Exciting news and cover reveal

Today I'm VERY excited to be able to share some brilliant news about a new book coming next year  (and to reveal the cover, but just hang on a moment first...)

Releasing in March 2023, Infinity Gate is a major new science fiction novel from M. R. Carey, author of the million-copy bestseller The Girl With All the Gifts. It’s the first book in a duology called the Pandominion, with the second book due to release in Spring 2024. 

Infinity Gate is a thrilling tale set in the multiverse - the story of humanity's expansion across millions of dimensions, and the AI technology that might see it all come to an end . . .

 

The Pandominion is a political and trading alliance of a million worlds - except that they're really just the one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an AI threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they'll eradicate it by whatever means necessary, no matter the cost to human life.

 

Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth's environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel. It could save everyone on her dying planet, but now she's walked into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of.

M. R. Carey said about the new novel: “I've always been into genre fusion. The Girl With All the Gifts was sci-fi horror, the Koli books post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a big splash of fantasy and so on. Infinity Gate is pure SF, and that switch of gears has been really energising for me. The core idea is that with the stars forever out of reach (because relativity) humanity goes sideways into other dimensions. There's an empire of a hundred thousand planets, but they're all Earth - the Earths of parallel universes where evolution took different turns. And when a scientist from our world stumbles across the edge of this empire, she triggers a whole chain of events that could save or doom every world there is. All that plus cyborg soldiers, a robot hive-mind and a sentient rabbit girl on the run from the empire's deadliest agents. It's a ton of fun.”

Orbit UK Publisher Anna Jackson said: “I already knew that Mike Carey was an unbelievably talented, versatile writer with a passionate fanbase, but this new duology really blew me away! It’s full to the brim with brilliant ideas and buzzing energy, with characters who grab hold of you and refuse to let go. It’s a total thrill-ride through the multiverse on an epic scale, and readers of space opera and high-concept SF are going to be hooked. We’re excited to reveal the cover today, from our very talented designer Nico Taylor. I love how it gets across this concept of alternate versions of Earth, and how it feels as epic and exciting as the book itself!’

And now for that cover!

Doesn't that look good? You can read more on the Orbit blog from 1pm ish today, Wednesday 12 October...

#Blogtour #Review - The Book of Koli by MR Carey

The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy, 1)
MR Carey
Orbit, 16 April 2020
Available as: PB, e, 376pp
Read as: PB
ISBN: 9780316477475

I'm so glad today to be joining the blog tour for The Book of Koli by MR Carey and am grateful to Orbit for an advance copy and to Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Readers for inviting to take part.

This was never a book I wasn't going to read. Carey's books - especially those set in the world of The Girl with all the Gifts, and the haunting Someone Like Me - are immersive, readable and remain with you.

But it did add a little frisson to see that in his latest, we are dealing with a world where Nature has, as it were, taken its revenge. It's easy to see that right now, I think. And the post-apocalyptic feels relevant in a way that it can't have when this was being written.

Not that our present pandemic is going to see us reduced, like Koli here, to scattered communities living on subsistence agriculture and bits of scavenged, ill-understood tech. But we can perhaps see how dependent our society is on everything working together, and how fragile it all might be.

In narrator Koli's (a young man living in remote Mythen Rood, in the North of England, perhaps a hun dared year from now) world, Nature is the enemy. Everything is trying to kill us. The very trees are hostile, as are a host of fierce creatures - wasps the size of a human head, "needles" that will take your arm off, floating seeds that will take root in your flesh. There are also dangerous remnants of human tech - attach droids gone feral, for example. And there are other people - the Shunned Men who have taken to cannibalism, and various messianic sects. It's a cruel and hard world outside the village stockade and not a place you'd willingly go, except for short hunting tripos, but it's where Koli went and, apparently, came back from.

Telling this journey over three books, Carey takes his time in the first to establish the setting, the history and the language. Koli and his village speak a very distinct variety of English and in places the reader has to work a bit too understand, especially, the names and some of the references but this speech adds greatly to the atmosphere and helps one believe that, yes, here is a future community.

The language also adds a hint of comedy when Koli stumbles on a piece of working tech - a media player hosting an avatar who speaks in a hip dialect (well, hip a long time before Koli was born) of English-Japanese-teen. Seeing him trying to communicate with an AI that uses this language, when his world and his references Arte so narrow and, well, different - is quite funny, but also rather sad, underlining what humanity has lost.

Against this larger theme, though, much of what Koli does and what happens to him in this book flows from basic human motivations - love, jealousy, desire to be someone - which an adolescent boy in a hardscrabble place like Mythen Rood feels just as much as anyone else. Carey tells a story that, well, just works, at this elemental human level so that for the greater part of this book the reader just wants Koli safe, wants him not to take the catastrophic course of action he does here - rather than caring about that wider world, the causes of the collapse, and what might be done now to put things right. Carey only leads us up to that slowly and by the time he does we really care about Koli and his world, its people, even its AIs like Monono.

In feeling and content the book reminded me of John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, particularly in the way that the future world, apart form being post-apocalyptic, turns out to be flawed even in its one terms. I'm sure comparisons with Riddley Walker are also inevitable, especially given Koli's dialect (although I found this perfectly accessible) and the composite religion that has emerged. No doubt other parallels can be drawn but really, Carey makes this setting and own, peopling it with credible characters who have credible motivations and addressing many other themes than "how to survive societal collapse". There are trans characters here. There is misuse of power. The ethical implicates of AI is an issue. And there is that fundamental question - when is is permissible to kill?

If that makes the book sound too solemn and ideas-y, it's really not. This is an absorbing and involving story with plenty of action and a thinking, three dimensional protagonist who you may want to slap at times but who will quickly find his way into your heart.

I'm so glad that The Trials of Koli and The Fall of Koli (ooooh...)  are coming later this year because I for one would not like to have to wait a whole year to see what happens next - and how the story finishes.

One to grab and read quickly, I think!

The tour continues with many great stops got come - see the poster below for details.

For more information about The Book of Koli, see the Orbit website here.

You may, in spite of These Strange Times, be able to get the book from local shop - if you can, please do, because they needs your support as ever before. Alternative you can go online to Blackwell's, Foyles, Waterstones or Amazon.

Review - Someone Like Me by MR Carey

Cover design by Duncan Spilling

Someone Like Me
M R Carey
Orbit, 8 November 2018
HB, 512pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley (thank you loads Nazia!)

Someone Like Me is an intriguing mix - supernatural horror, but one that also wonderfully captures the graininess, the hard dilemmas and nagging constraints, of ordinary life; an abusive ex-husband, compromises over healthcare due to the limits of insurance, the need to earn a living in tough times.

Set in Larimer, a suburb of Pittsburgh, it's a step away from Carey's previous UK focussed books, both the fungoid zombie chronicles of The Girl With all the Gifts and The Boy on the Bridge and the spooky prison drama of Fellside - though perhaps closer in atmosphere to the latter). Overall it put me in mind of Lauren Beukes' US inner city horrors The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters.  As in those, the city almost takes on the attributes of a character, throwing out bizarre paradoxes and horrors as the dark secrets of an overgrown motel in a forgotten part of town reach out to downtrodden single mother Liz Kendall and troubled teen Fran Watts.

Carey's writing is at its most chilling, though, as he brings to life in the reader's mind Liz's thoroughly unpleasant husband - her ex-husband as she keeps having to make clear - Marc. A plausible, manipulative and violent man ("Once you give yourself permission to treat the person you're supposed to one like shit on your shoe, you don't ever rescind that permission") he wore Liz down until she was only an echo of the woman he married, and despite divorce, she isn't free of him yet - his shadow hangs over much of this book.

Carey's portrayal of this man is meticulous and convincing. It's done largely through the effect on her and her kids, showing how she was changed form the person she had been ("It was the first time Liz gave up something that turned out to have been part of her own identity. A lot of surprising things faded away... her self-confidence, her sense of humour, even part of her sex drive.")

In extremis, Liz finds the ability from somewhere to fight back against Marc. But once awakened, the part of her that was able to do that just doesn't want to go away again. It - she - has plans of her own. Liz seems caught between two cunning, and ruthless personalities, either of which could destroy her or at least, her way of life. She begins to doubt her sanity, but help isn't easy to get and how much can she actually say faced with a police investigation and upcoming court battle against Marc?
While Liz has welcome support from neighbours and a police officer BeeBee, that unwelcome support from the other part of her, the one with an agenda, throws everything into jeopardy.

I really, really enjoyed Carey's portrayal of hard working, long suffering Liz,  doing her best to bring up Zac and Molly ("Zac in particular needed to be saved from [Marc's] influence, from having that poisonous macho pantomime in his line of sight every day of his life"), just about making ends meet on a low salary, having to cope with so much but never giving up. Indeed the extent of her tenacity, her love, would be hard to overstate and I can't explain why - I won't reveal what's actually going on here because a large part of the book is devoted to untangling that mystery. Liz's son Zac teams up with Fran to get to the bottom of it, because Fran's closely bound up with it too. If Liz is suffering violence and abuse in the present, Fran suffered in the past when she was kidnapped as a child. Still beset by nightmares and hallucinations, she to has tried to rebuild her life, assisted by Dr Southern at budget therapy sessions covered by her kidnapper's medical insurance.

Fran has other help, too - Lady Jinx, an armoured, sword wielding fox who's come from a kids' TV programme. Jinx is a delight to read. The way that Carey interleaves her with mundane conversations and activities, has her provide a running commentary on events and - at times - shows her as genuinely sad, wounded and grieving, is  masterpiece of writing. Jinx is as real as any other character here, even while Fran knows that she is "just" a part of her unconscious. And there are others too - like Beth, who has been through things you wouldn't be able to imagine, can never go home, and wants a place to be safe and live her life. I also liked Fran's dad, a sensible man doing his best to bring up his daughter after his wife's death.

While perhaps seeming a little slow at first (after the immediate blazing opening) this is a book to cherish and linger over: Just pay close attention, enjoy the texture of Carey's writing and take in the story - whether the daily routine of Liz's life, insights on race and high school (Zac is white, Fran in black, which features in their relationship's ups and downs), policing, life on the edge of poverty,  or just the gradual construction of the trap in which everyone here is caught. Watch for that - you'll see it closing but you might not see it... if you get my drift.

Relax and take all that, and more, in, as the sense of menace gathers and the tempo quickens, because once things pick up... just wow. You'll be clenched tighter than a clenched fist. There is danger - physical danger, moral danger, risks to relationships, risks to reputations and real damage that will take time to heal - if it can ever heal at all. Mysteries do seem become clear, but at the end, a shadow still seems to hang over Liz and Fran, and I wonder if they can ever really get clear of it?

An excellent book all round, certainly up with the best of Carey's writing to date and possibly a shade better.

Blogtour - Fellside Q&A with MR Carey

MR Carey's chilling and absorbing horror-thriller-fantasy-SF (take your pick) is just out in paperback.

My review from earlier this years is here. I said then that the characters were frighteningly real (in the case of one, frightening is exactly the right word) and concluded that "The complexity of Jess's situation, her need for redemption - and where will she find that in Fellside? - the absolute reality of the characters and the fascination of the mystery that she very gradually unteases, kept me totally hooked and wanting more of this."

I think if you read the book you will, too and I hope that paperback publication brings it many new readers.

To celebrate the occasion, Mike has answered some questions I put to him about the book and his writing. And I've also got a giveaway! So let's get started.

Q. Mike, thank you for taking the time to answer these questions about Fellside. Starting with characters - How long was Jess Moulson in your mind and when/how did you “find” her?

There’s a sense in which I didn’t so much find her as sew her together out of pieces of people I already knew. But that’s a half-truth. Even when a character is based on one real person you take liberties. You re-invent and re-cast. And when she’s a composite of several people you end up even further away from where you started. 

That being said, there are a lot of aspects of Jess that were inspired by people I’ve known and loved and been very close to. I’d wanted for a long time to write a story about addiction, and been put off by a sense of my own limitations. I was both too close to the source material and too far away. I’ve known addicts, and I’ve been an addict, but my own addictions were, to be frank, very small potatoes. I was writing Jess from a perspective that had a fair bit of parallax to it, and it took a while before I felt like I knew her.

Q: Do your characters come to you before the plot or does the plot come to you first?

It can work either way. In this case the core relationship between Jess and Alex – the addict, and the person she’s wronged and feels responsible for – came before everything else. That dialogue was the conceptual core of the story. Then I decided on the prison setting, and a lot of the plot dynamic came as a result of that decision. The remaining characters all in their different ways either reflect Jess or strike sparks off her, and of course everything is built around her quest and the big misdirect that ultimately deflects it.

I probably have a weakness for elaborate plot dynamics, and some of my earlier novels were over-complicated as a result. I was slow to absorb the lesson that every story stands or falls by its characters, and that if you make the characters bend into odd shapes to fit the needs of the plot your audience won’t forgive you or stay with the story.

Q: How much control do you have over the characters? Did the book ever take completely unexpected turns?

No, not really. Some characters – like Salazar and Shannon McBride – ended up having bigger roles than they were originally meant to, but that’s not a control thing. At least I don’t see it that way. I’m always a bit wary of writers who claim their characters rebel and go their own way. It feels like a humble brag, with a barely disguised subtext. “My imagination is so humonguously strong that my creations wrestle their way off the page and have actual lives!”

I think what really happens is less magical but equally cool. You have an idea of who a character is and how they fit into your story. But then when you come to write them and really spend time with them they fill out in your mind. They solidify, and they accrete nuance and purpose. These are just by-products of you actually having to write them and work them out: the placeholder version of the character gets replaced by a fuller and – if you’re lucky – more convincing version. And at that point you may decide they’re working so well you want to use them more.

The best example I can come up with is from my comic book writing. In The Unwritten there’s a minor character named Pauly Bruckner. He’s a contract killer who gets trapped in the world of a children’s story, where he is effectively transformed into Rabbit from Winnie-the-Pooh. In this form, as Mr Bun, he’s desperately unhappy and slowly going mad, because the world he’s in resists his every impulse and instinct. So he tries to rebel and just makes things worse for himself. That was meant to be a done-in-one story, but Mr Bun was so much fun to write and so interesting to explore that we ended up returning to him again and again, and eventually we gave him a fairly big part in the series climax.

I love it when that happens, but I don’t think it says anything about my abilities as a writer. It’s just very cool, very precious serendipity.

Q: Harriet Grace is a terrifyingly real character. Do you know where she came from?

When I write monsters I try very hard to write them from the inside and to make their monstrousness understandable. Hardly anyone in real life sees themselves as evil. They always know where they’re coming from and what factors fed into their decisions. They forgive themselves for most things, and even when something troubles their conscience they’ll usually see themselves as fundamentally decent in spite of that.

Grace was partially inspired by a story I read about a brother and sister who were trafficking young women into prostitution. I was really struck by how these two thoroughly messed-up and vile human beings stood by each other throughout the trial and sentencing. How in spite of their utter lack of empathy for pretty much everyone else in the world they felt love and concern for each other, to the point where they each claimed the greater share of the blame to try to exonerate the other. Somehow in the novel that translated into the story of Grace’s relationship with Stephen Menzies, and its disastrous consequences for both of them.

That doesn’t explain Grace, of course, and it’s not meant to. The detail of her facial cleft and the rejection she suffered as a child doesn’t explain her either, but it gives you a starting point for understanding her – how a sense of her own victimhood could translate into a determination never to be weak or at a disadvantage again, and how some really bad things could follow from that.

M R Carey

Q: The prison in Fellside was convincingly - scarily - real to me. What ‘on location’ research did you do? 

I ended up doing quite a lot, but the permissions fed through the system slowly. By the time I got to do the majority of the actual prison visits the book was well underway. I went to Holloway twice, the first time to talk to the team doing the drug rehab work there – who were just amazing, really generous and helpful and full of insights – and the second time, after it closed, to visit the actual prison. I also went to two other prisons in the London area, where I did workshop sessions with groups of inmates.

But it’s fair to say that the bulk of the research was secondary. I read a lot of autobiographical writing by inmates and former inmates and a lot of articles about the modern prison system, which has changed out of all recognition in the last twenty years and is still changing. I tried to reflect those changes, and I tried to make Fellside as a setting as authentic as I could, but I took some liberties to make the story articulate as it needed to. One of the biggest inaccuracies, although it was a conscious decision, is about the size of the place. If Fellside really existed, and if it was as big as it’s stated to be in the book, there wouldn’t be another woman in jail anywhere else in the UK. Out of the entire prison estate of around 100,000 inmates, only 5000 are women.

Q: Did any writing particularly inspire Fellside?

I think Erwin James’ A Life Inside was the most influential secondary source. I decided not to read Piper Kerman’s My Year In a Women’s Prison because Orange Is the New Black was already happening and I didn’t want either to overlap with it too much or to push against it too strongly. It seemed safest not to know about it. I’ve seen the series since, though, and I think it’s amazing. I’m also reassured to find that it’s not like Fellside in any way that really matters.

Q: There is a point in the story where a thing happens - I'm not saying what it is - that seems to divide readers. Some say, that thing would never happen. How do you respond to that? (Do you respond at all?)

Do you mean in the appeal? Yeah, I freely admit that I was bending the logic of the judicial system to breaking point there. In reality it’s very hard to imagine the appeal court judges permitting the re-examination of a witness in open court like that, or allowing that re-examination to lead to a revision of the original verdict. That’s not how appeals work. But all the alternatives were a lot less dramatically satisfying. I just wanted to have that conversation happen in a forensic setting, so all the various clues could be put on the table and the truth finally produced with a big flourish. 

And I have the excuse that what comes out in court is – by this point – not the truth we’re really looking for. It’s almost a grace note, although obviously it has huge significance for Jess. It felt like a pardonable sleight of hand.

Q: What’s next? Is the story finished...?

In prose form, yes. But I’m working on the screenplay for a movie version. If it happens it will be produced by Poison Chef and directed by Colm McCarthy, the same team that did the movie version of The Girl With All the Gifts. That prospect makes me very happy indeed.

Q: Finally, a question that isn't directly the book. You're locked up in a privately run prison and you can can choose one book. Which would it be?

That would be a hard call to make. You’d need something that had a really meaty and satisfying style, so you could read isolated passages and still enjoy them. If it had to be just one book I’d probably go for Tristram Shandy. If I could cheat and have a series of novels, it would be either Gene Wolfe’s Torturer quartet or the Bas Lag novels of China Mieville – Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council.

Mike, thanks for those answers and I'll look forward to a Fellside film as well as the upcoming Girl with all the Gifts.

Fellside is out now from Orbit in hardback, paperback and e-book. You can buy it at your local bookshop, here, here or even here. 

The Girl with all the Gifts movie is out on 23 September.

To celebrate, I have copies of both books to give away. To enter, go to my Twitter, @bluebookballoon, follow and retweet the pinned tweet. I'll pick a random winner for each book next Thursday (15 September). I'm afraid I can only post the books out in the UK and Ireland.

The Girl with all the Gifts

The Girl with all the Gifts
MR Carey
Orbit, 2016 (film tie-in edition)
PB, 461
Source: Paperback copy kindly supplied by the publisher, original ARC from Amazon Vine (2014).

In celebration of this book being released as a film, it's been reissued in paperback in a pretty nice new design - something that you don't often get with film tie-ins, in my opinion! It also has some nice extras - an interview with the author, some book group questions and previews of his next book Fellside and of Resistance is Futile by Jenny Colgan.

I'm therefore dusting off a review I did of Girl for Amazon Vine back in 2014: I blogged less, and never posted the review here.

I haven't made any changes, I think the review speaks for itself.


I hope and believe that this book will be a big success - I found it a gripping read, hard to put down and genuinely engaging.  It is though difficult to review without giving too much away, as as the effect depends on careful pacing and the gradual revelation of what is going on.

We are first introduced to Melanie, the Girl of the title, who may be about 10 years old.  She goes off to lessons every day - but the journey is from her underground cell, along a short corridor, to her classroom.  She travels strapped into a wheelchair, pushed by "Sergeant", unable to move her arms or legs. And once she arrives, her chair is placed so that neither she, nor her classmates, can communicate. The adults around her seem to either fear her, or hate her, or both. Apart from Miss Justineau, her favourite teacher.

Melanie's day to day treatment isn't by any means the cruellest thing that happens to the kids.  We slowly discover that something has gone very wrong with the world.  ("The population of Birmingham is zero!")  Outside the fence around the site where Melanie lives, threats loom - Hungries and Junkers - and paradoxically it's only Sergeant and his men who keep them at bay.  The site exists to find an answer, and Melanie may be the key.

Eventually, the fragile normality Melanie has known is threatened, and she and a small group of companions - including arch-torturer Dr Caldwell - have to band together to survive.

Though all this, Melanie grows and learns. Can she find a way not only to save herself, but the human race?  And if she succeeds, what will the cost be?  Dr Caldwell believes that the pain and suffering she inflicts is justified, given the potential prize.  Can that be right?  What does survival mean - it it more than finding a way to beat off or destroy the Hungries?

This is an action-filled story throughout, with Hungries and Junkers to be fought off, but it's also a story of discovery, at the heart of which is the developing relationship between Melanie and her teacher, Miss Justineau.  I found that sad and beautiful, as what Melanie discovers about herself, her origin and her life affects Justineau - even as the latter risks everything to protect the girl from the threats that surround her.

The book is well written and compelling. The closest comparisons I can think of are some of John Wyndham's post apocalyptic stories such as The Kraken Wakes, The Day of the Triffids or perhaps closest, The Chrysalids, where similar dilemmas are explored - but it is better than any of them, not least in the degree to which the characters become real.

Definitely one to look for in 2014. [And wasn't I right?]

Image from http://www.orbitbooks.net/

Review: Fellside by M R Carey

Fellside
MR Carey
Orbit, 7 April 2016
HB, 496pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley.

Before I get into this review I should issue a couple of warnings. First, it's going to be very hard to do the book justice without dropping some spoilers. I don't want to do that, so if you find things getting a bit... cryptic... that may be the reason. (Or it may be me reviewing badly, it can happen). Secondly, this is a very violent book in places. I didn't find that a problem but if that bothers you, take note. It is also, though, in places a very tender book).

Onwards, then.

Carey had a hit a couple of years ago with The Girl with all the Gifts and Fellside seems, at first, to resemble the earlier book. There is a sympathetic female protagonist with a dark history who's clearly in A Lot Of Trouble, an institutional setting, some real hard cases making her life difficult and - behind the gritty realism - an element of the fantastic.

But that's only, I think, superficial. While I enjoyed Girl a lot, this is in many ways a tenser, more complex story.

We first meet Jess Moulson when she wakes in hospital. She has suffered injuries and - beyond those - something very bad has happened. How bad, and the exact trouble she's in, would be one of those spoilers but it's enough to say for now that it carries her away to Fellside, a private mega-prison somewhere in (I think) a remote part of Yorkshire. There is some grim humour here in that the Governor believes he's running a model institution while the very opposite is true. Jess's problems only get worse: shut away (in her own view, deservedly) she's prey to the truly terrible Harriet Grace, leader of the prison drug gang; to prison staff, revolted by Jess (spoilers!) and not above dealing out their own justice; but most of all, to the voices that come in the night.

Jess has, it seems, a strange ability to walk through others' dreams - and hear the voices, to meet others who walk through them: "the dead were dreams that dreamed themselves alive. Maybe the living were too..." That means she can not only engage with her fellow inmates on a visceral level, but also, perhaps, with her own past. If she doesn't lose herself in the Other Place, might she be able to find the evidence that will free her from Fellside? But if it does - with so much else going wrong - with it be too late?

The book knots together Jess's own quest for redemption; her lawyers' attempts to prove her innocent; the machinations of Grace and her accomplices (willing and unwilling) as they try to use her for their own reasons; the despair of weak people, fallen into Grace's power; and a tragic love story. All woven round the nightmare world of Fellside, which Jess explores by day as a prisoner and at night, in her dreams, as something else.

What's especially good is the balance between the fantastic and the mundane. This is a supernatural story, no doubt about that, but Grace is a scarier monster than anything in the dreamworld and the day to day indignities and fears of prison life can't just be stepped away from but have to be lived through, and not only by the prisoners: others are locked away in Fellside too.

The characters are also real - frighteningly so in the case of Grace her associates, but everyone here - the other prisoners, the prison staff, Jess's legal team - is so well drawn that you could have just met them at work. You mostly wouldn't want to, but you could. In fact I think I've met real people who were less convincing than some of these characters. Equally with the setting. Yes, the systemic reality of a prison is exposed in harsh detail (the corporate flam of the PR and legal suits, the smug Governor) but that's not the main point: quite simply, Carey makes Fellside-the-place simply, simply, real. (Another scary thought. I don't want it to be).

This degree of reality both in setting and character means that when it's time for the fantastic you simply walk with Jess and accept it - the weird dream logic, the nighttime world - and therefore its consequences. This is how such things would be, if they were. (The reality does slip, but only at one point - you'll know the moment when you reach it, in a courtroom scene where something happens that is obviously needed for the sake of the plot, but that wouldn't, in real life: by then though the book has built up such a head of steam that that this scarcely registered with me.) That's how, for me, this is a better book even than The Girl with all the Gifts.

The complexity of Jess's situation, her need for redemption - and where will she find that in Fellside? - the absolute reality of the characters and the fascination of the mystery that she very gradually unteases, kept me totally hooked and wanting more of this.