Dan
Women and conflict is the theme of this anthology. Edited by Bristolians Joanne Hall and Roz Clarke, it features fifteen stories, all by female authors, spanning fantasy and SF. The overriding flavour is one of gritty combat - there's no cheesecake fluff here. Think Ellen Ripley
The nature of anthologies is that you're going to like some stories more than others, but there are no real duffers here. I'll highlight a few that stood out for me.
My favourite was probably Lou Morgan's “Archer 57”, a tale of loss, revenge and desperation in a dystopian future. Joanne Hall's “Arrested Development” has a nasty sting in the tail that makes you reassess the protagonist and ponder the ethics of what she's doing. KT Davies' “The Quality Of Light” is more a vignette than a full story, but it's an evocative piece that conjures the sensations of medieval battle very effectively (like I would know). Danie Ware's “Unnatural History” is a bughunt, not a stand up fight, a gothic monster movie with hints of Lovecraft and Mieville. “Fire And Ash” by Gaie Sebold is rightly placed at the end of the book. It's about aftermath, surviving the wars and what comes next.
It's a good collection. My only caveat would be that reading all the stories in one splurge means the theme becomes a bit repetitive and restricting, but that's an issue with all themed anthologies, and one easily avoided by pacing yourself (if you can) and parcelling the stories out.
After five strong secondary world fantasy novels, this is a change of direction for Daniel Polansky. It's firmly set in a modern New York of hipsters and craft beers, but also one where the supernatural is very real. There are pirates on the Gowanus Canal, a subway ride through the circles of Hell, and goblin markets where you can buy your heart's desire. The sense of place is one of the strengths of the book. We see it all, from Wall Street financier luxury to grubby dive bars. Our hero is the almost nameless M, a magician without any visible means of support who nevertheless has a knack for navigating the city and its denizens to his advantage. If he's between homes, an apartment sitting gig will open up, if he's thirsty someone will buy him a drink. His insouciant cockiness puts me in mind of no one so much as John Constantine. In fact, there's a vaguely edgy, vaguely hip quality to the whole book that's reminiscent of mid 90s Vertigo comics.
It's an engaging read, but it's quite lightweight. I enjoyed it a lot while I was reading it, but I'm not sure how long it will linger in the mind. The lack of gravity is emphasised by the structure. It's more a series of vignettes, episodic adventures of M and his friends, than it is a complete novel. There is a loosely overarching story of two rival magical leaders, but it's mostly background stuff until the end. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Polansky had been writing these stories as palate cleaning diversions between his other novels and has now lashed them together as his next book. That might be a good way to approach reading it, taking a couple of stories at a time and then breaking for something else before picking it up again.
A City Dreaming is a fun and enjoyable book, just don't expect it to change your life.
(ARC received from Netgalley)
I didn't really enjoy this one. The first third or so was very promising, with an intriguing set up, but I felt the middle third lost steam and then the last part was a chore to get through. The faux-Victorian setting feels overdone, the villainess' plot is an incoherent muddle, the bad guy is so cartoonishly bad he is neither scary nor believable, and the attempted love triangle is unconvincing. It's a shame, as the premise was intriguing, but the execution didn't live up to my hopes
As always with Connolly, this is a terrifically readable thriller, well written with vividly drawn characters and a plot that keeps you turning the pages. The only reason this isn't a four or five star review is my building frustration with the underlying big story of the series. It's an intriguing story of good vs evil on a cosmic scale, but it is moving so glacially slowly that it is danger of losing my interest. I'd love it if there was an endpoint in sight, if Connolly said “five more books and it's done” but right now I feel I'm investing n something which is never going to pay off.
An SF epic, limited (mostly) to one planet but roaming oh so far in time. We follow the evolution of uplifted spiders over a huge span of years, tracking their scientific advances and societal development. Probably loses two stars for getting a little baggy midway and for spending too much time on humans who are neither as cool or interesting as the spiders, but then it gets one back for an ending that is clever and hugely satisfying. A good read.
When news broke that Joe Hill's new book was about a disease-inspired end of the world, it was hard not to think of his dad's epic The Stand. I dismissed that as a hopelessly lazy comparison, at least to begin with (more on this later). The Fireman is a very different book in scale and mood. Civilisation may be collapsing across the world, as populations fall prey to Dragonscale, a spore that infects its victims, paints beautiful patterns on their skin, and then causes them to combust, but this book focuses entirely on New England, and the story of school nurse Harper Grayson, pregnant and infected. It's one small story in a global catastrophe, which keeps the stakes low but very personal. Harper's unhinged husband (wrongly) blames her for infecting him and is bent on carrying out a suicide pact he thinks they'd agreed on. She is determined to live and bear her child, and so escapes, whereupon she falls in with a small community of infected people who may have found a way to live with Dragonscale. One of these people is the titular Fireman, a mysterious fellow with an English accent and a dirty fireman's jacket. He is notable for being able to somehow control the Dragonscale fires, and he starts a slow burning romance with Harper. Life in the colony is peaceful and safe, but there are serpents in this particular Eden, and it won't be long before they rear their heads. Because, let's face it, it would otherwise be a pretty boring 700 pages, wouldn't it?
Beyond the immediate narrative, there's plenty to get your teeth into here.The workings of the disease are not unlike social media, with strong parallels with the behaviour of Twitter mobs. It's interesting to read the book as a fictional counterpart to Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed as an examination of how people can become lost in groupthink and chasing the approval of their peers with no regard for right or wrong.
This is also a celebration of the power of story. It's full of references to Harry Potter, Mary Poppins, Doctor Who, Fahrenheit 451 and more. A key family name throughout the book is even Storey, for heaven's sake, which leads to the wonderful line: “All the rest of us flutter round you Storeys like moths around candles”. Of all stories though, the one that looms biggest behind this one is The Stand. As I said up above, it seems lazy to say that just because of the author's genes, but the parallels are too many to be anything other than deliberate. A world ending disease, a deaf mute called Nick, an obnoxious teen called Harold, a quasi-religious leader going by the title Mother....I'm not quite sure what Hill means by this. Respect for his parent? A cheeky proclamation that a baton has been passed on? At any rate, it's safe to say he has not forgotten the face of his father.
Above all, it's a hopeful book. In the midst of disaster there are many small moments of humanity, people helping each other out, trying to form new societies and just being decent. We are a long way from Cormac McCarthy's The Road here, as is acknowledged in another literary nod. It's no Wyndhamesque cosy catastrophe though (and I only just twigged that the Camp Wyndham in the book must be named for John Wyndham!). There's no flinching from the reality of mass death, the villains are pretty unpleasant and there's some fairly graphic gore. But this is a book about engagement with the world, about love, and about the need to survive in the worst of circumstances. Hill has been well known in the genre community for a while now, but I'd love to see him break out with this one. It's a terrific book, one which deserves to be read.
Melmoth, then.
Throughout Jaka's Story, Dave Sim had faced a barrage of complaints that there wasn't enough Cerebus / action / advancement of the overall storyline / mystical woo (delete as appropiate). So, ever cognisant of the needs of his audience, he gave them twelve issues of Cerebus clutching Jaka's doll and sitting almost catatonic outside a cafe while, up the hill, Oscar Wilde is slowly and painfully dying. That's it. There are cameos for passing characters from Church & State while Cerebus is occasionally dusted, but Oscar's death is the focus of this one. It's told in the same text panel and image style as the “Daughter Of Palnu” extracts in Jaka's Story, using actual letters from Robert Ross and Reginald Turner describing the last days of the real Oscar Wilde. The mood of the book is stately and sombre. It is a study of a man on the edge of the abyss, unflinching without being graphic or voyeuristic. As you might expect, it is dark and disturbing, with all the emotional heft a serious consideration of the subject deserves. That's not to say there is no light relief. Mick and Keef are back for a few pages, and the Roach's latest incarnation as normalroach is an hilarious study in repressed anger, but you won't be closing this one with many chuckles.
Given that this story takes us up to the exact halfway point of the saga, it's easy to draw comparisons with what we know about Cerebus' death, which at this point Dave had been promising for several years would occur in the very last issue. In his final days, Oscar is far from alone, unmourned and unloved. A great deal of the emotional power of the book is in the sadness and confusion of Robbie and Reggie, and their helplessness in the face of the inevitable. With the text taken from other sources, Dave can concentrate on the art, which is just wonderful. The character sketches are superb, and Gerhard has upped his game even further on the backgrounds. For such a slow, small story, there is a real cinematic feel, a sense that the events on the street are being viewed through a camera which simply records what it sees, sometimes panning up and down the hill, from Dino's Cafe to Oscar's hotel and back. A powerful, haunting work.
This is, believe it or not, where I started reading Cerebus. Probably not the best jumping on point, but even with little knowledge of the background, the quality of the work was evident. It was autumn 1990, and I'd just started at Nottingham University. There was a basement in the Virgin Megastore with a comics concession in, and I eagerly fell on it, as exactly the sort of thing I'd been starved of growing up in the deep South West. After I'd been in a few times buying pretty much whatever DC put out with a Mature Readers tag, the bearded guy behind the counter said “you might like this”, and slipped a random issue of Jaka's Story into my bag, explaining that the new storyline, Melmoth, was starting imminently. I read it, didn't really understand what was going on, but liked what I saw, and started buying the monthly issues regularly. That was Mark Simpson. Over the next few years, he, and his co-worker Stephen Holland, introduced me to so many great comics. After that, Mark and Stephen went on to open Page 45, and blew me away with their vision of what a comic shop could and should be. I kept in touch once I'd left the East Midlands (Mark and Stephen both ended up coming along on my stag night), and I've bought my comics from them for quarter of a century now. Well, only Stephen for the last ten years or so. One night in 2005, Mark went to sleep and just didn't wake up. There's a nice piece about him on the Page 45 website: http://www.page45.com/world/about/mark-simpson-1968-2005/ . As if this book wasn't suffused enough with death, I'll always associate it with Mark, just for that simple act of kindness (which, let's face it, was also a pretty good business decision, as it led directly to me spending hundreds and hundreds of pounds on the rest of Cerebus). Rest in peace.
My usual random observations
– Something that struck me this time is the sequence where Cerebus sees the chained Astoria in the middle of the road, and then seems to swap places with her again, as happened in C&S. This is a pivot, and it's after this vision that he starts to (slowly!) emerge from his catatonia. It also seems to have affected things in the outside world – it's after this, for instance, that the waitresses change, which I don't think is otherwise explained or commented on. I'm not entirely sure what is going on with this swapping.
– those are some very pigeony pigeons.
– what an epilogue. After almost forty issues of Cerebus doing very little, this explosion into action kickstarts the second half. The next couple of books are Cerebus back in high gear, and it starts here.
– In the afterword, Dave talks about having to excise one of Oscar's comments, as he could find no workable equivalent for “Jew” and didn't want to face a deluge of mail questioning the existence of Judaism in ancient Estarcion. Just remember that when we get to Latter Days.
A new Christopher Brookmyre is always cause for celebration round these parts, doubly so when it's a Jack Parlabane novel. Black Widow is a fast and gripping read, cleverly put together with a cast of characters that are interesting and / or likeable. The slapstick grand guignol humour of Brookymre's earlier funnier stuff now seems to be permanently MIA, but this is still quietly witty, and unafraid to offer a mordant chuckle at some very bleak events.
Diana Jager is a surgeon with a controversial past who finds herself the chief suspect in the disappearance of her husband. Journalist Parlabane is at the lowest of ebbs, newly divorced with a career in the toilet. He is engaged by the husband's sister to find out exactly what happened, and as is his wont, starts tugging on all manner of loose threads until the sweater is completely ruined.
Diana is a hunter twice over, in name at least. She's cool, calm, ruthless when she needs to be and not afraid to break rules if she benefits. But is she a murderer? You will probably change your mind half a dozen times as you progress through this very well constructed book, until you reach the ending and are forced straight back to the beginning to reread the early chapters in a new light. The clues Brookmyre scatters throughout are clever enough that you'll pat yourself on the back for catching them, while all the time you're missing what's really going on. Not unlike Jack Parlabane himself.
Deaths aside, this is a story all about relationships, marriage, and the myriad ways two people can mess each other up. I'm not sure there's one happy couple in the book (although there are a few hopeful signs by the end). I found myself genuinely concerned for the author while reading it, as the descriptions of life after a disintegrating marriage had a painful ring of truth to them. I hope he's just got a good imagination.
Central Station is a middle Eastern border city, a huge spaceport between Israeli Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa. Space travel is but a tiny element of the book though, as Tidhar is more interested in these scrabbling to survive at the foot of the gleaming towers. If there's a throughline to the novel, it's the Chong family and their affiliates - the book follows various Chongs, with the most pagetime given to Boris, recently returned to Earth from space. His lovers, father, cousins and various other connections (an artist who makes and kills gods, a rag and bone man who may well be immortal, a young woman infected with a disease akin to vampirism that makes her thirst for data) all take centre stage for a while before fading back into the mass of humanity that makes up Central Station. And that's really my only gripe with this book. You can throw around phrases like “mosaic novel”, or “collage fiction”, but there is no escaping that this book is a collection of short stories loosely lashed together. There's no overarching plot (well, there are hints of something in the background), several dangling threads and not a great deal of action. But what you do get is an outstanding depiction of this new society. Tidhar has created something recognisably human, yet quite alien at the same time. It reminds me in some ways of Ian MacDonald's great SF novels set in the world's emerging economies where the shock of the new is multiplied by our Western unfamiliarity with existing cultures and mores. The writing is tremendously evocative of this future culture. You will taste the dust of Central Station in the back of your throat by the time you finish. It's a book that has lingered in my mind, probably one of the best SF novels that will be published in 2016, but not one to be read for quick thrills.
[I received an ARC of this book from Tachyon via NetGalley]
It's the early hours of the day after Halloween, and four young girls' paper rounds are about to get very weird indeed...before most people have eaten their breakfast, the girls will encounter mysterious hooded figures talking gibberish, some kind of space capsule, futuristic knights riding pteranodon like dragons, and more.
Brian K Vaughan's SAGA is my favourite ongoing comic series, and this sees him taking that super imaginative pulp SF vibe and putting it firmly into an Earthbound location, and even more firmly into a 1980s setting. There are intriguing ideas here, and I like the art and it's palette of blues and purples a lot, but it's hard to be any more positive than that at this stage. The four principals feel a little underdeveloped so far, in contrast to the way everyone fell in love with SAGA's cast from the off. I like the way the story piles mystery on top of mystery, but a lot will depend on the resolution of those mysteries. Vaughan has thrown an awful lot of balls into the air, and at the moment we have no idea where any of them are going to land. There's a lot of promise here, and this could turn out to be a brilliant series, or it could just as easily collapse into a shambolic mess. I'll stick around to find out, but I'm not completely onside yet.
After nine novels, this is Joe Abercrombie's first short story collection, all based in his First Law universe. Although the short story is more associated with SF than fantasy fiction, people who have enjoyed the novels will find a lot to enjoy here. There's plenty of Abercrombie's trademark violence, none of which he flinches from describing, as well as the humour that relieves the relentless grimness of the setting. A lot of these stories are very funny, in a “throw your hands up and laugh at the unfairness of the world because there's nothing else you can do” kind of way.
Characters from the other First law books float around the edges of these stories, but they are mostly standalone works. A bit of background knowledge is useful, but not essential. Several of the stories in the book follow the adventures of Shevedieh the thief and the warrior Javre, two women who have been thrown together by circumstance and end up in a series of scrapes across the continent like a latter day Fafhrd and Grey Mouser. These stories are the most enjoyable works here. They could easily have been fixed up into a short novel of their own, and I'd love to see Abercrombie return to this pair, especially as my only grumble about this collection would be that quite a few of the stories are more like vignettes that place you in a scene and then then whip you away with the outcome unresolved. But being left wanting more isn't exactly a bad problem when it comes to reading, is it? If you've never read any Abercrombie then you should probably start with the novels, but one you've torn through them and you're wanting more this collection will do nicely.
[I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review]
I came to Polansky via his highly enjoyable Low Town books, essentially crime novels given a fantasy spin. Those Above is a much more traditional kind of epic fantasy, set in a world where humanity is subject to the titular creatures, a sort of avian race that have effortlessly mastered us. The book follows four characters at various levels of society, from the highest to the lowest. And that is really my main problem, because that is all it does. There is very little plot, a bit of enjoyable politicking in one strand, but mostly a slow observation of characters and their interactions with others. The world building and character drawing is strong, and I enjoyed reading it a lot, but the end of the book has barely advanced from the beginning. I understand it is part of a two book series, and this has done a good job of putting pieces in the right places, but the second volume needs to deliver on story. I wonder if this would have been better served by being published as one big standalone novel - it works for Guy Gavriel Kay, after all.
A pacy and intriguing first half sets up a good mystery against the backdrop of interstellar war. Unfortunately the second part squanders all this promise in a mess of cliché and terrible plotting, where vital elements are hastily introduced by infodump just a page or two before they need to appear. This was potentially a good SF adventure, but it could have done with another draft and a good editor first.
Short review - it's amazing. This is the longest sub-story in the whole Cerebus project (unless you count Mothers & Daughters as one book instead of four). It starts with Cerebus as houseguest and ends with, well, everything.
I mentioned in my High Society review that a lot of core Cerebus was still waiting to be introduced at that book's end. This is where it all happens. We finally see the military force of the matriarchal Cirinists, and learn exactly what Cirin is (ahem). Cerebus' magical nature comes into focus, things like the tiny Cerebus appearing to Astoria, or the sneezing fire (and how good is the sequence where he picks up the one coin supposedly minted by Tarim, and the other coins start ripping their way out of the sacks and flying towards him?), and the preoccupation with cosmology starts. If I remember right, Dave has three attempts at explaining the beginnings of the universe throughout the 300 issues, and I'm not sure any of them have the impact of the amazing double page “that's what left of her” spread here.
It's a running theme of the book that Cerebus is his own worst enemy and Church & State makes that clear. His vanity and greed ruin his chances again and again, not least with the sphere that melts while he is distracted by the artists. It's this quality that make him so manipulable as well. As in High Society, he is set on his path through the book by the actions of others. For someone who doesn't have a huge amount of screentime, Weisshaupt is perhaps the most influential character in the series thus far. I love that Dave is confident enough in his worldbuilding to show us the consequences of actions we didn't see, without the overexplanation and infodumping of lesser works.
There is more foreshadowing scattered throughout the book. Dave must have planned this (the first 200 issues at least) down to the smallest details. I am constantly amazed at this laying of groundwork for things that wouldn't be fully explained for another six or seven years. Once again, Elrod's first appearance contains a seemingly throwaway line that means an awful lot more once you've read a few books on, as does one of the sequences in Cerebus' dreams shortly afterwards. Even little things like Boobah thinking something fell in the pantry resonate with knowledge of what's to come. Possibly the most extreme is the way one illustration in the first volume suggests that Dave had a pretty good idea of the way he was going to draw the key moments of issue 300 even back at this point. And as for “You live only a few more years. You die alone. Unmourned. And unloved.” - well, we'll see, won't we?
I could sit and pick out highlight after highlight (“Oy should wont to boy drogs wif moy ‘alf”, “Sounds like my ex-wife” “It is”), but my favourite part of the whole book is the Astoria's trial sequence. The rising tension and sense of something hugely disruptive approaching is expertly handled, and the way the page layout forces you to read quicker and quicker is masterful. In fact, the rhythms of the storytelling throughout are phenomenal, and then Gerhard's appearance partway through the first volume is the final piece of the jigsaw. His backgrounds - hotel, tower, moonscape - are just exquisite. In fact, almost everything here is wonderful. There's philosophy, comedy, cosmology, drama, a sharp understanding of power and institutions, plus the sheer quality of the characterization, the dialogue, the art, the structure - this is quite possibly as good as comics get. Not bad for a funny animal book.
This is an excellent tale of teenage friendship and demonic possession. As young girls, Abby and Gretchen become fast friends. As they hit their mid teens, Gretchen begins to change, sparked by a night of youthful experimentation that goes wrong. As you might expect, it takes a while for Abby to realise that her best friend has been possessed by a demon, but once the satanic penny finally drops, she becomes caught up in an all consuming struggle for Gretchen's soul.
A lot of other reviews mention the 80s nostalgia of the settting, and they're not wrong, but this also has a lot of the flavour of classic 70s religious horror movies like The Exorcist and The Omen. It's a fast moving engrossing book that kept me turning the pages. I really cared about whether or not Gretchen could be saved, and I found the portrayal of the all encompassing friendship between the girls quite moving. Other highlights of the book include a phone call that is genuinely spooky, a climax that is over the top in all the right ways, and a poignant final chapter. A special shout for the depiction of Charleston - Hendrix evokes a decaying swampy atmosphere that fits the narrative perfectly.
Easy five stars for this modern crime classic. Set on the fringes of the 1992 LA riots, it's the story of Latino gangs using the city meltdown and the desperate overstretching of enforcement agencies to settle their own scores. It's told as a series of vignettes over six days, each focusing on a particular character. These characters then appear in each other's stories, giving rise to a polyphonic evocation of just how utterly messed up gang culture is. This is thrilling, visceral, graphic stuff, a sledgehammer of a book that kept me turning the pages quicker and quicker.
Gripping and hilarious, this tale of a road trip gone horribly awry is one of the best books I've read this year. There is plenty of incident, from bad peyote trips to biker showdowns to a diner that may be run by cannibals, but there is also plenty of subtext to chew on, as a journey through America becomes a journey into the narrator's psyche. Jung's take on synchronicity is explicitly mentioned a few times, and his idea of the amina is at the heart of the book. And if that sounds heavy, don't worry, you're never far away from another tragicomically bad decision by our hero, usually while deep under the influence.
And Mr Keevil appears to know his Richmond Fontaine records, which is another plus as if one were needed.
I'm rereading Cerebus for the first time in a decade or more. High Society was always lodged in my mind as the first of the really good Cerebus books, but I was concerned about the reliability of memory and the perils of revisiting old favourites. I shouldn't have worried - this is still great stuff. It's funny, sharp and switched on, an amazing jump from the first collection. I don't think we see another quantum leap in skill like this in the rest of the series, or indeed in any other artistic endeavours I can think of off the top of my head.That said, the beginning is still raw Cerebus. The issue breaks are very obvious and there are far too many narrative captions (they finally drop out maybe a third of the way through the book, and Dave's storytelling skill has increased so much that you don't even notice their absence). The kidnapping and the Fleagle brothers are great fun, but it's when Astoria enters and starts manipulating Cerebus that it kicks up a whole another level. The economic and political detail is still far ahead of anything else I've seen in comics (apart from non-fiction works like Darryl Richardson's Supercrash), but it's also very funny. Some of my favourite sequences are the campaign trail encounters, where Dave's gifts for mimicry and revealing character through dialogue shine. It may be a fantasy world, but these sketches are so recognisably from our shared cultural understanding. John Cleese, misanthropic depressed Jewish comedians, That Farmer Guy From The Wuffa Wuffa issue, all so vivid in just a couple of panels. Election night itself is memorably tense, an excellently orchestrated issue. After that, we're into Cerebus' premiership, such as it is. Some people have complained that this section is rushed and flies by too quickly. It might well be that they are right and Dave had written himself into a corner after committing to wrapping up HS in 25 issues (if so, not the last time it will happen. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the size of the work – there was no going back and revising what was already in the public domain), but I always thought it was deliberate, and, along with the page design literally knocking Cerebus' world sideways, supposed to emphasise how overwhelmed he was by events. Maybe, maybe not.A few other random observations:The very last page is, considering it was created by a twentysomething, an astonishingly acute take on the tendency of the idealistic young to believe in pointless doomed causes.On this reread, I was completely floored by a particular stupid comment of Elrod's. Innocuous in itself, it takes on a whole new meaning once you've read Minds, which wouldn't be published for another twelve years or so. That's some pretty hefty foreshadowing.All those words about how it's much better than the first book and how this is the best starting point notwithstanding, it's surprising how many elements of what I'd consider to be “Core Cerebus” are still waiting to be introduced at the end of the book. The Cirinists have been an absolutely minimal presence, if they've featured at all, the Tarim / Terim dichotomy has barely been mentioned, and any information about the nature and number of aardvarks is missing – at this point, Cerebus is still basically just a funny looking character. Lots to come... I am itching to crack on with Church & State now. (FWIW, I reckon Sim's talent continues to build, albeit at a more incremental level, all the way through to issue 220 or thereabouts. After that, his technical ability soars – the lettering, page composition and character art in the final few books are all tremendous – but his narrative ability pretty much deserts him, until a late flourish with The Last Day).
it's the same indie snobbery as before, full of the same asexual losers loudly proclaiming how they really understand pop music, but what sets this apart from the usual Everett True wannabes is the structure. It describes one night in a Bristol club and each chapter /issue has a different viewpoint character experiencing the same events from their own perspective. Very clever and very well done. Hell, it even made me dig out a Long Blondes album for the first time this century.
A Home Front story that focuses on the less noble side of the Blitz. It's full of black marketeers, petty theft and casual dishonesty but it's also an excellent character study of a misfit orphan and the struggling single mother who takes him in. They are two people you'd probably try to avoid in real life, but Evans gives them warmth and humanity.