JAMIE BUXTON
THE WARM HANDS OF GHOSTS
by Katherine Arden (Century £18.99, 400 pp) it’s World War i and Nurse laura iven can’t escape the war. it follows her home to Halifax, Nova scotia, first with a harbour explosion that kills her parents and then with a chest of her brother’s effects, sent from France along with a mysterious message.
as laura plunges back into the maelstrom of trench warfare, horror builds on horror but we’re saved from total immersion in the mud, blood and guts by our heroine’s terse warmth, the ghastly tension as her brother’s fate is uncovered and the unflinching brilliance of the writing.
this is an extraordinary novel — lyrical, gritty and complex — whose supernatural themes only serve to emphasise its essential humanity.
SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN
by John Wiswell (Arcadia £20.00, 320pp)
YOUR typical wyrm is a dragon and dragons, as we know, are wise, strong and violently unpredictable. Well, apart from the wyrm shesheshen, a freeform mess of gristle and inchoate urges, and prone to swallowing people. in other words, a monstrous and carnivorous worm.
Now meet buxom Homily. she needs to kill shesheshen to restore her family fortunes, but is blissfully unaware that shesheshen, with the help of a few old bones and the odd bear trap, can take the form of pretty much anyone she wants. and they fall in love.
Charming, gooey, repellent and immersive, a story to slither into the hardest heart.
THE THREE BODY PROBLEM
by Cixin Liu
(Head of zeus, £9.99, 448pp) the three- body problem is a real mathematical thing. the physics states that the gravitational forces between three bodies in space makes their orbits too complex to predict.
the book asks what happens when a distant civilisation, prey to these forces, sets its sights on planet earth?
it all adds up to a dazzlingly complex narrative full of unpredictable shifts of pace and tone, with the reader pushed and pulled between heavyweight issues: tricky physics, philosophy, Chinese history, and planetary annihilation.
Reissued to coincide with the Netflix series, i urge readers to delay their binge and wrestle with the gnarly pleasures of the genre- busting, best- selling original.