#Review - Nightshift by Kiara Ladner

Nightshift
Kiare Ladner
Pan Macmillan, 18 February 2021
Available as: HB, 256pp, e, audio
Source: advance e-copy via NetGalley, purchased audio and HB
ISBN(HB): 9781529010381

I mainly listened to this book as an audio, finishing the hardback as I got close to the end and needed to see how it all turned out.

Nightshift attracted me because it promised a story of nighttime, of dark streets, of people at work in the silent hours while the world sleeps (a slight obsession of mine). In fact that isn't quite its focus, but nevertheless, it made a complex and satisfying story, still one with something of the dark about it - albeit spiritual rather than literal.

Meggie, a young woman from South Africa, is living and working in London around the turn of the Millennium. Holding down a boring office job while she attempts to complete her English degree, she meets and falls under the spell of the exotic Sabine - and her life becomes an adventure.

Twenty years later, suffering from insomnia as she recalls those events, and after discovering new and unsettling facts about Sabine, Meggie decides to set everything out in a book, to try to work through it - to understand what was really happening.

It's a story of intoxication, of abandon - familiar in some respects. Meggie sees herself as ordinary and Sabine, unconventional, mysterious, cool, Belgian (a nice touch - maybe it would have been too much of a cliche if Sabine were French) becomes an obsession. Meggie's in her restless years, coming to terms with having left home, in a rather pedestrian relationship with Graham and waiting for her future to happen.

The two young women begin by having lunch together, not-quite going out but with something between them. There's a will they, won't they to the whole relationship, Sabine holding herself slightly elusive, coming and going and eventually, eventually making herself even less available by switching to the night shift. Meggie has a boyfriend, but her preoccupation with Sabine makes her wonder if she might be gay or bi, setting her off on a path of exploration before she finally concludes that no, she's neither. This is typical of the relationship - Meggie not so much doing things with Sabine but bouncing off her, considering new and different ways of being, perhaps projecting on Sabine more than really understanding her. 

Still, Meggie doesn't hesitate to follow Sabine to the night shift - although in predictable fashion it isn't straightforward to actually find Sabine. Nevertheless, Meggie does meet a gallery of eccentrics and free spirits who work three weeks on, three off, spending their work hours compiling press clippings in a seedy warehouse next to London Bridge. (If you worked in London in the late 90s, the book captures the atmosphere perfectly - the peak Blair years, just ahead of the city assuming its easy glamour in the Noughties). There are heroic sessions of drinking and drug taking, lots of clubbing, philosophical conversations on the roof at end of shift, shared cigarettes, episodes of poverty, break-ups and always, always Sabine.

Sabine is a thumpingly interesting character but to be honest, at times, can be a bit annoying. She is - or at least as seen through Meggie's eyes she is - an embodiment of the idea that what matters in life is to live, to the full, for the moment, feel strongly, go places, experience things. An approach to the world that scares me, frankly, and in all the encounters between Sabine and Meggie there's a slight sense of danger, of being on the edge of something - sometimes closer, as when they go to the opera with Sabine's lover (or is he?) and someone suggests a threesome, or when, off their heads with coke in a car going to Brighton, the two women are stopped by the police.

It's a mark of how good Ladner's writing is that the reader connects with all the possibilities here, with the richness of them while at the same time, the reader understands just how much Meggie is... what word should I use? Bewitched? - by Sabine, and why she is (though it's hard to put into words, you just need to read the book). 

Meggie is bewitched enough to drop Graham, to start trying to be like Sabine, to act like her (though plagued by doubt over whether she's getting it right), to dress like her. Meggie's obsession with Sabine gets in the way of any clear perception by her of what Sabine might really be like - of the risks of being close to her, yes, but also of what Sabine's own needs might be. Meggie both takes Sabine too seriously, revelling in the details of her life (her brother's tragic death, the missing father, the glamorous older lover) and fails to take her seriously enough, being quite, quite heedless of mundane details that might - in hindsight - matter a lot. 

So the dance whirls on, the two women existing in the same spaces with each other but really, I suspected, living out two quite different stories of what is happening.

Until a final, awful event which changes everything. A shocking event, which Ladner does not try to explain. Is it a betrayal of one by the other? Is it a reckless attempt by one to demand attention, rescue? Or both?

It's something that leaves Meggie wondering about everything she had known, believed, assumed, about Sabine - and still wondering years later.

A complex, atmospheric read, capturing so well a certain sort of relationship and its aftermath.

#Review - Wendy, Darling by A C Wise

Design by Julia Lloyd

Wendy, Darling
A C Wise
Titan books, 1 June 2021
Available as: PB, 330pp, e
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN(PB): 9781789096811

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Wendy, Darling to consider for review.

I have a soft spot for reimaginings of the classics, especially those stories, often childhood stories, that have such a firm place in our mental landscapes they might seem fixed or eternal. It can be revelatory to return to these with an adult eye, not only revisiting their fascinating worlds but asking the question, what was really going on?

Wendy, Darling is firmly in this tradition. As the book opens, Wendy has discovered with horror that Peter is outside her daughter, Jane's, bedroom window and of course is about to carry her away to Neverland. Brutally ignoring Wendy ('You're no fun!'), who of course has waited years and years to meet him again, he does just that. So we see, perhaps, the first layer of nuance here: Wendy's disappointed life, fixated on that short time when she, Michael and John fought pirates, spoke to mermaids and lived with the Lost Boys. 

What happens after an experience like that, and what can it do to one?

Well, plenty as it turns out. In a second layer of disappointment and betrayal, we see that while the two boys internalised Neverland and Peter as imagined, Wendy clung to its reality - and that the England of the First World War did not welcome a young girl who refused to grow up, refused to accept that her childhood tales were just that. Wendy suffered a cruel fate, confined to an asylum and subject to abuse which is described in stark terms. Wendy's life with her husband Ned represents a courageous (and as we later learn, unconventional) attempt to regain some control over her life, even at the cost of compromise and submission to patriarchal power. It's an interesting story in itself, one I'd like to have read much more of, and and builds into a moving account of Wendy's friendship with Mary, an Indigenous young woman from Canada who Wendy meets in the asylum.

At the same time as we learn about Wendy's earlier troubles, Wise is also telling the story of her return to Neverland, and of Jane's first visit there. These are three very different stories, with different pacing. Jane's arrival in Neverland is traumatic, involving memory loss and there is an urgency, a menace, to her experiences that contrasts with Wendy's fond memories. Jane's is an urgent story that feels as though it is going to dark places quickly. In contrast to that, Wendy's return feels a bit slow and melancholy as she revisits the sites of past adventures and finds the enchantment gone. Ultimately pointing to something sinister going on, these parts of the story are very much "Wendy in her own head" until Wise brings the various strands together towards the end of the book. 

The darkness at the heart of Neverland forms a mystery that both Wendy and Jane have, from their separate perspectives, been unpicking and it ultimately requires both to face deep fears. I felt the conclusion to the book really soars at that point, exploring different sorts of courage, both that based on long experience and suffering and that arising from youth and optimism.

I found this an absorbing book overall, one which doesn't hold out illusory hopes that everything will get better: even after they've finished in Neverland, Wendy and Jane will have to return home to face a home dominated by Ned's authoritarian father and to face the choice of whether Wendy can trust her husband with her most dangerous secret, as he trusted her with his. It is though a hopeful book, showing how there can be second chances and how friendship and love, even of unconventional kinds, can make a difference. That, in the end, is what breaks the paradox of Peter Pan - wanting not to group and dismissing Wendy, a real mother, as 'not fun' while insisting that Jane, a girl, act as mother to the Lost Boys - but only in the ways he approves of. Peter comes over, ultimately, as the ultimate demanding male and facing hims down in Neverland may show Wendy (and Jane, with her dreams of being a scientist) how to navigate similar attitudes back at home in London.

For more information about Wendy, Darling see the publisher's website here.

 

#Review - Bad Apples by Will Dean

Bad Apples (Tuva Moodyson, 4)
Will Dean
Point Blank (Oneworld), 7 October 2021
Available as: HB, 352pp, e
Source e: Advance copy provider by the publisher
ISBN(HB): 9781786079817

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Bad Apples.

Tuva Moodyson is back! And not before time. I'd been missing the adventures of Sweden's foremost local reporter, adept as she is at getting caught up in murder while she attempts to describe the daily goings on in the town of Gavrik (aka - to her - Toytown).

At the end of Black River, Tuva was, you will recall, set for new challenges when her paper, the Gavrik Posten, absorbed its rival in neighbouring  Visberg - a place which we soon learn makes Gavrik look like a bustling metropolis. A hilltop town, only approachable via one severely graded road, Visberg has its own traditions and its own (numerous) aristocracy in the wealthy Edlung family who run the place along with so-called "Sheriff" Hansson. And it's not about welcome an outsider like Tuva to investigate its doings.

So it's not, perhaps, the best start when Tuva stumbles across a mutilated corpse on her way to introduce herself to the place...

In Bad Apples, Will Dean repeats the success of his earlier Tuva books, creating an atmosphere of Gothic horror and plain weirdness alongside a modern police investigation. Again, the forests loom large, enclosing Tuva and the other characters. Don't those forests represent the wide open spaces of nature, though? Well, they might - if they weren't full of hunters slaughtering the equally numerous elk - creatures you really don't want to cross. Fusillades of gunfire, men (and women) armed to the teeth, references to weapons - rifles, knives, axes - pepper the book, as though hinting at all the opportunities for a quick (or slow and painful) death. 

And as if that wasn't enough, Hallowe'en is getting close. Dean explains how, despite the reservations of older members of the community, this American custom has become a Big Thing in Sweden. But first we have to get through the unique Pan Night, Visberg's own special festival, when rotting apples lie on the town streets and all kinds of mischief is indulged. Tuva's there, of course, trying to solve a crime, and stop a criminal who is not above sending her coded warnings. (Also, of course, indulging her sense of curiosity). 

I just can't convey how creepy this book gets - it's perhaps something to do with the contrast between Tuva's life in Gavrik (of all places) and the state of things in Visberg. At home, as she's now beginning to think of it, she's back on the rails, off the booze, happy with her friends, her job (she has a promotion) and especially her  girlfriend Noora.  But at the other end of the Visberg road is a dark, closed community with its own secrets. 

We see Tuva shuttle back and forth. Readers of the previous books will recall that she won't take crap from anyone, but also that she's still grieving for her mother, still feels she let her down and will always see echoes of that in what goes on around her. All this weirdness isn't, one might think, good for her. I do, bizarrely, feel a bit protective towards this fictional person, who - you won't be surprised to learn - goes through quite a lot in this story. I might even go so far as to say that Will Dean is a MONSTER and shouldn't be put in charge of a vulnerable character like this...

Tuva Moodyson has, I would say, for me, joined that group of crime protagonists who are more important to the reader than the mystery they're apparently trying to solve. The details of that do unspool but I was worrying so much about Tuva, I didn't try to hard to read the clues (though they are there). Accordingly I wasn't prepared for the white knuckle conclusion to this book. 

I. Wasn't. Prepared. At. All. I say again, Will Dean is a MONSTER. 

In short, another book from Dean that is as much (more) an empathetic character study as a crime novel, but which still has plenty of thrills and excitement and some real shocks, setting up a perfect opening to what I profoundly hope will be a prompt Book 5 (and what I know will contain its own share of fear and regret...)

Finally - fans of Tuva's books will be delighted to know that the creepy wood carver sisters are back, and their trolls are more grotesque than ever...

For more information about Bad Apples, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

Cover by Mel Four/
Pan Macmillan art dept

Black Water Sister
Zen Cho
Pan Macmillan, 10 June 2021
Available as: HB, 370pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley
ISBN(HB): 9781447299998

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of Black Water Sister via NetGalley

Black Water Sister is an absorbing story. It is firmly set in the modern world, taking place on the bustling island of Penang, yet blends that with a sympathetic take on traditional magic, mythology and indeed, gods.

Jessamyn ("Jess") and her parents are Chinese Malaysians. They have lived in the USA, where Jess's parents went to work, since she was five years old. After her father loses his job and suffers a health scare, the family return to Penang and are living with relatives (Jess's aunt Kor Kor and her husband). Jess's dad is carrying out pretty menial work for her uncle, and she and her mother feel he's being taken advantage of - but they're being provided with somewhere to stay so are under something of an obligation. It's a delicate situation, and Jess doesn't want to upset things. 

However, we know two things from the start of this book, both threatening no end of upset. First, Jess is gay. Secondly, she's being haunted by a ghost who is, she soon learns, that of her grandmother, Ah Ma. Granny drags Jess into a complicated feud involving a businessman with criminal connections, rival Chinese deities and the history of that sprawling family. Jess is, of course, resistant at first and thinks she's losing her mind but she eventually has to accept, reluctantly, the reality of what's going on - and, even more reluctantly, that Ah Ma will get her into deep trouble unless she helps out.

Playing out in the background is the fascinating story of Jess's large family, its hopes and fears, preferences and prejudices, something she navigates on a daily basis. The fact that Jess has been brought up abroad is a superb alibi for Zen Cho to explain cultural references that the Western reader may not quite get - as well as creating a layer of friction for Jess since she's, ever so slightly, out of step with everyone else. There's a nice description, a kind of inversion of the normal picture, showing the effect of exile when Jess sees her parents - who she's previously regarded as quite reserved people -  suddenly becoming very social, and realises that's who they really are when they are at home and relaxed rather than among strangers. 

But Jess doesn't have much time to understand the impact of emigration on her family, or how it feels for them to be home, apparently defeated by the land of promise they thought they were going to. No. The story gets very thrillery, with plenty of action, characters who are morally conflicted and Jess herself desperately trying to work out exactly how this strange world she's entered - a world of mediums and endlessly bickering Chinese gods, of hoodlums, of downtrodden building workers - actually works. It would be so much easier if she could depend on Ah Ma for guidance and advice but she turns out to be a somewhat mercurial person (while, I think, subtly educating Jess all the same).

As if that wasn't enough, Jess is trying to combine all this with maintaining a long-distance relationship with her girlfriend Sharanya (especially as Jess isn't out to her parents, and is desperately afraid that they will reject her). There are tensions here, things Jess doesn't want to share about her new life and the sheer pressure of events - and being in a crowded house - make sit hard to take those calls. Jess's dilemma here, even as a self assured young woman who knows what she is and shat she wants, is painful to see.

It's a well written book that draws the reader further and further in, exploring so many cross cultural themes - not only US culture contrasting with this part of Asia, but also the position of the Bangladeshi migrant workers in Malaysia, the accommodation of the ancient (and not so ancient) gods with the modern world, the place of Christians (Jess's aunt is one) and much more. There are also some sharp contrasts even within cultures: such as the way those traditional gods came to be - the male gods often having been reverend holy men, the female ones, unfortunate woman scarred by violence and so raised to the status of deities. Part of Jess's quest is to discover the truth about a particular god, the Black Water Sister of the title, presented by some as a violent and vengeful spirit (and accordingly, used for that purpose) but who actually has a rather more interesting history. Jess needs to understand, and quickly, if she's to outwit gods, her grandmother, the mobsters and other sundry dangers.

And at the end of the day, she also needs to work out her relationships with her family and Sharanya. 

And find a way to earn a living.

So - there is a LOT going on here, but Zen Cho shapes this material into a sharp, readable and fun book. I'd strongly recommend Black Water Sister.

For more information about Black Water Sister, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Emergency Skin by NK Jemisin

Emergency Skin

NK Jemisin

Amazon Original Stories, 17 September 2019

Available as: Audio, 1 hour 4 mins, e

Narrators: Jason Isaacs

Source: Audio subscription

ASIN: B07X4JS37T

Emergency Skin is a remarkable novella, not least for the fact that Jemisin tells a story in which we never hear directly from the point of view character.

He - though the pronoun is moot, for reasons developed in the story which it would be spoilery to give here - is on a mission back to planet Earth (or "Telos" as we're told it should be called) to collect biological samples needed by the distant colony which is his home. Earth is expected to be a hostile wasteland, given that the colony in question was established to house those who had fled environmental destruction.

We're given this in formation by a narrator who is apparently an AI designed to assist the protagonist with this task. We only hear the AI's side of the conversation, together with the voices of one or two people he meets on earth (no, it's not a desert). The AI is a marvellously querulous and elitist construct, reflecting, of course, the views of its masters and betraying their own elitist and blinkered thinking. It's lovely to hear this consciousness come up against the conundrum that Earth simply seems to have flourished ones its makers - supposedly the best, brightest and most innovative of humanity - shoved off.

Again, no spoilers, but Jemisin does gives us an object lesson here in thinking beyond the dreary and reductive worldview of the tech lords and their political lapdogs. It's an impressive argument, albeit necessarily compressed given the form (I would like to see it articulated at greater length, perhaps in a novel) - essentially a challenge to the economic orthodoxy that privileges immediate profit above all. And she shows how openness to alternative view points, and courage, can lead us to challenge even the most ingrained assumptions. That's a lesson needed now more than ever, I think.

In all, a thought provoking and satisfying novella, due in no small part to Isaacs' narration, which captures the cadences both of the smug AI and of several person whom the protagonist encounters on Earth. As I've said, we never hear his voice but the compelling dialogue almost makes you think you have.

I'd recommend. 

#Blogtour #Review - This is How We Are Human by Louise Beech

This is How We are Human

Louise Beech

Orenda Books, 10 June 2021

Available as: PB, 289pp, e, audio

Source: Advance PB provided by the publisher

ISBN(PB): 9781913193713

I'm grateful both to Orenda Books for sending me an advance copy of This is How We Are Human to consider for review and to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in this blogtour.

I was rather wary of this book. It's about a young man, Sebastian, who has autism, how his mother Veronica cares for him - and how she sometimes gets it wrong. It is very close to home for me. My daughter (now in her twenties) has autism. She has had her ups and downs, as we have we in seeking support and trying to ensure she can live an independent and fulfilling life. 

There are differences: young men and young women are seen by society in slightly different ways. Also, my daughter has learning disabilities and is non-verbal, which Sebastian in This is How We Are Human is rather fluent, not to say loquacious. Still, I recognised a lot here. As the parent of a young person like Sebastian, your life becomes focussed on your child. You become their advocate, their interpreter to an often shockingly indifferent world. See for example the episode at the start of this book, where Veronica is seeking help from a sexual health clinic for Sebastian, who is suffering all the frustrations of a young person without a girlfriend or boyfriend and who has little prospect of finding one. The response of the other clients in the waiting room, and of the doctor when eventually Sebastian and Veronica meet her, is hardly helpful.

As a parent, you also, inevitably, fail. Quite rightly, adults who have autism want to control their own lives rather than having them managed by their parents. The difficulties they have with that can be considerable. In This is How We Are Human likeable, slightly posh, steely determined Veronica, with her extensive collection of headscarves, is simply at her wits' end. She is doing her best, but she has reached her limits - and the world is beginning to shut down for Sebastian as he, also, begins to reach and cross boundaries that the world sets for people like him. 

Veronica isn't, though, one to give up easily. So she turns to 'high-class escort' Violetta for help.

Violetta is a fascinating, vividly portrayed character - a young woman who needs to raise money quickly and has found a way to do that. She's beginning to recognise that there is a cost and we see vividly depicted episodes of PSTD. (Do be aware that the book is explicit in places. It is never prurient or exploitative, but does feature Violetta being abused (and one incident takes that so the extreme) as well as other episodes that chip away at her self-esteem. We learn a lot about her background and the trap she is in, paying for her father's care and how she, too, shows courage and finds her way through. In fact this book is as much Violetta's as it is Sebastian's and the strange, quirky relationship they build is well observed and, in some ways, heartbreaking. But then a lot about this book is heartbreaking, from Sebastian's frustration (and his shrewd understanding of it) to the bullying he suffers to the way that the default reaction of the wider world, when any problem comes up, is to try and tidy him away. (I've experienced this - again from the parent's perspective - when Daughter, frustrated beyond endurance, committed some social outrage to a chorus of tutting from the adults around. My tip? The most accepting, welcome place we ever found was our local McDonald's). 

This is How We Are Human is, as I said, a book that comes close to home for me, and some of these times it provoked tears. I really don't think I'd have read it if it had been written by anyone other than Louise Beech, whose honest, human and brave stories I've simply come to love. When I saw what she was writing about, I knew I could trust her with a subject like this and that she would respect and understand the Sebastians and Veronicas of this world (and, indeed, the Violettas as well). 

And she did.

So, this is rather wonderful. It is a deeply human book, the title so apt, because the reality of autism really does challenge narrow minded assumptions about what it is to be human and demand that we so-called neurotypicals take a good hard look at ourselves.

On a lighter note, for fans of Louise's writing, I can confirm (slight spoiler!) that Bob Fracklehurst is back!

About Louise Beech

Louise Beech is an exceptional literary talent, whose debut novel How To Be Brave was a Guardian

Louise Beech

Readers’ Choice for 2015. The follow-up, The Mountain in My Shoe was shortlisted for Not the Booker Prize. Both of her previous books Maria in the Moon and The Lion Tamer Who Lost were widely reviewed, critically acclaimed and number-one bestsellers on Kindle. The Lion Tamer Who Lost was shortlisted for the RNA Most Popular Romantic Novel Award in 2019. Her 2019 novel Call Me Star Girl won Best magazine Book of the Year, and was followed by I Am Dust.

For more information about This is How We are Human, see the Orenda Books website here or hop on the blog tour and read some of the reviews listed on the poster below.

You can buy This is How We are Human directly from Orenda, from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon. 

 

#SocialMediaBlast #Review - Bleeding Hearts by Ry Herman

Bleeding Hearts
Ry Herman
Jo Fletcher Books, 10 June 2021
Available as: PB, 414pp, e
Source: Advance PB copy
ISBN(PB): 9781529406313

I'm grateful to Jo Fletcher books for an advance copy of Bleeding Hearts and for inviting me to take part in the social media blast.

It was great to return to Ry Herman's Boston and to meet Angela and Chloë, introduced in Love Bites, again. Angela, you may recall, is a vampire, and Chloë a witch, and they are deeply in love. But there is a problem - Angela is desperately afraid that she will take too much from Chloë and she has allowed a year for them to find a way for Chloë not to end up undead. Or even, dead. Now there are only two months left before some hard facts need to be faced...

I love the way that, in these two books, Herman centres the love between two supernaturally blessed (or cursed?) young women and the ups and downs of their relationship. Angela's belief, in particular, that there may be no way for her safely to feed from Chloë threatens to break them up. Without Chloë, Angela would be faced by a choice between starving, and going back to picking up strangers in bars and clubs to feed from. Issues of consent are never far away, Angela recalling the abuse she suffered from Tess, her ex, who made her into a vampire, and Herman showing us an another model for vampirism. This is in a story strand beginning in San Francisco just before the earthquake of 1906 where Meijing, who has been trafficked and abused, falls into the company of Master Hiram, an even more ruthless vampire than Tess - and one with a dash of religious fervour to him. 

As Chloë digs deep into ancient legend and magical practice to find an answer to Angela's fears (and more fundamentally, a way that she can make an acceptable life with a person who can only emerge when it's dark), Angela wonders if she might not find answers with Tess after all. It's a mark of just how much Herman makes the reader feel for his characters that as the tension between them over this trip rises (Chloë wants to go along, fearful of losing Angela, while Angela resists that, knowing how dangerous Tess might be to the woman she  sees as having stolen her lover) I almost didn't want to turn the next page from concern that one or the other would go too far, say just too much, from a mixture of love and fear and provoke a split.

Almost. This is a compelling and involving fantasy romance, and I HAD to turn that page. 

And the next. 

And the next. 

Angela's quest takes her physically further and further from Boston, and Chloë's... well... it's hard to describe. Further spiritually? Or mythically? Chloë seems to find herself travelling into a weird realm that blends the symbolism of Boston's past with that of myth and story, a sort of Otherworld - and we know don't we, that the Otherworld is perilous place? Both women face dangers, in a story set in those weeks of later 2000 when a US election was decided by "hanging chads" and politicised legal cases - a setting with echoes, of course, twenty years later.

I love the way that in this book Herman gives us a deft fantasy blending vampirism, lycanththropy and witchcraft while not shying away from the more incongruous aspects of that (Angela, an astrophysicist, is in despair at the logical contradictions - what would happen if werewolf Mike were to visit a lane with no moon? Where does the mass-energy come from (an go) when he transforms?)

I love the way he also gives us a complex modern romance, one that requires supernatural issues to be faced in the same breath as more conventional relationship problems (and which combines the two creating some really knotty life difficulties).

But above all I love the way he grounds this in a response to and depiction of some of the darker parts of reality: in the desire Angela and Chloë have to live their lives like any other couple, despite political trends that want to deny them that, or in the prejudice faces by Meijing through nearly a century. It's a very affirming book, with people, in their diversity, finding a way despite human - or supernatural - obstacles to express their love.

For more information about Bleeding Hearts, see the publisher's website here - and the other reviewers joining in the blast, on the poster below.

You can buy Bleeding Hearts from your local bookshop (but hurry, before they all go!) or online from UK Bookshop dot org, or Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.