Why even heaven can be hellish
THE MEMORY CHAMBER by Holly Cave (Quercus €18.20)
AN ELEGANT tale of love and loss, memory and murder, set in an edgy near-future. Isobel is a heaven architect, able to mine clients’ memories before they die and build customised digital heavens where they can be happy forever.
But is this life after death something to look forward to? Psychos may be banned from the process, but could a person enjoy you in their heaven without your consent? And can the police gain access to memories to solve past crimes?
When perfectionist Isobel falls in love with a terminallyill client, things go horribly wrong. Her need to learn the truth clashes with her ethics.
This is a dream ride with revelations, rather than shocks, and all the better for it.
A HERO BORN by Jin Yong (translated by Anna Holmwood) (MacLehose €21)
PART one of the Legends Of The Condor Heroes, this publishing phenomenon comes to us in a brisk and thrilling new translation. We are taken back to 13th-century China, an era of clashing armies and corrupt officials. It is also, thank the stars, a time of lost parents, mistaken identity, derring-do and bonkers fights.
‘Doughty’ best sums up our hero, the young Guo Jing; ‘irascible, charming, wise and bone-headed’ describe the Seven Freaks of the South, the kung fu masters who are training him to avenge his father’s death.
The tale is like every fairy tale you’ve ever loved, imbued with jokes and epic grandeur.
Prepare to be swept along as our champion gallops towards his nemesis and destiny — without ever quite understanding what either is.
THE SMOKE by Simon Ings (Gollancz €23.80)
BERLIN was nuked way back in 1918, America’s still reeling from the 19th-century Yellowstone caldera eruption and Yorkshire’s steel mills are churning out parts for space rockets. If that’s not enough, Bolshevik idealists have invented a death-reversal ray, accidentally spawning chickies — hypersexual imps — from the mud of the Somme.
This is the background to a mind-bending bildungsroman in which Stu, a young architect, must negotiate an intense affair with one of Britain’s elite, come to terms with his mother’s death and rebirth, and work out why a chickie is dogging his progress . . .