August 2026 - Reviewed

I write this from a hotel room in LA where I am recuperating from the last five days excitement at my first ever WorldCon. I had a truly brilliant time meeting up with fantastic writers, creators and general wonderful nerdy people, but I ended up doing a lot of stuff and I'm very tired now! I also had a great reading month, banking eight books, all of which were very enjoyable in their own ways.

The Abominable – Dan Simmons

Those of you who read my review of The Terror earlier this year may have been expecting that this equally doorstop size book would feature a monstrous yeti or abominable snowman. So did I, yet what I actually got was a 900 page novel that featured zero yetis! Instead, the pages were filled with incredibly detailed pseudohistorical account of an expedition to Everest set just after the first world war. I did end up enjoying it quite a lot despite the frankly unforgivable Lack of yetis, and having travelled to Bengal and Sikkim earlier this year, it was lovely to revisit them through the pages of this book. There were, in my opinion a couple of flaws which didn't pop up in The Terror, especially with regards to the Sherpa characters and the one female character. I had thought in the previous book that Simmons did a great job of depicting the indigenous characters but the Sherpas in The Abominable were not drawn with anything like the precision and grace I had expected. Additionally, the solo female character is introduced via her breasts which is frankly bizarre! I did enjoy the sections where they beat up Nazis though, that's always fun.

Ascension – Nicholas Binge

Still furious about the lack of yeti, I emailed my agent and demanded a recommendation that featured some sort of mountain based terror and he absolutely delivered with this wonderful science-fiction book. Ascension follows a physicist called in to help investigate the sudden appearance of a gigantic mountain in the middle of the ocean, and to climb and study it alongside a group of other scientists, (my favourite was the geologist!). Alongside this narrative is the main character's reckoning with his past as he reconnect with his ex-wife who was also on the expedition. 

Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay

An Australian classic I have been meaning to read for years, I absolutely loved this claustrophobic humid book that absolutely defines the genre of dark feminine novels. A group of school girls travel into the Victorian outback to visit hanging rock Mountain and three of them vanish without a trace, The story then follows the repercussions of this event. I thought it was So well done and I am now dying to go and watch the film. Something I thought underlined the whole text was the absence of the indigenous people of Hanging Rock and the surrounds and how much they haunt the narrative just by their absence, and how that absence really underlines how unsuitable and alien the settler class are in this environment.

The Poet Empress – Shen Tao

I ran through this excellent fantasy book in a single day! I picked it up at about three in the afternoon on a weekend  And realised a few hours later that it was going to completely take over the day until I finished it! This is a Asian inspired fantasy that follows a young woman who becomes the lead concubine of a vicious prince with weapon based powers, as she discovers why he is the way he is and how to find power of her own. It's basically the end of blue eyed samurai where the Princess say  'I want to be great' if that were a book. This makes it sound like it could be romantasy, but it's not, and I thought the author made interesting choices every time and really pulled out the threads of the characters in a way that reminded me of the best of genre fiction as a lens through which to view the human condition.

The Porpoise – Mark Haddon

The only other book I had I'd read is the Curious adventure of the dog in the nighttime and that was maybe 15 years ago so I was quite surprised to pick up this adaption of Shakespeare's Pericles play and find out it was by him. I was further surprised, never having read the play, to discover it wasn't about the Athenian general! However, once I actually got into the book, I found it extremely beautifully written and engaging. It's framed through the unnamed daughter of the king of Antioch, reimagined as the abused child of a billionaire. I loved how Haddon gave this character, Angelica, the depth and agency she deserved an ending that I choose to interpret as happy or at least least hopeful.

Strange Sons, Dangerous Daughters – Imogen Russell Williams

I spend a lot of time thinking about the Mabinogion and so I really appreciated this wonderful poetic version. The writing is really beautiful and very rich and I can see myself definitely turning back to it as I work on my own adaptions of the stories. I also really liked Chris Riddell's illustrations, an artist I have loved since his work on the Edge Chronicles.

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario – Matt Dinniman

The second in the dungeon crawler Carl books and I also had a lot of fun with this one. They're easy reads but I like the interpretations and developments seen in this book and I was eager to continue with the next series although I am stubbornly waiting for the paperback versions as I don't want to pay a fortune for the hardback! If you've never read LitRPG, the series seems to be a good place to start, and it is definitely very widely available.

Yesteryear – Claire Caro Burke

My final book of the month was Yesteryear which I had been meaning to read since it came out and finally picked up a copy. I think any book with this much height would probably struggle to match it and I did like this book but I found the narrator so terrible and full of both self-loathing and loathing of the outer world that I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I think I should have! It also wasn't quite what I was expecting in terms of the structure, although I did like the twist at the end. I am extremely interested in the impact that this book has had on actual tradwives and how they seem to be leaving that label and it is fascinating to see the impact of fiction on the real world.