Category: Book Review

Rosie | Little Bird Book Blog1 Comment

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: 02/03/2021
Length: 320 pages
Genre: Dystopian | Literary Fiction

CW: n/a

Blackwells.co.uk

‘The Sun always has ways to reach us.’

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

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Rosie | Little Bird Book Blog3 Comments

Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica

Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publication Date: 06/02/2020
Length: 224 pages
Genre: Dystopian | Sci-Fi | Horror

CW: Cannibalism, sexual assault, animal abuse, graphic descriptions of slaughterhouses 

Blackwells.co.uk

It all happened so quickly. First, animals became infected with the virus and their meat became poisonous. Then, governments initiated the Transition. Now, ‘special meat’ – human meat – is legal.

Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans only no one calls them that. He works with numbers, consignments, processing. One day, he’s given a gift to seal a deal: a specimen of the finest quality. He leaves her in his barn, tied up, a problem to be disposed of later.

But the specimen haunts Marcos. Her trembling body, her eyes that watch him, that seem to understand. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost – and what might still be saved…

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Rosie | Little Bird Book Blog2 Comments

Dear Child by Romy Hausmann

Firstly, a huge thank you to Quercus Books and NetGalley for providing me with this copy in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: Quercus Books
Publication Date: 14/05/2020
Length: 352 pages
Genre: Psychological Thriller | Mystery

CW: sexual assault, kidnapping, domestic violence

Blackwells.co.uk

A windowless shack in the woods. Lena’s life and that of her two children follows the rules set by their captor, the father: Meals, bathroom visits, study time are strictly scheduled and meticulously observed. He protects his family from the dangers lurking in the outside world and makes sure that his children will always have a mother to look after them.

One day Lena manages to flee – but the nightmare continues. It seems as if her tormentor wants to get back what belongs to him. And then there is the question whether she really is the woman called ‘Lena’, who disappeared without a trace 14 years ago. The police and Lena’s family are all desperately trying to piece together a puzzle which doesn’t quite seem to fit.

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Rosie | Little Bird Book Blog2 Comments

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication Date: 26/02/2019
Length: 830 pages
Genre: Fantasy

CW: n/a

Blackwells.co.uk

A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens.

The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction – but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.

Across the dark sea, Tane has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep. 

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Rosie | Little Bird Book Blog4 Comments

Little Gods by Meng Jin

Firstly, a huge thank you to Pushkin Press and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: Custom House
Publication Date: 14/01/2020
Length: 288 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction

CW: n/a

Blackwells.co.uk

On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time.

When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement.

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The Swimmers by Marian Womack

Firstly, huge thank you to Titan Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher: Titan Books
Publication Date: 23/02/2021
Length: 288 pages
Genre: Sci-Fi | Dystopian

CW: n/a

Blackwells.co.uk

After the ravages of global warming, this is place of deep jungles, strange animals, and new taxonomies. Social inequality has ravaged society, now divided into surface dwellers and people who live in the Upper Settlement, a ring perched at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere. Within the surface dwellers, further divisions occur: the techies are old families, connected to the engineer tradition, builders of the Barrier, a huge wall that keeps the plastic-polluted Ocean away. They possess a much higher status than the beanies, their servants.

The novel opens after the Delivery Act has decreed all surface humans are ‘equal’. Narrated by Pearl, a young techie with a thread of shuvani blood, she navigates the complex social hierarchies and monstrous, ever-changing landscape. But a radical attack close to home forces her to question what she knew about herself and the world around her.

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