Boundary: The Other Horizons Trilogy – Book One by Mary Victoria Johnson ★★★★ A promising debut skilfully blending suspense and the supernatural Penny and her five friends live in an isolated Victorian Gothic mansion surrounded by a dense forest. All their material needs are met: new clothes and good food, as well as lessons and books from which they learn about the outside world. However, it is clear from the outset that there is a dark underpinning to this tale. For the fifteen years of their lives, Penny and the other children have been confined to the house and its grounds, forbidden to venture beyond the Boundary, an invisible, impenetrable, deadly entity that surrounds the estate. The only other people they have ever seen are...

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz ★★★★ “Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time.”• Sappho, fragment 147 “Who was Sappho?” this novel asks in its prologue. An ancient Greek lyric poet whose work survives only in fragments; most of her life the subject of fanciful speculation. We know she was from Lesbos; we know she was exiled to Sicily; we know that she had an island and was, as the prologue says, “garlanded with girls.” So much of her work has been lost, but Sappho herself survives in collective human memory as an extraordinary woman from history, and as an artist who blazed her own trail and became legend. For the women in this novel, and for the narrators who chronicle and comment upon the unfolding events like a Greek...

Ocean of Grass: The Petrellan Saga – Book One by Gordon A. Long ★★★★ A fascinating tale of a sea-faring society forced to adapt to living on land For generations the Sea People have lived in an ocean-dwelling theocracy, a hierarchical, ship-bound society ruled by Priest-Captains. Some live on Masterships of luxury and prestige; others on smaller Familyships of fishing, cargo and trade. However, with the rise of the cruel, tyrannical Priest-Admiral, a number of the Familyships have rebelled against the old order and been branded as heretics. After a sea battle in which they are overwhelmed by numbers, the rebels are forced ashore to become refugees. In order to survive, they salvage all they can of their old life, burn their Familyships,...

Monstrous Design (Battalion of the Dead Book 2) by Kat Dunn ★★★ Continuation of the adventure begun in Dangerous Remedy After the rescue of Olympe from the Bastille, the subsequent revelations about her extraordinary power to control electricity and wield it like magic, and the dangerous struggle between revolutionaries and the royalists to harness that power, the Bataillon des Morts (Battalion of the Dead) found themselves betrayed by one Camille trusted: her former fiancé, James. With Olympe abducted and taken to London, the Bataillon part ways: Camille and Al journey to London to rescue Olympe, while Ada and Guil stay behind to find out what the treacherous Duc de l’Aubespine – who wishes to use Olympe’s power to overthrow the...

Dangerous Remedy (Battalion of the Dead Book 1) by Kat Dunn ★★★ Fantasy adventure set amidst the chaos of the French Revolution The year is 1794. Following the executions of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, the French revolutionary government is under the control of Maximilien Robespierre and his Jacobin allies, who have established a grim dictatorship under the guise of furthering the revolutionary republican cause. A spate of arrests and executions by guillotine are filling the prisons in Paris and leaving the city awash in blood. A new religious belief, the Cult of the Supreme Being, is being supported and promulgated by Robespierre to replace Catholicism as the official religion of France. However, despite the promise of the...

Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey ★★★★★ Marvellous tale of lives lived many times over … or so it would seem “You can’t ever know someone completely. You’d have to be everything to them, and that’s impossible.” Thora Lišková and Santiago López encounter each other as university students in Cologne late at night outside a party, messing up their introductions so thoroughly that they stage a do-over, and eventually bond through a shared love of stargazing and by climbing the ruined clock tower together. Both long to travel to the stars and explore the universe; Santi who believes in fate and wants to see God, and Thora who has always wanted to be “elsewhere”. But Santi’s sudden tragic death puts paid to their relationship...