Binged Children of Ruin and Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky while waiting on some many-times-delayed flights over the long weekend. Far-future sci-fi where a desperate generation ship effort to save humanity from itself largely fails. The first book in the series, Children of Time, is one of the greats imho. The series won a Hugo award (in somewhat dubious circumstances through no fault of its own).
The second and third don’t quite live up to the original. There’s a lot less of the hard sci fi stuff where we follow the generation ship through ages of time and periods of cold sleep and dealing with the remorseless survival logic of deep space distances and time, the later two are more the nature of different alien models of consciousness and sentience , though the second has some truly memorable cosmic horror stuff happening too.
I’d recommend Children of Time to absolutely anyone (it’s a brick though) the second and third in the series are more optional.
Halfway through Christian White’s fourth novel, ‘The Ledge’, and I’m enjoying it immensely.
After his disappointing third effort, this is a most welcome return to form.
The chapters alternate between the present day where human remains have been found and 25 years prior, when a local teen goes missing in a small town in Victoria’s high country.
Little snippets of information are coming to light as the yarn unwinds and a major twist has been promised in the blurbs I have seen. Can’t wait to see how it all turns out.
It’s an El Dorado for lovers of Australian bush noir literature right now, with Chris Hammer’s newie ‘The Valley’ released and due to land on my doorstep tomorrow.
I’m heading into Warrnambool tomorrow and Christian White, Ian Rankin, Chris Hammer and Dave Warner are all on the list. I don’t expect that all 4 will be at KMart though.
Lady at Collins said you get a copy of his last book together with purchase of The Ledge. I said “but that one was crap”, turned out The Nowhere Child was the book. That wasn’t crap.
White has done a couple of novellas with a co-writer Summer something which I’ve heard on Audible. One of them was extremely creepy.
What a treasure it is to devour and savour a new book from Chris Hammer who maintains his lofty spot as my favourite Australian author.
‘The Valley’ is simply superb and maintains Hammer’s outstanding run of novels. It’s another beautiful piece of writing with an intriguing plot, enticing characters (including the return of Detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan) and a vividly described rural setting.
Regular readers will be tickled by the mentions of previous characters Doug Thunkleton, Martin Scarsden, Max Fuller, Morris Montifore and other law enforcement figures.
Hammer also continues to indulge his penchant for quirky first names as we get to meet Vicary, Simmons, Teramina, Willard and Cornell.
Although loath to give this a perfect score because that leaves nowhere to go if I am fortunate enough to read something better, I feel duty bound to rate this at the apex. 9.95/10
I’m about to start.Bought it Friday but I’ve been too crook to read a paper book. Just had a debilitating virus. Sleepy every 2 or 3 hours, no appetite at all, constant headaches, zorba the greek every 45 minutes.
I was just a smidge disappointed with The Seven…mainly just on comparison levels.
I had Candice Fox recommended with her last, High Wire, and bought it on Kindle then was looking for a void and Kindle was easiest, I started it, then read the synopsis again, and thought “what made me buy this? I don’t read this sort of book”. That was the reason I stopped listening to Bergmoser’s The Hitchhiker.
