its light and the depth of its past, only lightly covered by its present and by what we like to think of as "civilization"; this is a part of the world that he clearly knows, and loves, and this comes through clearly in the book. His handling of young adult characters is deft, often funny, often poignant.

2007

Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe
reviewed by Matthew Hughes
In this episode, we reconnect with the centurion Lucius (or Latro, as he was known in the first two books, Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete), some years after he made it home from Greece after the Hellenes had fought off the last invasion by Persia. Lucius had served on the losing side, a mercenary in King Xerxes's army that was slaughtered by Spartan and Athenian hoplites at the Battle of Plataea. There he suffered a catastrophic head wound that left him with a great scar on his scalp and a brain that can only remember the last twelve hours.

2006

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
"A teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister. An aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction, is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute, a forest harbors soldiers apparently unaged since World War II, and rainstorms of fish (and worse) fall from the sky. There is a brutal murder, with the identity of both victim and perpetrator a riddle -- yet this, along with everything else, is eventually answered."

2005

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
reviewed by Margo MacDonald
Mr Norrell emerges out of decades of seclusion in his isolated library to prove that English magic has not completely been lost and that he is the sole remaining practical (rather than theoretical) magician. He sets about, in his own pedantic way, to restore English magic and make himself useful to the government in the wars against the French, and so on. It soon becomes evident, however, that he is not the only magician in England. There is another: Jonathan Strange. Norrell takes on Strange as his pupil but refuses, in his paranoid way, to teach him even half of what he knows. Nevertheless, Strange is obviously more naturally talented than Norrell.

2004

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton
reviewed by Sherwood Smith
The ritual of eating a dead dragon, Bon Agornin, is what launches the story. Bon's powerful and demanding son-in-law, the Illustrious Daverak, takes more than his share for his own family, despite the wishes of Bon and the claims of Bon's other children, the Blessed Penn, Avan, the brother who works in the city, and the two younger maiden sisters, Selendra and Haner. Avan decides the next day to institute a lawsuit against Daverak.

2003

Ombria in Shadow by Patricia A. McKillip
reviewed by Margo MacDonald
The plot leads you on a swift-moving journey through a maze of truth, loss, secrets, bravery, temptation, obsession, magic, and, ultimately, love. The king dies, his mistress is cast out, the prince is just a boy and at the mercy of an evil woman and sorceries of all kinds. Those who love him seek to save him, while those whose purposes are woven through with much greater ambition, care not who is destroyed as they move towards their goals.

The Facts of Life by Graham Joyce
reviewed by Gabe Mesa
The story follows the lives of Martha Vine and her seven daughters in the British town of Coventry in the years during and immediately following the Second World War. Telling the seven daughters and their husbands apart is somewhat difficult at first, but the author quickly manages to delineate their individual characters and circumstances. The youngest sister, Cassie, is a free spirit whose casual liaisons result in her bringing a small boy, Frank, into the world. Because he has no father and only a partly competent mother, Martha Vine's matriarchal decree is that Frank (like a sister before him) be handed over to other townspeople for an informal adoption.

The Facts Of Life by Graham Joyce
reviewed by Martin Lewis
Martha Vine is the matriarch of the Vine family, mother of seven daughters. Cassie is the youngest of these, "the result of a night of careless and rough passion after the celebrations over the election of the first ever Labour government of 1924." The story opens with Cassie waiting to give away her infant son to a stranger. Just as she is on the point of doing so, she has a vision of golden light streaming from the three spires of Coventry.

2002

The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin
reviewed by Victoria Strauss
This novel takes Earthsea's story forward. As it begins, Alder, a sorcerer of modest ability, comes seeking Ged, who is living with Tenar in contented retirement on the island of Gont. Alder has been sent by the Masters of Roke, because he has been dreaming strangely of the land of the dead (known as the dry land). Though Ged no longer has any power, he knows more about the dry land than any man living, for he entered it long ago to defeat the wizard Cob, who breached the barrier between death and life in his search for immortality.

2001

Declare by Tim Powers
reviewed by Nick Gevers
All the qualities that made his earlier eldritch swashbucklers so impressive are here in full measure: an intense and intimate sense of period or realization of milieu; taut plotting, with human development and destiny as consequential as the ingenuities of concept for which the author is so famous; and, looming above all, an awareness of history itself as a merciless turning of supernatural wheels, as a play of shadows cast by huge, heinous otherworldly conspiracies. And this time the conspiracy is that of the rebel angels, and the shadow cast is the Cold War.