Review - The Misheard World by Aliya Whiteley

The Misheard World

Aliya Whiteley
Solaris, 24 February 2026 
Available as: HB, 272pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(HB): 9781837866915

I'm grateful to Solaris for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Misheard World to consider for review.

Oh this is a tricksy book. How much to say in a review? That's also tricky.

To start as the book starts, then, Elize Janview is a soldier, in an army, fighting an existential war against a deadly enemy. She's fighting for the South, against the North, in a struggle that follows a long period of coexistence. (If you're asking, South of what? North of where? those are good questions - but I won't enlighten you, you'll need to read the book). 

The war started after the North used a dreadful weapon against a city where people from North and South lived together, worked together, made art together. Now the South is desperate to copy that weapon, before the North can use it again. And there's an urgency since the North is winning and war comes closer and closer. 

We see Elize and her comrades defending Crag, a fortress used as a prison for captured soldiers from the North. Whiteley's portrayal of Elize and her little circle is great, showing the moments of boredom made bearable by endless gambling, bets on anything and everything. The food. Elize's helping out in the bakery. It all helps build up a picture.

Then, suddenly, the South has a stroke of luck. The notorious Northern spy, Marius Mondegreen, has been captured! His great enemy, the Allynx Syld, will interrogate him at Crag - and Janview is invited to witness the process. Surely Mondegreen (a magician who goes by the stage name 'The Misheard Word') will reveal the secret of the Weapon?

So the first part of this story proceeds. The land where North and South fight has, perhaps, something of the Ruritantian about it, these two minutely realised antagonists lying in mountainous country apparently isolated from anywhere else and in a seemingly pre-Modern world. Distrust abounds between the two (and did before the War) so things in Crag are complex - though perhaps Crag forms a third little world, with North and South again living and working together. 

And at the heart of that is Mondegreen's interrogation. It's clear that something lies between him and the Allynx (a Northern title) but we don't learn what until the final catastrophe, after Crag's fall when he and  Janview are on the run. Then there's a whole different story that she finds incomprehensible and unlikely, though for us, reading this book, it will be more familiar and will put the nature of Janview's world in a rather different perspective.

For her, though, she's now forced to choose between impossible absurdities. A survivor of that terrible weapon - one of few - she had joined the army to get revenge. Now she's faced with the possibility that her time has been wasted, that her enemies are elsewhere (but where?) and that her world may be doomed.

In The Misheard World, Whiteley deploys a brilliant concept, a wonderfully realised nesting of realities that operates on multiple levels. There's the question of what's really going on, the answers to which emerge, but only in part, as a result of the interplays between those realities. There's a question behind that - a why and how question - that isn't answered, but which preys on the mind of the reader: you will perhaps create your own answers to that. Finally, there's the wonderfully realised story of Mondegreen and the Allynx who, as I have said, have History - they almost step off the page (the kind of thing that could easily happen in this book) as real, living people with their own history and setting.

And of course, there's Janview who is also vivid and rather touching in her impossible situation.

How does it all end? Whiteley very definitely leaves that open. The book is in the end, I think, about how reality is written, and rewritten, and part of that concerns just what we mean by "end". This author refuses to be definite, and I loved the way she achieved that.

A mind-bending, worlds-spanning SFF treat that you really mustn't miss. Strongly recommended.

For more information about The Misheard World, see the publisher's website here.