Up for Review: Gone Girl

I just read this one. It was fucking awesome. I’m going to review it, of course, but don’t wait around for my essay-length opinion on the matter – if you like psychological thrillers, pre-order this NOW.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Crown Trade)

Marketing copy from NetGalley:

From New York Times bestselling author Gillian Flynn, a twisted novel of literary suspense, and her most ambitious to date.

On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick’s wife, Amy, has disappeared. Nick is weak, Nick is a liar, and maybe he’s not the very best of husbands–but is he a killer? Amy’s diary reveals turmoil over their marriage, strange sicknesses, and her deep wish to be a mother–but is she telling the whole story? As the evidence slowly mounts, and the cops’ investigation deepens, Nick is incriminated in horrible ways. Nick swears he didn’t murder his beautiful wife and goes on the offensive to clear his name…only to learn that something may have happened more disturbing than death.

The terrifying masterpiece of a marriage gone wrong, Gillian Flynn’s fast-paced, dark, and ingeniously plotted Gone Girl confirms her status as one of the hottest thriller novelists around.

Gone Girl will be released on 5 June 2012 by Crown Trade, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group

Review of The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente

Title: The Habitation of the Blessed
Author: Catherynne M. Valente
Series: A Dirge for Prester John #1
Published: 1 November 2010
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Genre: mythology, fantasy, metafiction
Source: own copy
Rating: 9/10

Can you compose a review out of quotes? I suppose not, because that wouldn’t be a review, but I wanted to. The Habitation of the Blessed is such a beautiful, beautifully written book that I kept writing down quotes. This book was just unbelievably lovely from the very first line:

“I am a very bad historian. But I am a very good miserable old man. I sit at the end of the world, close enough to see my shrivelled old legs hang over the bony ridge of it. I came so far for gold and light and a story the size of the sky. But I have managed to gather only a basket of ash and a kind of empty sorrow, that the world is not how I wished it to be.” (5)

I love the sorrow-tinged humour there – a terrible historian but an excellent miserable old man. I love the imagery – light, gold, and the vastness of the sky, contrasted with a basket of ash and disappointment. And I love the pathos in those last words, “that the world is not how I wished it to be”. The speaker is a monk named Brother Hiob of Luzerne, and his words speak of the death of his faith.

Hiob was on a mission to find Prester John, a legendary Christian priest and king who supposedly ruled over many rich and powerful lands in the East. Hiob began his quest with a sense of awe inspired by this myth of Prester John and the East:

“We hoped to find so much in the East, hoped to find a palace of amethyst, a fountain of umblemished water, a gate of ivory. Brushing the frost from our bread, we dreamed, as all monks had since the wonderful Letter appeared, of a king in the East called Prester John, who bore a golden cross on his breast. We whispered and gossiped about him like old women. We told each other that he was strong as a hundred men, that he drank from the Fountain of Youth, that his sceptre held as jewels the petrified eyes of St. Thomas.” (6)

This dream turns out to be both exaggerated and nowhere near as magnificent as the truth. Hiob travels to the East with a group of monks, but instead of finding a utopia and an immortal Christian king, they find a dusty village where a woman sadly tells them that John is gone. To give him the story he wants, she leads Hiob to a miraculous tree that grows books instead of fruit:

“In clusters and alone, books of all shapes hung among the pointed leaves, their covers obscenely bright and shining, swollen as peaches, gold and green and cerulean, their pages thick as though with juice, their silver ribbonmarks fluttering in the spiced wind.” (10)

The woman allows Hiob to pick three books to transcribe. One is John’s story, telling of his time in a land called Pentexore, the utopia that the monks seek. The second is written by John’s wife Hagia, telling her own story and thereby giving us an idea of life in Pentexore. The third is a collection of stories written by Imithal, the nanny of three royal children. Imithal’s tales gives us some of the history and mythology of the land.

Pentextore is the idealised land of plenty, but also the home of mythological creatures (gryphons, phoenixes), talking animals, and some creatures that are completely unheard of, like the panottii who have huge, silken ears like wings and feed on sound. The earth is so fecund that anything planted in it will grow into a tree – animals, parchment, books, even people. When John first stumbles into Pentexore after crossing a sea of stone, he finds a ‘war garden’ where canons have sprouted peppery cannonball fruit and fallen horses have grown into trees with horse-head fruits that snort and whinny. When creatures die, their bodies are planted so they live on as trees. Death is something that generally only happens by accident though, because Pentexore has the Fountain of Youth, and its inhabitants are thus immortal. Being an immortal in paradise is not quite as simple as one might think though, and the Pentexorans have careful social practices designed to preserve their way of life. The most important is a ritual known as Abir, which happens every few decades. It’s a kind of lottery in which each person is given a new life and a new partner. You can deviate from the course set out for you, but you cannot acknowledge your previous lives. It can be painful, but it is essential to avoid being stuck in one life for eternity and turning paradise into hell.

As amazed as he is by these stories, Hiob is also deeply disturbed by them because they contradict his beliefs and his idealistic idea of John. One of the first passages he reads tells of John’s funeral, confirming that the immortal king is dead. Contrary to the belief that John was some kind of perfect Christian, the books reveal that he committed many sins and uttered many blasphemous statements. Hiob cannot believe that his idolised priest king could have “sullied himself with a spouse”, let alone a blemmye – a headless creature who carries her face in her torso. Hiob almost wrote her out of the story because she “could not be suffered to exist” (40). John himself could not even bear to look at Hagia when he first met her, because her eyes are on her breasts and therefore she does not cover herself as he believes women should.

Of course John himself experiences many blows to his Christian beliefs:

“It is as though every story I ever heard had broken itself on the shores of this places like blind, brittle whaltes, and I walked among their shards, that could never be made whole again.” (82)

“either this is the devil’s country or it is God’s. They invert everything I know to be true. But whatever they say is proven real by my eyes, my ears, my hands” (225).

Having proof of these supposedly impossible things is such a contrast to the idea of Christian faith and John often finds himself at a loss. How do all these strange creatures fit into God’s plan? They are not simple animals, and in fact some of the ‘animals’ think and speak like humans. If anything, the Pentexorans are superior to humanity, having managed to live in peace and happiness for so long. God’s promise of eternal life is pointless in Pentextore, where the Fountain of Youth has made them all immortal, and death is easily remedied by planting the body so that the person is transformed into a sentient tree. When John tries to preach to the Pentexorans, they ask him questions he can’t answer and find his ideas ignorant and unconvincing.

Despite all the magnificent things that John finds, he sticks stubbornly to his beliefs. He is always looking for his God, and trying to fit everything into Christian doctrine with a theory that Pentexore is Eden. Hagia and the other Pentexorans are baffled and frustrated by this. “He has never loved anyone but God. What kind of man is that?” (162), one of them wonders in disgust as he sees John continually rejecting or denouncing the beauty of the world and its inhabitants. Writing after John’s death, Hagia laments, “In all your world of sins, was it never shameful to reject life and all its works?” (84).

The Pentexorans are not without religion – each race has its own god or gods – but they cannot understand John’s devotion to the cruel Christian God. They find John’s bible stories “ugly” (63) and “uncivilised”. Why, for example, didn’t God forgive Adam and Eve? “A parent who does not forgive a child’s first offence is a tyrant” (135) a gryphon tells John. And why is Eve (and therefore women in general) so despised? Knowing what it is like to live in paradise, Hagia has a different interpretation of The Fall:

“Your Eve was wise John. She knew Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness” (63).

Time is an important feature in the novel, and tinges all the beauty with sadness. The books that Hiob is transcribing are rotting like normal fruit, and as he progresses the pages are eaten by mould and turn to mush. In later parts of the novel, parts of the stories are cut off as the pages disintegrate, and eventually there’s nothing left. The story is left incomplete, and Hiob is devastated.

I was too. This is the kind of book you dream of reading. It’s written in a rich, mythical style that in itself has the power to transport you to the world it describes. Reading it is a sensual experience – it’s as if you’re sipping on fine wine or savouring a perfect dish, and even common words can seem like delicacies. The fact that you can’t have the whole story is terrible and yet it makes you appreciate the book more. That wouldn’t stop me from reading the sequel though – I want to taste that exquisite prose again. John and Hagia’s stories continue in The Folded World, with a new set of boos plucked from the book tree. I have the eARC of The Folded World, but I want a hardcopy anyway. I bought a hardcopy of The Habitation of the Blessed, and it’s definitely the kind of book that you’d want to read on paper. It’s a gorgeous book too, with deckle-edged pages. I strongly suggest you borrow or buy it – it’s a mythical must-read.

Buy The Habitation of the Blessed at The Book Depository

April Round-Up

April was a pretty productive reading and reviewing month. I managed to read 8 books, and I’d actually have finished more if it wasn’t for a little snag…

Anyway, first to be read this month was the very popular military sf novel Germline  by T.C. McCarthy, first in a series known as The Subterrene War. I’d received the sequel, Exogene, on NetGalley, so in order to review that I bought Germline. Not really my thing unfortunately. There was loads of action, but coupled with paper-thin characters and a lack of world-building it was a bit of a bore.

Westlake Soul by Rio Youers was a short, somewhat experimental novel narrated by a 23-year-old surfer named Westlake Soul who is in a vegetative state after a surfing accident. He no longer has any control over his body, but the brain ‘damage’ turned him into a genius with the ability to project his soul/mind beyond his body. With these powers, Westlake sees himself as a superhero, especially since he has a supervillain to battle – Dr Quietus, an incarnation of death. The novel had its flaws, but it could also be very touching, particularly when we see Westlake’s family struggling to deal with his condition. So I didn’t love it, but I enjoyed it, and I admired what the author was able to do with the story.

Faustus Resurrectus by Thomas Morrissey is an occult thriller based on the myth of Faustus – the man who sold his soul to the devil in return for earthly knowledge and power. A madman commits a series of murders in preparation for a ritual to resurrect Faustus, and thereby take revenge on those that wronged him, and claim the power he feels he should wield. Occult scholar Donovan Graham assists the NYPD in the serial killer case, but gets pulled in deeper than expected. There’s a lot of cool stuff about the occult and performing arcane rituals, and on the whole it’s a good read. The author is also planning to turn this into a series featuring Donovan Graham.

I had a great time reading local YA zombie novel Death of a Saint by Lily Herne, the second book in the Mall Rats series. I wasn’t all that keen on the first book, Deadlands, so this one was a wonderful surprise. The characters and writing were much stronger than in Deadlands, and that drew me in and had me devouring the book in a very short time. It also uses one of my favourite YA stories – the journey. The Mall Rats series will be published in the UK next year, and it’s always exciting to see local genre fiction getting an international audience.

My leisure read for April was Dissolution by C.J. Sansom, the first in  series of historical mystery novels featuring the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake. I read it with a friend who was pretty disappointed in it, finding it to be far too similar to The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, but totally inferior to it. I hadn’t read the Eco though, and I thought Dissolution was a good read and an entertaining history lesson.

Then on to something completely different – the seedy, violent urban fantasy Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig, featuring the jaded, foul-mouthed Miriam Black. When Miriam touches someone she can see exactly when and how they’re going to die. She knows it’s pointless to try and save anyone, but then she meets a trucker named Louis who’s going to die just because he tried to help her. For his sake, she’s going to try and stop fate. Good, brutal writing and an interesting story.

My next read was a much softer one – the steampunk-ish YA The Peculiars  by Maureen Doyle McQuerry. It’s a coming-of-age story laced with themes of prejudice and imperialism, but it’s spoiled by the main character Lena, who tends to be really stupid and ungrateful.

My last read was the lovely Lies, Knives and Girls in Red Dresses by Ron Koertge. It features modern takes on fairytales, written in short prose poems. They’re funny, disturbing, violent and insightful, full of themes and subtleties that I think would be better-appreciated by adults. Review to follow closer to the publication date (10 July 2012).

I’d intended to read two more books this month - The Croning, a horror novel by Laird Barron, and Strindberg’s Star, a Dan-Brown style mystery by Swedish journalist Jan Wallentin. Unfortunately, with The Croning, the publishers sent me the wrong eBook, and haven’t replied to any of my requests for the right one, so I might not be reviewing that at all. I’d made up a nice reading schedule that I’d managed to stick to, and not having the next book totally threw me off track. I could have just moved on to the next book, but for whatever reason I just didn’t feel like it, and I wasted a few days. Eventually I started Strindberg’s Star. My intention was to have finished it by now, but it’s boring. Less than glowing review to follow, once I manage to reach the end.

Anyway, I’m off for now. Happy Worker’s Day/May Day to everyone for tomorrow – I hope you can enjoy some time off!

Review of The Peculiars by Maureen Doyle McQuerry

Title: The Peculiars
Author: Maureen Doyle McQuerry
Published: 1 May 2012
Publisher: Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS Books
Genre: YA, adventure, steampunk, science fantasy
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 5/10

Since she was a child, Lena Mattacascar has been called Peculiar. She has unusually long hands and feet, and each of her fingers has an extra knuckle. “[S]igns of goblinism”, the doctor said, and her grandmother never hesitated to tell her what a no-good goblin criminal her father was (he left home when Lena was five). Lena tries to pass her strange appendages off as “birth defects” but she’s desperate to know the truth about her father and her own genetics.

On her 18^th birthday, Lena’s mother gives her two gifts left by her father – a small inheritance, and a letter. Motivated by her father’s words to her, Lena decides to use the money to travel to Scree, the supposed land of the Peculiars. She takes a train to the town of Knob Knoster, on the border of Scree, where she will need to buy supplies and find someone to guide her through the wilderness. One man who could help her is Tobias Beasley, an inventor and historian.

However, Beasley is rumoured to be an eccentric who might be involved in strange dealings with Peculiars. A young but determined federal marshal named Thomas Saltre asks Lena to spy on him and report anything incriminating. Lena agrees, and gets a job in Beasley’s library, working alongside Jimson Quigley, a young man she met on the train. It’s a pleasant, fulfilling life, but Lena finds some suspicious things in Beasley’s home, leading her to make decisions that put the people she cares about in danger.

The Peculiars is a steampunk-ish coming-of-age novel about how difference breeds prejudice. The people who believe in Peculiars see them as sub-human, morally decrepit freaks. Scree has a dubious reputation as “the place where they send criminals. They say the forests are filled with hideous things”. “No one’s there but misfits, political enemies, and aliens”, Lena is told. It’s no surprise then, that all Peculiars are lumped together with thieves, murderers and anyone considered socially undesirable. The government uses this for political gain. Scree is rich in mineral resources, and by stating that Peculiars are non-human and playing into people’s fears and about them, the government is then able to declare Scree terra nullius – “a ‘land belonging to no one’”. It makes it easy for them to justify their actions there – stealing the land from the indigenous people and exploiting them as slave labour. It’s essentially the story of European colonialism. Scree is a metaphor for Africa or Australia, and the Peculiars represent the indigenous people of those lands.

It’s quite a while before you really see any of this in action though. The majority of the novel is set in Knob Knoster where Lena is trying to prepare for her Scree journey. As a result many reviewers have complained about the slow pace of this book. The blurb gives the impression that this is an action-adventure novel set in Scree, but in fact Lena doesn’t even get there until the last quarter of the novel. You also don’t get to see nearly as many Peculiars as you would expect – their very existence is portrayed as something of a myth for a while, although it’s obvious to the reader that they’re real.

Luckily, this didn’t bother me. I don’t trust blurbs, and in general I’m fine with slow-moving plots. I would have liked the Peculiars to play a larger part, but at least they’re intertwined with the politics and social views of the time. What really, really bothered me though, was Lena. She’s such a weak, thoughtless girl that she essentially spoiled the novel for me.

Thomas Saltre asks Lena to spy on Mr Beasley for him. In exchange he promises to provide her with a guide to Scree and since he’ll be focusing on Beasley, he’ll take his attention off Lena’s father, Saltre’s other most wanted criminal. Plus, Lena will be helping her country. Lena agrees, although there’s absolutely no good reason for her to do so at this point. She doesn’t need Saltre’s guide if Beasley will help her (which he immediately agrees to do). Saltre didn’t promise to leave her father alone, just that he would ignore him for a bit. It doesn’t even occur to Lena that Saltre could later use her to lead him straight to her father. And since when does Lena care about her country? The government is opposed to Peculiars, and she’s clearly a Peculiar.

It gets worse once she meets Beasley. She’s welcomed into his home, given a tour of his magnificent library, and invited to lunch. Beasley instantly agrees to be her Scree guide, and to help her pay for the expedition he offers her a job in his library and a place to stay in his lovely home. She accepts, and basically begins an ideal life for a young woman in her society. She has a respectable job doing fulfilling work, she has the independence that comes with making your own money, she lives in a beautiful, stately home, all meals are cooked by the housekeeper, and there’s the potential for a bit of romance with her colleague Jimson. On top of that, Beasley has offered to help her achieve her goal of travelling into Scree and finding her father. Beasley has basically given Lena everything she could want at this point. And still the stupid bitch goes running to Saltre with any information she can find to betray Beasley.

Lena actually carries around a notebook and pen just in case she learns something incriminating, and at one point she endures physical pain and great anxiety to go creeping around Beasley’s house in the middle of the night and steal one of his books. Why? Partly because she has a crush on the handsome Saltre, and partly because Lena is easily duped by authority. Saltre is a marshal, and she believes everything he says. The government says Peculiars are bad, therefore they must be bad (even though that implies that Lena is bad too, since she’s obviously Peculiar). If Beasley is breaking the law he must be stopped, even if he is good and the law is designed to exploit people. Lena is such a twit; it takes quite a while for her to think outside the lines.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the reader had more of a chance to empathise with her, if we could see things the way she seems to see them. For example, if it looked like Saltre might actually have feelings for her, or if there was something potentially sinister about Mr Beasley. But no – while she’s blindly making the wrong decisions, it’s crystal clear to the reader what’s really going on. It’s so obvious that Saltre is a villainous government agent manipulating a vulnerable young woman to get what he wants. He’s going to turn on her the moment she ceases to be useful. It’s so obvious that Mr Beasley, on the other hand, is a good, kind man, and Lena is making a colossal mistake by betraying him. I know Lena is naive, but I just couldn’t take her side when people like Jimson and Beasley are so much more likeable.

Jimson is the one who tells Lena that the government is using the Peculiars for political gain. Although he refuses to believe Peculiars exist, you know he’s right about the government. Lena is critical of Jimson for being too rational and scientific, but he usually comes off as a much smarter person in contrast to Lena’s tendency to dismiss evidence in favour of rumour, assumption, and arguments from authority. Jimson and Lena find things that cause them to be suspicious of Beasley, but Jimson takes into account the fact they’ve only ever seen Beasley act with kindness, so he suspends his judgement until they have the whole story and is careful not to do anything rash. Lena on the other hand, runs headlong into doing something rash. This puts everyone in danger, but she has the audacity to criticise Jimson for doing nothing while she took action!

The crap thing is that if it weren’t for Lena being so damn stupid and ungrateful, the story would stand still. It’s her weakness and poor decisions that jumpstart the plot and finally move it out of Knob Knoster and into Scree. It’s a much better book from that point on, but it’s only the last quarter or so. Lena still does some moronic things, but she at least seems to have learned a little from her mistakes and is able to stand up for herself. There’s more danger and adventure in Scree, and of course we learn more about the Peculiars and the government’s operations. Sadly, it’s a case of too little too late. There’s potential for a decent sequel, but The Peculiars is average at best.

Buy a copy of The Peculiars from The Book Depository

Review of Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

Title: Blackbirds
Author: Chuck Wendig
Series: Miriam Black #1
Published: 24 April 2012 (USA & Canada); 3 May 2012 (worldwide)
Publisher: Angry Robot Books
Genre: urban fantasy
Source: review copy from the publisher
Rating: 7/10

Miriam Black can see when people are going to die. One touch, skin on skin, is all it takes to give her a vision of exactly when and how it’s going to happen. Several years of living with this curse have made her a caustic, jaded human being, and she’s only in her twenties. She has no job, but gets by looking for people who are going to die soon, stalking them, and taking their money when they kick the bucket. It’s enough for her to survive on, and she never gets close to anyone.

Then she hitches a ride with a truck driver named Louis. Unlike most of the people she encounters in her seedy lifestyle, he’s a nice, gentle guy. She likes him, she’s attracted to him. But then she shakes his hand and sees that he will be horribly murdered in a month’s time, a moment after seeing her and speaking her name.

If there’s one thing Miriam has learnt over the years it’s that she should never get involved in people’s deaths. “It is what it is”, is her refrain. “Fate gets what fate wants,” and when she tries to prevent someone’s death she just finds herself playing right into fate’s hands. The problem now is that Louis is going to die because he tried to help her. She tries in vain to get away from him, only to get entangled with a con artist named Ashley, who’s on the run from some extremely dangerous people. Ashley puts Miriam on a path that leads straight back to Louis and his impending doom. Miriam knows that you can’t stop fate, but for Louis’s sake, she’s going to try.

One of the characters in Blackbirds remarks that Miriam is “just not who I expected”. I feel exactly the same way. Not that I ever really expect to encounter a woman like Miriam. She’s a trashy, foul-mouthed, morbid woman. She’s weird. She loves to lie and she’s very good at it.  She loves to hear herself talk, and at times I couldn’t believe the mouth on this chick:

“Cut the ‘little girl’ shit, paleface. If I only have fifteen minutes, then I want whiskey. Your cheapest and shittiest. Think lighter fluid mixed with coyote piss. And you can put a shot glass down, but if you’re amenable to it, then I’d damn sure like to pour my own.”

 

“She hates the sun. Hates the blue sky. The birds and the bees can go blow each other in a dirty bathroom.”

But don’t get me wrong – I like Miriam and her dirty mouth. And I like the writing. Blackbirds is written in rapid, brutal prose that hits just as hard as the story it tells. If this were a movie, I’d want Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher to direct it.

There’s a lot of violence, and it’s not the slick martial arts type – it’s dirty, angry street violence, or the professional cruelty of career criminals. Miriam spends most of the novel with bruises on her face. In the first chapter a trucker gives a black eye, and that’s like a kiss compared to the beatings she endures later. She’s not some punching bag though – getting beat up doesn’t get her down and she knows how to protect herself, as she proves by kicking the shit out of a pair of hillbilly would-be rapists who attack her on the road. However, she’s not quite so lucky when she encounters Frankie and Harriet – a pair of hitmen looking for Ashley the con-artist. Frankie’s dangerous but otherwise pretty normal – for a hitman. Harriet on the other hand is one cruel, twisted bitch who enjoys causing pain the way other people enjoy fine wines or collecting antiques.

Actually, I kind of like Harriet too. There must be something wrong with me. Anyway, she isn’t even as evil as her boss… So yeah, I enjoyed Blackbirds. It’s a quick and dirty brush with the seedier side of urban fantasy. A good kind of nasty, especially if you get a little tired of squeaky clean heroes and heroines who do no wrong. And if you like it, Miriam will be back in Mockingbird, due out in September 2012.

 

Buy a copy of Blackbirds (Miriam Black #1) by Chuck Wendig.

Up for Review

I thought I’d try and make a regular Monday feature out of my Up for Review posts. I’m always getting new stuff, and it’s a fun and easy thing to share, so here goes I thought I’d start out with Strindberg’s Star, the last of the May publications that I’m planning to review.

 

Strindberg’s Star by Jan Wallentin (Viking Books)
Written by Swedish journalist Jan Wallentin, cross-genre thriller Strindberg’s Star was originally published in 2010 as Strindbergs Stjärn. It’s already become an international bestseller with rights sold in 20 countries. It’s been particularly popular in Sweden, Germany and France, and now Viking Books, a division of Penguin USA, is bringing out their edition.

Here’s the marketing copy from NetGalley:

STRINDBERG’S STAR opens on amateur cave diver Erik Hall exploring the deep recesses of a flooded mining shaft near his home in Sweden.  In a cavern seven hundred feet below sea level, he discovers a well-preserved corpse wearing an ancient ankh, the Egyptian symbol for eternal life.  It doesn’t take long for the press to appear on the scene and news of the strange find to spread.

 

When a German expert in religious symbols and Nazi history, Don Titelman, learns of the ankh he seeks out Erik only to find him dead-and immediately becomes the prime suspect in his murder.  Don and his lawyer, Eva Strom, are taken to the German Embassy in Sweden for questioning only to be inexplicably imprisoned in an old wine cellar.  Don and Eva manage to escape, seeking out refuge with Don’s sister, Hex-a mysterious recluse who lives in an abandoned railroad deep underground.  Soon a ruthless secret society is chasing Don and Eva across Europe, in search of the ankh and its secrets…and that’s only the beginning.  Nils Strindberg’s arctic expedition, Norse mythology, ancient mysteries, and horrific Nazi secrets are all woven into this seductive, sophisticated, and thrilling adventure story.  In the hands of expert translator Rachel Willson-Broyles, fans of history, fantasy, crime, suspense, and well-told fiction will all find a new favorite in Wallentin.

Viking Books’s edition of Strindberg’s Star is due 24 May 2012.

Lily Herne’s Mall Rats are going to the UK!

The original Deadlands cover

I heard some great news via the Twitterverse last night – the Mall Rats series by Lily Herne (the pseudonym for mother/daughter writing duo Sarah and Savannah Lotz) has been picked up by Corsair Books and will be published in the UK in 2013. Corsair editor Sarah Castleton bought UK and Commonwealth rights to Deadlands and Death of a Saint, both of which were initially published in South Africa by Penguin and Puffin. The news was announced on The Bookseller and The World SF Blog.

Mall Rats is a post-apocalyptic YA zombie series set a decade after the infection hit South Africa during the 2010 World Cup. It follows a group of kick-ass teen rebels who fight against both the zombies and the corrupt government that worships the undead in a twisted theology of resurrection. Deadlands is set in Cape Town, while Death of a Saint explores the rest of SA. The final book will be The Army of the Left. If you’re interested, I posted my review of Death of a Saint yesterday, and you can check out both my review of Deadlands (I didn’t love the first book, but don’t let that put you off) and the joint review I did with Lu.

Deadlands and Death of a Saint, rejacketed by Puffin Books

I’m really happy for Sarah and Savannah, and it’s always exciting to hear about local genre fiction getting an international audience. I’m curious as to how the UK’s YA readers will react to the series. A glossary of SA slang will probably be in order, but I think readers will find the SA setting a fun and interesting break from the norm. Plus there’s loads of action and some great characters. Oh, and zombies. Lots of zombies.