This Year's Reading

[ninebelow]

#53 Nova Swing by M John Harrison

An SF novel laid on top of a detective noir on top of a Western with dialogue from a gnomic gangster film. You get the feeling this is a conversation Harrison is having with himself and you can only hear half of it. "What little oblique, dirty light fell on the side of her face served to occlude rather than

Comments

[rosefox]

[rosefox]

I wonder whether there's some legal or other reason that CMZ hasn't been reprinted. Regardless, it's a crying shame.

[ninebelow]

None of her stuff is in print in the UK which is indeed a crying shame as I'd like to go out and read the rest of them.

[abigail_n]

You want to hear something very wrong? I got China Mountain Zhang as a freebie. The distributors of the Hebrew translation tossed it in as a gift-with-purchase when I bought another book (the second in Barry Hughart's fantasy series, if I'm not mistaken, which is good but, of the two, clearly not the book I should have been spending money on).

[talvalin]

I've yet to read China Mountain Zhang so am in no position to talk about relative worth, but Bridge Of Birds is by far the best of Hughart's three books.

[ninebelow]

CMZ is much better than Bridge of Birds.