SCI-FI AND FANTASY JAMIE BUXTON
TO SLEEP IN A SEA OF STARS by Christopher Paolini (Tor £20, 880 pp)
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI, author of the best- selling fantasy eragon series, has turned to sci-fi and come up with stonking great space opera with rockets on. Starting small and personal, it builds into a crescendo of action with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.
A chance encounter with alien tech transforms Kira, a planet surveyor, into a human alien hybrid and life-form-of-interest to be pursued throughout the universe. Her struggles to adapt — and not accidentally kill her friends — keep the action up-close and personal, and the dilemmas punchy and real.
And if you ever thought that beclawed alien jelly was bad, wait till you meet mutant alien jellies. With teeth.
THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE by V.E. Schwab (Titan Books £17.99, 448 pp)
It’S 17th-century rural france and the devil appears to offer young Adeline the chance to escape a loveless marriage.
Alas, in taking him up, she wishes to be forgotten and, for the next few hundred years, from the slums of old Paris to hipster bars of new York, she discovers what the phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ really means.
It takes a fabulous meet-cute to end her arid existence, with a handsome boy remembering her nicking a book from his Brooklyn shop and turning her life around.
there are twists aplenty — young Henry has secrets of his own — but what we take from this beautiful, sweet and utterly engaging story is a message of love and hope.
A DEADLY EDUCATION by Naomi Novik (Del Rey £16.99, 336 pp)
even the meanest of the mean girls in Mean Girls would not survive the Scholomance, an interdimensional training school for wizards. It’s hard enough for el Higgins, a proto-goth girl, to fight the maws, lyeflies, groglers and suckerworms and she has a panoply of lethal, magical powers to draw on.
As a loner, el is ill-suited to form the sort of alliances that win friends and prevent evisceration. So when the most popular boy in the school starts taking an interest in her, she brushes him off until death and mayhem weave their romantic spell.
Sharp as a fang, funny and ruthless, this still manages to conjure up powerful observations about friendship, exclusion and privilege.