Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

 This is a beautiful novel, very much aimed at and very much hitting a distinctly postmodern kaleidoscopic target, with prose that occasionally literally took my breath away. The stated goal of looking at five lives (fictional lives, fictionally lost in a real event, fictionally given alternative lives) at the same handful of moments between 1944 and the novel's end in 2009 does make it really had to pull a single story out, though there are occasional interconnections if you pay attention, but it leaves room for Spufford to say things about London and England and Western culture and plausibly humanity overall; he makes glorious use of the space he gives himself. All the POV characters are deeply human, flawed on multiple levels, believable, plausible, different in their experiences and triumphs and regrets.

Railhead by Philip Reeve

 

This is a weird novel, a sort of very-far-future SF that somehow manages to have a strong whiff of Cyberpunk to it--corporate overlords, virtual hacking spaces, AIs, the works--though the primary feature of the setting is that humanity has reached the stars by finding a more or less literal railroad (the vehicles at least seem to run on actual rails) through magic-tech gates to the stars. Uh, apparently most of the trains have something like AIs in them. They all have names, and they have different personalities. The story is basically a Cyberpunk story, young thief ends up doing a job for someone who's probably not entirely to be trusted (though he does turn out to be telling more of the truth than the corporate overlords or the AIs, who are more or less the same things; this is probably not a huge surprise). It's reasonably well-written on the prose level, and most of the characters and their motivations are clear. Given this guy's best-known work is a four-book series, I wouldn't be shocked if there were other novels planned to follow on this; I think it ends just fine, and if there are other novels, I won't need to read them. Not the worst use of my evening, not deathless.

Gone Too Long by Lori Roy

 

This novel seemed to have lots to say about the inherent core depravity of the KKK and its members, but the story was simultaneously kinda muddled and more than a little obvious: I worked out the two or three big twists well before they were revealed, which ... might have been in the intended range, considering how clearly those things were telegraphed. Of course, "obvious" isn't just about plot details, and the intended message, here was pretty flipping obvious. The characters were kinda muddled and blurry around the edges, sometimes closer to the core--there are some characters who are doing things for reasons that aren't ever clear, without any apparently longer-term thinking about eventual inevitable repercussions. The prose was mostly stolid, without a lot of sparkle (some of that might have been that one of the primary POV characters is kinda uneducated). Even the ending was murky: There's clearly supposed to be something obvious happening next, but there are two options, and I don't think Ms. Roy was trying for a "The Lady or the Tiger?" kinda ending. Maybe I just wasn't in the fight headspace tonight, but this really didn't work for me all that well. Things happen.

Red Traitor by Owen Matthews

 

So it turns out that *Black Dawn* is the first book of a trilogy. This is the second. Like the first two, It's a a spy thriller mostly, with much less of Mystery about it, and a lot of Soviet Russian internal politics, which means authoritarian as hell, and survival is more or less the same as winning. There are some good characters, here: The main, Alexander Vasin, is clearly a detective at his core, not a spy or counterspy; his boss Orlov is pretty despicable (as are all the Politburo types); most of the people in the novel can fairly be described as "morally murky." The tension spins out really well, conveying just how close the Cuban Missile Crisis came to spiraling out of control to a nuclear exchange (and even though the USSR didn't have anything like the intercontinental reach it wanted the world to believe it did, there's nothing about "nuclear exchange* that is a good outcome). A really good book, and I'm looking forward to the third book in the trilogy, which is at this moment at the bottom of my checked-out to-read stack.

An Honest Man by Michael Koryta

 

This is an excellent novel, a cluttered story with clear characters; through the middle section it's more interested in unveiling a couple of the characters than in unveiling the plot/s they're dedicated to unraveling, but that's OK: They both have secrets they're skittering around the edges of, and telling the reader those secrets makes them--especially the main POV character--much more reliable, even as like tight-third-person narrators. Other than those characters being somewhat veiled, especially at first, and some other characters being intentionally murky as to their morality and/or trustworthiness, everyone's motivations are pretty clear, here. Koryta seems to have a thing for the physical edges of the US, between the North Atlantic and Montana; the metaphors there seem pretty obvious to me and they might even be intentional.

The Less Dead by Denise Mina

 

This is not a very good novel. The characters are unpleasant and mostly uninteresting, the story is jumbled without being complicated or complex; the primary saving grace is the occasional extraordinarily well-turned phrase. It's pretty clear the author has things to say, but she's not really able to get out of her own way here--that's a pity, because I think I agree with much of what she's trying to say.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

 

There was a wet fizzle at the coffee shop this afternoon, a novel that was clearly not working for me, so I bailed after like sixty pages. This, though: This was emphatically not a fizzle of any kind. Ms. Makkai writes with wit and passion here, telling interconnected stories of the slow-motion catastrophe that was AIDS among the gay subculture in the 1980s and about a woman whose brother had died in that catastrophe trying to resurrect or reconstruct or resomethingorother her relationship with her daughter. So much of the novel just rings with loss--the grief here isn't just for the dying, it's for the living and the innocence and hope they lost so much as the friends and lovers--that the little glimmers in the last few chapters feel like a goddamned sunrise, some sort of moment to be grasped and clung to because there are always people who can't stand that there are people who love and are happy in different ways than theirs. A beautiful, heartrending, eventually optimistic (ish) novel.