• The Foot on the Crown by Christopher Fowler (K)

• Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim
• Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being by A. W. Prihandita

•  I Do Not Remember My Life and It's Fine by Marco Giancotti
• Thames Water: Britain’s biggest utility just got captured by toxic private credit markets
• Telling Gaps and Domestic Tyranny: Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances by Lee O’Brien
• Screams in the Vault: Public Domain Horror in the Age of IP by Sterling Dudley

•  Gryphon @ The Junction

[Author's Note] I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world. [p. 366]

Reread for Lockdown bookclub: original review here. I liked it even more the second time around, though I found myself focussing more on the silences, absences and unspoken truths of Alex's childhood than on the natural history of dragons. Interestingly, it felt a lot more hopeful when I read it in 2022 than now, nearly three years later.

Discussed with book club. Reactions were mixed. We wanted more about knots, and whether they were actually magic.

• One was awarding many valuable contracts for vitally needed supplies and equipment to Conservative Party members with no obvious capability to fulfil them, without and transparency. That piece of corruption will be held against the Conservative Party for a very long time. He wasn't responsible for all of that: the entire Cabinet were involved. 
• The other was the decision to discharge many hospital patients into care homes for the elderly without testing them for COVID-19. That was his decision, and it resulted in the residents of those care homes being placed at very high risk of infection. And being elderly and frail enough to require care home residence, a great many of them died.       

I was no longer the outward and visible sign of Agamemnon’s power and Achilles’ humiliation. No, I’d become something altogether more sinister: I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it – in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight. [loc. 1596]

This is the story of Briseis, a princess of Lyrnessus who was captured when the Achaeans sacked the city. Her husband and brothers were slaughtered, and she was given to Achilles as a prize. Later, Agamemnon's prize Chryseis was returned to her father, a priest of Apollo: plague had broken out and Apollo, the god of plague, needed to be appeased. Agamemnon complained about the loss of his property: Briseis was taken from Achilles and given to Agamemnon to replace Chryseis, and Achilles then sulked in his tent and refused to fight.

Of course the story is quite different from Briseis' point of view.( Read more... )

The best thing about there being a murder in Fowey is that it means there is a murderer in Fowey. It could be anyone. [loc. 464]

The nameless narrator of Monsters is a twelve-year-old girl, orphaned in a boating accident ('Don’t worry – I’m not that sad about it') and living with her grandmother. Every summer she's packed off to an aunt and uncle who run a guest house in the quaint Cornish town of Fowey. There, she meets Miles, also twelve, and they bond over a murder ( Read more... )

Depending on your point of view, the transplantation of a human heart is a miracle, a violation, a leap of faith, an act of sacrilege. It’s a dream come true, a death postponed, a biomedical triumph, a day job. [loc. 199]

Keira, aged nine, is fatally injured in a traffic accident: her heart keeps beating but she is brain-dead. Max, also aged nine, has been in hospital for almost a year because his heart is failing. This is the story of how Keira (and, more actively, her family) saved Max( Read more... )

He had gone outside his class, and it served him right. [loc. 2758]

A classic of LGBT+ literature, read for a 'published posthumously' challenge -- I managed to find an affordable Kindle edition. Splendid prose, intriguingly detached/omniscient narration, and appalling social tension.( Read more... )

"Wasn't your novel originally going to be about a marriage agency in Ukraine?"
"Null and void... I was writing about a so-called invasion of bachelors to Ukraine, and then an actual invasion happened. Even in peacetime I felt queasy writing right into not one but two Ukrainian tropes, 'mail-order brides' and topless protesters. To continue now seems unforgiveable." [loc. 1457]

The first half of Endling is the story of Yeva, a malacologist ('despite its inclusion of mollusks without backbones') who's determined to save endangered snail species. It hasn't gone well: she is down to one living specimen, Lefty, whose shell coils the opposite way to others of his species. (Yeva, similarly, coils the other way: she's asexual, though she has a passionate friendship with a conservationist.) Lefty is an endling, the last of his variant. Perhaps Yeva is too.

To finance her mobile lab, Yeva works for Romeo Meets Yulia, an agency that does 'romance tours' for Western men. ( Read more... )

...turning your back on your family, I knew, wasn’t nearly as terrifying as turning your back on an entire nation. [loc. 3643]

Stella North is the only female contestant in Europe's first ever youth air race. It's 1937, and the European powers are desperately trying to avert war: 'No one who fought here twenty years ago and survived wanted to see their sons come of age and go straight out to fight another war'. Meanwhile, the young men who are Stella's (male) competitors seem to be obsessed with the war records of their instructors and chaperones. She's especially vexed by the French pilot, Tony Roberts, who strongly resembles the German pilot, Sebastian Rainer. Tony flew in Spain, during the Civil War: Sebastian has never heard of Guernica.