Science Fiction

A man in an ivory robe knocks on the door, compliments the baked ziti, and eats dinner with a family who cannot ask him to leave. He is not there for any of them. He is waiting for the neighbour to get home. That is the first chapter, and it tells you exactly what kind of book this is.

Twenty-three years after The Time Traveler's Wife, Niffenegger hands the disorder to Henry and Clare's daughter. Alba has two husbands, a safe house she has owned since 1947, and a stepsister made of code. The result is warm, unhurried and structurally unruly, and the machine turns out to be the most interesting person in it.

Jazz Bashara checks her bank balance every day like it might have grown on its own. She needs 416,922 slugs. Not four hundred thousand, not half a million. That precise figure. She will not tell anyone why, and the answer, when it finally arrives, is the best thing in the book.

James Islington takes a holiday from epic fantasy and comes back with a lean, funny, genuinely nasty cyberpunk thriller about a contract killer who has been engineered not to care. Fast, inventive, and over far too quickly.

A spoiler-free review of A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett, the third Ana and Din mystery. A dead gentry girl, two cattle clans on the edge of war, and a murder weapon made of fungus and song.