Due to an unintended quirk of timing, I read Or What You Will immediately after Sofia Samatar’s magnificent, book-obsessed fantasy A Stranger in Olondria, so perhaps I was primed for a book about books. Or a fantasy novel about novelists forced to live in an all-too-flawed reality, or a meditation on mortality or a meta-literary escape to a near-mythical elsewhere. The fact that Jo Walton uses an reference to Samatar’s masterpiece as an emotional lever only heightens the connection between the two works. But this is not a review of Olondria. And although there is a concrete relationship between the two books, Walton’s story of an imaginary friend concerned for the incipient demise of his progenitor, bestselling author Sylvia Harrison (also referred to as the owner of his “bone cave,” in a somewhat distressing allusion to David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks), and seeking a route to mutual immortality deserves its own evaluation.

Or What You Will, like the cuisine at the Teatro del Sale in Firenze (Walton steadfastly refuses to call the city “Florence,” citing a preference for its Italian name), begs to be devoured slowly, in courses that may be individually savored and committed to memory. Walton’s prose is kin to chef Fabio Picchi’s carrots, or maybe the porcini mushroom soup: excellence wrought from the most prosaic of elements. It even includes something like Maria Cassi’s political comedy: There are anecdotes about the abstract nature of Victorian women’s legs, Canadian threats and biblical inerrancy. A rather lengthy paragraph on the Canadian emigration system is especially, ah . . . poignant. But for those (like me) who have only experienced Firenze in books, this is likely not the most effective route to explain this book. Let me try again.

Walton’s nameless, chameleonic, probably mostly imaginary narrator says he (and he is, by his own admission, an indisputably and irrevocably male aspect of fantasy novelist Sylvia’s mind) “will ask you to do nothing but read, and remember, and care.” He then spends the full length of Or What You Will weaving the brutal reality of Harrison’s long life with a melange of Renaissance apocrypha, Shakespearean comedy and Greek mythology. Throughout, he dodges between narrating the negotiations of the creative process, narrating the creation itself and playing his part in Sylvia’s latest book, all the while slowly unfolding his plot to save Sylvia’s life (and his own). Walton’s snark keeps any potential mawkishness at bay, and the result is a thoroughly memorable story about magic, meddling gods, learning to love properly and all the ways the worlds we create can save us in the ones we’re born into.

It’s a worthwhile reminder that creativity has value and that the proper standard of value is rarely monetary. Or What You Will is the literal manifestation of escapism, but it also may be among escapism’s most effective champions. Walton’s Firenze is an island of charming dysfunction in a world whose dysfunction more often frightens, and its fictional analogue, Thalia, is a theatrical idyll. Walton’s narrator is equal parts Melpomene and the archangel Michael, though he denies the latter. It is fantastical, but tangible all the same, less escapist than transporting, and suffused with joy and the tacit hope that maybe, just maybe, the salvation Sylvia finds in crafting her books might be attainable for the reader as well.

A mysterious illness grips a country. The public health department scrambles to respond and enforce mandatory quarantines. It’s a story that could have been ripped from headlines about the coronavirus. But that’s where the similarities with The Down Days end—at least we should hope so, or else we’re in for a wild ride.

The Down Days is set in Sick City, a coastal African city afflicted with a deadly laughter epidemic that has turned society upside down. People have reorganized their daily lives around not getting sick and making a quick buck however they can. Although the Virus Patrol and mandatory health checks give the appearance of a government in charge, residents are increasingly suspicious. Rumors abound that the citizenry is being doped with hallucinogens, and lately, rumors carry as much weight as the truth. After all, why put your faith in science if it can’t explain—or cure—this disease?

At the center of the novel is Faith, a “dead collector” who is asked by a teen girl to find her missing baby brother. But in the twisty plot of The Down Days, the fates of a dozen characters are woven together, including some who turn out to be ghosts. The line between the living world and the afterlife has blurred, and Sick City must contend with the goings-on of the spiritual realm along with everyday existence. It’s complicated, and the reader doesn’t know any better than the characters about what’s real, what’s a hallucination, who is a ghost or who is a charlatan. Ultimately, the novel asks you to imagine an alternate reality that constantly changes shape. 

Readers who enjoy meaty speculative fiction like The Power by Naomi Alderman will find much to chew on in The Down Days, which poses extremely timely questions about faith, authority, hope and conspiracy theories.

In the thought experiment of Little Eyes, Samanta Schweblin’s latest novel, kentukis are the latest craze. They’re motorized, furry pets, like anonymous webcams on wheels.

An explanation of how kentukis work emerges slowly, mysteriously, encounter by encounter. If you purchase a kentuki, you become its “keeper.” Someone else will purchase the rights to be the “dweller,” operating the toy and observing the keeper’s environment through the kentuki’s lens. Kentukis can be one of a handful of endearing animals, from dragons to moles. The people behind them, too, are a host of believable characters, ranging from preteen boys and teenage girls to retired people. But the kentukis’ too-good-to-be-true cuteness, coupled with the ordinary lives of the people who interact with the toys, foretells horrifying consequences.

Drawn in quotidian elegance, the novel is a string of nonstop, colorful vignettes that follow a handful of international kentuki connections: Peru-Germany, Italy-Norway, Croatia-Brazil, Sierra Leone-Hong Kong, among others. The randomness of the assorted connections breeds unpredictability. Kentukis can move on their own, but only so far, and not on rough terrain. They make noise, not speech. Many connections create ways to communicate, but some communication becomes unwanted, and some develops into co-dependence. Some keepers grow fearful or wary of their kentukis, while some dwellers are set off by their keepers’ strange behavior. The links spread across the globe like a sticky web.

Kentukis raise real-world questions about privacy and increasingly invasive, animated technology. Like Furbies or clowns, kentukis are both adorable and horrible. They’re reminders of basic human needs and vulnerabilities. They’re objects of obsession and companionship, and yet they can also be too close for comfort.

If Schweblin’s sci-fi thriller Fever Dream made sleep difficult, Little Eyes raises the unease quotient. The book seems to watch viewers creepily as it unfolds. 

Is it too early to declare Megan Angelo’s debut one of the best novels of 2020? Maybe. Even so, it’s probably one of the funniest and most hopeful dystopian stories you’ll come across this year. Set in 2015 Manhattan and in a fictional community in 2051 California, Followers tells the story of three women who are all social media influencers and reality TV megastars of their time.

When Orla, a wannabe author who blogs about celebrity gossip, ends up with a roommate named Floss, a shameless fame chaser, they concoct a scheme to use the public’s collective obsession with famous people to their advantage. This is in 2015, when living without social media and smartphones is far more daunting for these young women than the seemingly unlikely concern of surviving without access to clean water.

But then comes the spill. Bringing back long-forgotten memories of Y2K hysteria, Angelo presents a future in which Apple and Instagram no longer exist. The internet as we know it is gone, but this advanced civilization nevertheless functions with self-driving cars, robots, networks and devices. Society is still obsessed with celebrity, and Floss’ daughter, Marlow, is its new star. Living in the government-created community of Constellation, where everyone is filmed 24/7 for the rest of the country’s viewing pleasure (and as a corporate marketing tool), Marlow begins to realize that maybe she has a choice—one that connects her back to Orla in the most surprising way.

Even if you aren’t a fan of science fiction or reality TV, Followers delivers a shrewd look at human relationships, habits and obsessions. Of all the doomsday scenarios out there, perhaps it won’t be too bad if this one comes true after all.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Megan Angelo shares her vision of the future and explains why landlines should make a comeback.

The best alternate histories seem real, not just because they’re able to both replicate and twist historical details with precision and care, but also because they’re able to capture an emotional landscape. First Cosmic Velocity, the debut novel from Zach Powers, is full of attention to physical, geographic and historic detail, but what makes it a truly gripping work of imagination is its ability to create an emotional reality for its lead character amid an ambitious, delightfully strange look at a different version of the Soviet space program.

It’s 1964, and the space race is in full swing. The Soviet launch program in Star City continues its progress under the watchful eye of its Chief Designer, and to all outward appearances, everything seems to be a success. Within the walls of Star City, though, a different story is unfolding. The cosmonaut program has only partially succeeded. The astronauts go up, but they never come back down. Instead, the Chief Designer and his team have relied on twins to create an elaborate ruse, as the surviving twin carries the burden of continuing the life of their deceased sibling after a “successful” space mission. First Cosmic Velocity follows the last of these twins, Leonid, as he embarks on a publicity tour even as the space program and its closely guarded secrets are at a crossroads.

Perhaps the greatest success of the novel is Powers’ ability to get inside Leonid’s head, to paint a portrait of the psychological whiplash he’s endured throughout his life. The novel jumps back and forth between Leonid’s childhood as a poor boy in Ukraine and his adulthood as a person whose entire existence is built on lies. What does that do to a person? What choices can they make when they’ve surrendered their very autonomy to a cause? Powers is unafraid to probe the confounding, often darkly comic answers to these questions, even if the answers are sometimes frustratingly uncertain.

This attention to emotional detail, combined with a powerful supporting cast and a masterful sense of historical table-setting, makes First Cosmic Velocity a delightfully complex page-turner for space enthusiasts and fans of alternate histories. You will never look at the space race the same way again.

Some novels are masterpieces of world building and detail, with page after luxurious page of topography and wardrobe. Sometimes, the world can be so elaborate that it overtakes the story and any questions that story might ask. A great storyteller knows what to tell us and what to leave out, and a great novelist knows when the book should be short.

The Parade, the latest compelling tale from Dave Eggers, is a short book, but not at the expense of anything it needs to function as a taut, direct and lean narrative. There’s not an ounce of fat on this book, and that makes it both inviting and the kind of novel that will linger in your brain for hours, even days, after you’ve read it.

Eggers sets his tale in a nameless country just coming out of a painful civil war. Two men, who refer to themselves by numbers rather than names to simplify their relationship, have been hired to pave a road that serves as both a symbolic and literal unifier of the country. It’s a simple job, largely automated thanks to sophisticated machinery, but the two men approach it very differently. One is businesslike, Spartan and committed to keeping to his schedule without any complications, while the other is carefree and eager to take in the culture. As the road project marches along and their journey becomes complicated by their conflicting personalities, the novel asks us to ponder the dueling ideas of isolation and immersion in a foreign land, and how much is too much of either.

The novel is sparse, free of proper names and major geographic and political details because it doesn’t need them. In deliberate, measured prose, Eggers marches his characters down the road toward uncertainty, building tension and conflict until the novel’s complex and thoughtful climax. The purposeful vagueness makes the novel feel timeless and universal, while Eggers’ way of pouring on the emotional details when it really counts makes it haunting.

The Parade is a tight, thrilling, brisk read that will make you ponder your place in the world.

BookPage starred review, February 2019

Imagine that the world never transitioned out of the ice age, but humanity’s long history has stayed more or less the same. To get through the winter, humans hibernate. Within this world, all the great artists, writers, historical figures, Shakespearean characters and Grecian myths endure, but they are reframed within an alternate reality that centers on humanity’s 16 weeks of sleep.

The pharmaceutical company HiberTech has developed a drug that allows humans to sleep dreamlessly through the winter, expending 30 percent less of their bodies’ hibernal fat reserves and requiring less strenuous preparation for the “Hib.” This comes with a caveat: One in every 3,000 who take the drug doesn’t quite wake up. Referred to as Nightwalkers, these unlucky people appear to have some vestige of their past lives rattling around, but their consciousnesses are nowhere to be seen. HiberTech has been developing methods to rewrite what’s left of the Nightwalkers’ consciousnesses in order to “redeploy” them. After all, one in 3,000 makes for good business.

A select few humans don’t hibernate, including Charlie Worthing, who joins the Winter Consulate to help keep the rest of humanity safe during the four months of winter. Charlie soon finds himself escorting a Nightwalker to Sector 12 in northern Wales to claim a bounty from HiberTech’s headquarters—and to follow up on rumors of a viral dream.

As Charlie is pulled deeper into a mystery he hadn’t meant to sign up for, readers are looped into a tale of dreamers, thieves and an elusive, mythical creature called the Gronk who folds its victims’ laundry, collects severed pinkies and has a strong preference for Rodgers and Hammerstein show tunes. 

Jasper Fforde is in fine form in his 14th novel, stringing along this adventure with wry wit, a sometimes-bonkers plot and a joke that takes a hundred pages to sneakily find its punchline. If not for the absurdity of the tale, Early Riser could’ve easily been a mere allegory of the dangers of global warming and Big Pharma. But what matters most is the nature of humanity, as empathy saves the day, and our good guy has no reason to wonder just how good he is.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On a small island in the middle of the sea live three girls. The first, Grace, is practical and protective. The second, Lia, is brave and loving. The third, Sky, is pure and innocent. Three sisters, set apart from a dying world, safe from it all. It might sound like a dream or a poem, but in Sophie Mackintosh’s beguiling, eerie debut novel The Water Cure, the island is real. But is the island to keep the girls safe, or to keep them prisoner?

King, the girls’ father, has created a haven to protect them from the toxicity being spread across the world. Never permitted to leave the sanctuary of the island, the girls and their mother participate in rituals and rote therapeutic behaviors to keep themselves clean. When King leaves the island for supplies and doesn’t return, the girls and their mother are left alone to wonder what happened. But then, the unthinkable happens: a boat arrives on the beach. A boat that doesn’t carry King, but three strangers, three men. The girls have never seen men before other than King. With no sign of when King might return and no idea of what these men might want, the girls and their mother must decide what to do with the strangers on their shore.

Sometimes, it’s the most human books that chill us the most. Plenty of recent books amp up the action and violence in the name of pure entertainment. Indeed, it’s the bread and butter of the sci-fi and fantasy genres. But no other book in the last year has left me feeling simultaneously frayed and mesmerized. Mackintosh is such a strong writer sentence by sentence that the reader feels an inescapable pull from the narrative. You can’t help but keep turning the page, wondering, with dread, what will happen next. One of the rituals the girls undertake is to decide who gets to be loved by the others in a given year. The others won’t return that love. It’s a twisted take on self and group preservation, and one that’s being encouraged by both mother and father. What would a trio of girls who haven’t known the outside world think of love? Is the concept of love universal? Is love owned? This is just one example of how small moments become so much larger in Mackintosh’s hands.

I think it would be a mistake to categorize this book as purely a work of science fiction. However, it would be an even larger mistake to miss such a powerful book because it didn’t have robots or time machines. In the same way that The Handmaid’s Tale and The Children of Men reflect women’s experiences back to us, The Water Cure is written in the future, but it’s about us now.

For genre geeks such as myself, one of the most exciting developments in 21st-century fiction is the embrace of sci-fi, fantasy and horror by so-called “literary” authors. Karen Thompson Walker epitomized this elevating trend in her first genre-bending debut novel, The Age of Miracles (2012). Walker takes on the horror genre with The Dreamers, the tale of an inexplicable sleeping sickness that consumes an entire college town, beginning with a freshman dorm.

Soon after the first student is stricken, several of her classmates also fall prey to the plague, including a young woman whose social awkwardness takes on fatal significance, and another who has just had sex for the first time and is now pregnant. The development of new life in her womb becomes a crucial theme throughout the novel, an affirmation of vitality in stark contrast to the mother’s dreadful slumber.

As the disease spreads beyond campus, panic rises. The panorama of these afflictions exposes a range of memorable characters. There are no heroes. In fact, the foolishness of “heroism” is diagnosed with devastating impact. There are many different ways that Walker’s victims succumb to the mysterious sleep, while others attempt to cope with their loved ones’ collapse. Worst of all, some sleepers come out of their uncanny dream state permanently unhinged. In every case, a basic principle of human nature unfolds: A person realizes their truest self when confronted with a crisis of mortality.

The Dreamers does more than satisfy both the horror geek and the literary nerd. With clinical precision and psychological depth, Walker delivers a vivid embodiment of our ongoing national anxiety.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Iain Reid’s philosophical sci-fi novel Foe tells the story of Junior and Henrietta, a married couple living on a farm in an undisclosed location sometime in the near future. They live a relatively isolated and quiet life that is structured around monotonous routine. Their domestic doldrums are upended by the arrival of Terrance, a mysterious figure who claims to work for a scientific outfit called OuterMore. He has come to tell the couple that Junior has been tapped to potentially participate in the Installation, a human settlement in outer space. Informed by Terrance that Junior’s involvement won’t be finalized for another few years, the couple returns to their normal existence.

Two years later, Terrance returns with news that Junior has indeed been selected to participate in the Installation program. The mission will require him to live very far away from the farm for several years. Stunned and confused, Junior is concerned about leaving Henrietta alone on their remote homestead. But Henrietta will not be alone, as OuterMore plans to replace Junior with a duplicate version of himself.

Furthermore, Terrance moves into the household to conduct interviews and collect observational data for the replacement. This new and bizarre domestic situation, as well as Henrietta’s mysteriously apathetic response to it all, perplexes Junior. The reader then follows Junior on an unsettling yet thrilling search for answers that ultimately culminates in a shocking final twist.

Foe is a philosophically bewildering and psychologically triggering novel. Reid’s depiction of Junior’s and Henrietta’s existential crises forces the reader to engage with questions of romantic relationships, identity, technology and the nature of humanity. Such an ambitious work risks being muddied. Reid, however, brilliantly executes his vision through short chapters filled with well-crafted internal and external dialogue.

With Foe, Reid has written a page-turning novel that will entertain you and have you questioning the very foundation of your existence at the exact same time.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.