Live By The Blurb, Die By The Blurb
In theory, I'm going back to work next monday. Unfortunately, I haven't done enough reading during my time off. I reckon, though, that I can get through two books between now and then. The following six are the top of my to-read pile, and I'd like you to pick two. I reproduce the book blurbs below as a guide to any titles you may not recognise...
Millennium People by JG Ballard
As he searches for the truth behind the Heathrow bomb that killed his ex-wife, psychologist David Markham infiltrates a shadowy protest group based in the comfortable Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, it aims to rouse the docile middle classes and to free tem from the burdens of civic responsibility. Soon Markham is swept up in a campaign that spirals out of control - as the conrnerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital...
The Etched City by KJ Bishop
Fleeing the ghosts of their past, a healer and a killer escape from the ruined Copper Country to the city of Ashamoil. But, as they salvage new lives from the debris of the old, they will discover that the ghosts of the past are also the ghosts fo the future. In the Etched City art will infect life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles will bloom.
Transmission by Hari Kunzru
Leela Zahir, Bollywood actress and temperamental star, is being catapulted from the fringes of fame into a million inboxes. Arjun Mehta, computer geek, looks up from his screen to find that he does, after all, have a role to play in the world. Guy Swift, marketing executive with his own agency, a beautiful girlfriend and a handle on modern life, is losing his grip. The message that has landed in a million inboxes has the power to destroy dreams and to make them, to hijack lives and to set them free. In this age of instant worldwide communication, anything can happen and anything will...
Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators, extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and readers into strange new territory. The girl detective goes to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bankrobbers. A honeymooning couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear...
Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore by Ray Loriga
A salesman for 'the Company' searches hazily for his wife, grasping at memories just out of reach. When they ask about her, he tells them she's dead. People say she may be in Tokyo.
While evoking the bewildering visual universe of Blade Runner, Loriga, one of Spain's most successful authors, has produced a dizzying picaresque novel of drug-fuelled nights and wild sexual encounters that deals with themes as diverse as loss, chemical dependency and globalisation.
Secret Life by Jeff Vandermeer
In 2002, when Jeff Vandermeer's collection City of Saints and Madmen made nearly every 'year's best' sf/fantasy list, including those of Publisher's Weekly and Amazon.com, this merely confirmed what fans and critics alike had already known - that the future master of fantastical fiction had arrived. Now, with Secret Life, Vandermeer's newest short fiction collection, readers can return to the world of Ambergris, where the author has set five of the these stories. But Jeff Vandermeer is a man of many worlds, as reflected in his travels and in his fiction: 'Balzac's War', set in the same milieu as Veniss Underground, is a harrowing, powerful far-future novella [...] In thirteenth-century Cambodia, a lone artist is torn between his love of his craft and his unspoken love for a woman, in 'The Bone Carver's Tale'. [...] Secret Life represents the author's continuing effort to stretch the narrative boundaries of fiction while still entertaining the reader. Yet all of these stories are related thematically: transformation, and what it means to be human.
Poll
Millennium People by JG Ballard
As he searches for the truth behind the Heathrow bomb that killed his ex-wife, psychologist David Markham infiltrates a shadowy protest group based in the comfortable Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, it aims to rouse the docile middle classes and to free tem from the burdens of civic responsibility. Soon Markham is swept up in a campaign that spirals out of control - as the conrnerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital...
The Etched City by KJ Bishop
Fleeing the ghosts of their past, a healer and a killer escape from the ruined Copper Country to the city of Ashamoil. But, as they salvage new lives from the debris of the old, they will discover that the ghosts of the past are also the ghosts fo the future. In the Etched City art will infect life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles will bloom.
Transmission by Hari Kunzru
Leela Zahir, Bollywood actress and temperamental star, is being catapulted from the fringes of fame into a million inboxes. Arjun Mehta, computer geek, looks up from his screen to find that he does, after all, have a role to play in the world. Guy Swift, marketing executive with his own agency, a beautiful girlfriend and a handle on modern life, is losing his grip. The message that has landed in a million inboxes has the power to destroy dreams and to make them, to hijack lives and to set them free. In this age of instant worldwide communication, anything can happen and anything will...
Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators, extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and readers into strange new territory. The girl detective goes to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bankrobbers. A honeymooning couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear...
Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore by Ray Loriga
A salesman for 'the Company' searches hazily for his wife, grasping at memories just out of reach. When they ask about her, he tells them she's dead. People say she may be in Tokyo.
While evoking the bewildering visual universe of Blade Runner, Loriga, one of Spain's most successful authors, has produced a dizzying picaresque novel of drug-fuelled nights and wild sexual encounters that deals with themes as diverse as loss, chemical dependency and globalisation.
Secret Life by Jeff Vandermeer
In 2002, when Jeff Vandermeer's collection City of Saints and Madmen made nearly every 'year's best' sf/fantasy list, including those of Publisher's Weekly and Amazon.com, this merely confirmed what fans and critics alike had already known - that the future master of fantastical fiction had arrived. Now, with Secret Life, Vandermeer's newest short fiction collection, readers can return to the world of Ambergris, where the author has set five of the these stories. But Jeff Vandermeer is a man of many worlds, as reflected in his travels and in his fiction: 'Balzac's War', set in the same milieu as Veniss Underground, is a harrowing, powerful far-future novella [...] In thirteenth-century Cambodia, a lone artist is torn between his love of his craft and his unspoken love for a woman, in 'The Bone Carver's Tale'. [...] Secret Life represents the author's continuing effort to stretch the narrative boundaries of fiction while still entertaining the reader. Yet all of these stories are related thematically: transformation, and what it means to be human.
Poll