Review: Nonesuch: A Novel

Nonesuch: A Novel by Francis Spufford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a fine piece of fiction.

It reminds me of Connie Willis, in that it's set in World War II, in the Blitz, and involves time travel, though the time travel doesn't come until the end. It also reminds me of Charles Williams, in that it's set in the period when he was writing and involves the occult (a secret society along the lines of the Golden Dawn, working from the writings of a 17th-century researcher who discovered how to bind lesser angels into statues around London). But it feels very different from both authors. It has more psychological and spiritual depth than Willis, and is more down to earth and much less self-consciously lyrical than Williams, and the main character is one that neither of them would write. It's like the best parts of both writers, plus something neither of them achieves.

The author started out as a nonfiction writer, which is probably why it feels so well researched, and yet the research isn't ground into the reader's face like some authors (including Connie Willis) sometimes do. It's used to give us a moment of observation that makes us feel like we're actually there and then, a passing detail that someone in that place and time might well have observed. It's literary in feel, but not in the trying-too-hard, overly lyrical way that some writers approach being literary. It feels literary because of the aptness of the observations, the way the characters come to understand themselves and each other, and the theme that runs throughout.

I'd summarize that theme as a confrontation and a contrast between people who believe that having power gives them the right to do whatever they want because they can, and people who believe that human freedom and dignity is a higher value. The most obvious level at which this operates is World War II itself, between the Nazis and the beleaguered British. Part of the plot hinges on the moment where Churchill almost didn't become Prime Minister and lead Britain to fight, instead of taking the easier route of folding in the face of the Nazi threat. But it's also operating at the level of the occultists and British fascists (there's considerable overlap between the two groups); real-life occultists often were seekers of power for its own sake, and if they had got it would have used it to exploit others for their own benefit, so this rings true. And at a personal level, it comes down to two women: Lall, an aristocratic British fascist who has got hold of some of the occult research and is determined to use it to impose her vision of how the world should be ordered, regardless of what anyone else thinks or what it costs them, and the protagonist, Iris, who is determined to stop her, who considers the losses Britain is suffering (and that she herself and her beloved are suffering) are a worthwhile price for freedom.

Iris is a complex character. She starts out, for me, at least, unsympathetic; she sleeps with a number of well-off idiots who she has no respect and not much liking for, mostly because she enjoys the sex, though also (very secondarily) because they take her to nice places beforehand. She picks up Geoff, a nerdy young radio engineer, at a bohemian club they both happen to be at, partly to spite Lall, who Geoff is obviously smitten by, though it's equally obvious Lall doesn't want him. But then events both supernatural and otherwise start to occur, and Iris starts to discover new dimensions in the world and in herself. Eventually, we get the story that's been hinted at throughout about the fire that changed her life, and it forms a key part of a devastating conclusion that pulls off the "surprising but inevitable" trick perfectly.

In fact, the whole thing is pulled off very nearly perfectly, with the odd exception (for such a careful researcher) of a family whose individual titles make no sense when taken together. I had a pre-publication version for review from Netgalley, and will mention this issue to the publisher, and it may well be corrected before publication. I did also wonder (view spoiler)[why, given that the characters knew how to free angels from their captivity, they didn't even discuss doing that to the statues in order to deny access to them for time-travel purposes(view spoiler)[, but that was a minor point.

This is by far one of the best books I have read this year, and given that I've read, so far, 150 books in 2025, that's an achievement. Highly recommended. (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

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Review: The Element of Fire

The Element of Fire by Martha Wells
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I've tried to read this twice now. The first time, I bounced off the complex setup and wordy descriptions early on, and set it aside for several years. The second time, I made it about halfway through before deciding that I just didn't care about the characters enough to trudge through the kind of tragic war story that I don't enjoy in order to find what happened to them. There are clear hints of two of the characters ending up together, but I didn't much like either of them or think they would be a good couple, so that didn't motivate me either.

My issues were mainly with the setting: a decadent court with a weak king, where the Queen Mother makes most of the effective decisions, and the king's older cousin is clearly the villain. Practically everyone, including one of the two main characters (the captain of the queen's guard), sleeps around constantly as if relationships don't matter even a little bit, and that alone made it not the book for me, even before the violence and gore and meaningless death of innocents really started to kick in. (To be fair, at least in the first half, we're only told, not shown, that the captain is promiscuous; we don't see him with anyone, even the widowed queen, his main lover.)

The two main characters, the captain and the king's older-but-illegitimate half-sister, do seem to be trying to do the right thing in a dark world, but... it wasn't enough for me.

It's well written for the kind of book it is; it just happens that I don't care for that kind of book. It's from the 1990s, meaning it's been scanned and run through OCR, meaning that there are quite a few small typos and misreadings, because publishers seldom do a thorough enough job of cleaning up the books they publish that way. (It's difficult work - I used to do it, and OCR doesn't seem to have improved much in the intervening 30 years, oddly.)

Not for me, might be for you.

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Review: Way of the Wolf

Way of the Wolf by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had this in my TBR folder for a while before starting it, because I assumed it would be very similar to every other Buroker, and I'm not always in that mood.

The characters do feel very familiar. As I've said before, it's like the author has a small number of actors who play all her characters, and while they bring something new to each role, you can recognize the similarities. The (tentative) love interest this time is played by the wacky, self-regarding guy, and the narrator and protagonist is the competent, snarky but slightly insecure woman.

Considered on its own merits, it's a solid piece of work. There's a strong setup: the middle-aged protagonist, Luna, was born a werewolf, left her pack after killing her lover while shifted, and has been taking potions to suppress her change for more than half her life, but now various events are pushing her towards returning to the pack. Her mother is ill, her cousins appear to want to kill her, and there's a mysterious box with a wolf carved on it that she wants to know more about. Her potion supplier has suddenly disappeared, and a lone werewolf (the wacky self-regarding one) has turned up and is poking around for who-knows-what. Machinating somewhere in the background is her creep of an ex-husband. Their two sons, who have left home, are mentioned but play no direct role in the plot. Luna just wants to work quietly at her job managing an apartment complex and save some money for her retirement, but the dynamic situation won't let her do that.

As usual for Lindsay Buroker, there are very few editing errors, just the odd hyphen where it shouldn't be and "palette" for "palate". The characters, while very reminiscent of all her other characters, are engaging, the banter (though, again, familiar) is good as always, the setup is original, and the pacing worked well for me. I'd probably read the whole series if I could get it as a bundle and was in the right mood.

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Review: Six Against the Yard

Six Against the Yard by The Detection Club
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Something unusual: a themed anthology contributed to by some of the best-known detective writers of the early 20th century: Margery Allingham, Ronald Knox, Anthony Berkeley, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Russell Thorndyke. There's also an article by Agatha Christie, not part of the original volume but published around the same time, about a real-life unsolved murder.

The theme is "the perfect murder," and in between the stories, George W. Cornish, a retired Scotland Yard detective, analyzes the crimes and talks about how they aren't perfect murders at all, and how detectives would go about solving them if they happened in real life. The one that he does concede is probably not soluble is the Sayers, but he manages to pull off a move of "even when I lose, I win" by claiming that it isn't actually a murder.

While Cornish's commentary is interesting, it does go a bit against the grain of the detective genre, which we all secretly know doesn't reflect real life. It's as if a relationship counsellor commented on a book of romance stories, or a Western historian on a book of cowboy stories, or an actual undercover agent on a book of spy stories. It takes the air out of them a bit.

The stories are mostly enjoyable, though. I'd read the Sayers before, in one of her collections, but the others were new to me, and they're varied and interesting - some told in first person, some in third. As with any anthology, some are better than others, but all of them, I thought, were at least competent. The Sayers was the best written, to my mind, though in terms of the actual crime story I most enjoyed Anthony Berkeley's venture into American-style hard-boiled meeting British matter-of-fact domestic crime.

The proofreading of what I assume is a scanned and OCR-interpreted text is, as usual, rough in spots.

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Review: Brigands & Breadknives

Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Travis Baldree is one of the best writers of cozy fantasy out there, and here he has produced a book that is pushing the boundaries of how much action you can put into a cozy, while absolutely writing a cozy book. It's not about the fighting. It's about the character growth.

Fern, the rattkin bookseller we met in Bookshops & Bonedust , comes to join Viv, the orc who has, until now, been the protagonist of the series, in the town where she's founded her successful coffee shop (see Legends & Lattes ). The idea is that she will set up her bookshop opposite the coffee shop and there will be retail synergy.

But if anyone has earned the right to be a cozy fantasy heretic, it's Baldree, and, as he says in his acknowledgements, “I don't want to pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life's woes.” Despite a successful launch and the fact that everything's going fine, Fern discovers that her mid-life crisis has not been averted by her move to a different town and reconnecting with her old friend Viv. She gets very drunk, and, happening to spot Astryx, a famous thousand-year-old elf warrior, on the street, on a whim hides in the back of her cart, thus involving herself in adventure. Astryx is on her way to collect a bounty on a chaos-agent goblin she has in custody, and other people want the goblin too - some for the bounty, others for revenge.

Neither Fern nor the ancient elf comes out of the experience unchanged. Along the way, they encounter a sentient ancient blade reforged (as a punishment) into a breadknife. His name is Bradlee, but, given his form, he gets the nickname Breadlee, which he objects to strenuously.

Fern continuing to use a nickname he hates is kind of bullying, or at least rude, but then, Fern is rude. Not just because she swears a lot, though she does, but because she's often blunt and tactless in her interactions with others. It's a wonder she survived in retail for so long, honestly.

Her imperfection, though, is part of what makes this book so good. She isn't brave, in any way; she can't talk to her old friend Viv about the fact that the bookshop isn't working out as she'd hoped, for example. But over the course of the story, she comes to care enough about the people she's with to develop a degree of courage, though, realistically, she's still incapable of fighting effectively. Both she and Astryx find new meaning through their journey together, and new honesty with themselves, and that, to me, is the real story (and the real strength) of the book. It's also part of what makes it cozy, even though it has more fighting than a cozy normally would.

There's not a lot to criticise for me here. It's all minor stuff: Fern gets drunk on whisky at the start of the book, but by the end of the book it's become brandy. There are some commas after adjectives that shouldn't have them, including a couple that come between the adjective and its noun. There's one misplaced apostrophe ("Warden's barracks" when there's more than one warden). The distances shown on the map and the distances described in the narrative don't seem to match up well, in that places that seem the same distance apart on the map can require very different lengths of time to travel between them, not obviously connected to the difficulty of the terrain. Astryx has an elder blade named Nigel, which she makes no attempt to conceal, but which somehow is not part of her legend.

The flaws are so minor, and the strengths so well handled, that I had to give it the full five stars, which I don't hand out particularly often. Not only is it sound in its craft, it has a deeper layer of meaning that is what I look for in a five-star book, and relationships and personal growth are at the heart of that depth. It's cozy in that it doesn't have epic scope - the things that matter in it matter mostly to the people directly involved - but they matter deeply to those people, and that makes for a compelling story.

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Review: A Knack for Metal and Bone

A Knack for Metal and Bone by Kim McDougall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't see nearly as much steampunk fiction these days as I used to a decade ago; the tide seems to have ebbed on it. I enjoy it when it's done well, though - which it rarely is, though this one, I'm glad to say, is largely an exception.

We're on a future post-apocalyptic Earth, it turns out through bits and pieces of backstory doled out in relevant moments rather than in infodumps (good). The eruption of magic six centuries ago filled the world with dangerous monsters. This apparently happened in the 21st century, based on how long ago Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is said to have been written. Much technology was lost, but some of it is now being reconstructed in a new way, using magical power sources. I love a good alternative tech tree based on magic, and this was a big plus for me. I'll note that I wouldn't have picked the book up if I'd known it was post-apocalyptic, since I don't usually enjoy that genre. However, it was far enough post-apocalyptic that it was effectively a secondary world in most respects.

The characters are a bunch of military misfits on a suspicious mission to investigate why a science station out in the Meadows (where the monsters are) has suddenly stopped communicating. There's a princess, which almost put me off - I can't stand princesses as a rule - but she's not at all princessy; she's a mechanic with a magical-technology arm and a mech familiar that turns from a bird into a mouse, all of which is cool. She's not a kid, either. She's 28. And there's a werewolf, also not one of my favourite tropes, but he also has an interesting backstory: he killed his incompetent general to keep his whole unit from being killed. Shifters are discriminated against, so he's in more trouble for being one than for killing the general.

Even though there's a large group of characters in the troop and most of them are introduced at once, I quickly got to be able to distinguish them, which is well done by the author. Most of the minor characters don't have much more than a couple of quirks and a role, but that's fine. The two main characters, who have a relatively slow-burn romantic attraction, have some depth to them, some of which is given in backstory references and flashbacks.

It's relatively well edited for a steampunk book, which are usually awful and full of vocabulary issues. There are a few notable glitches, though. The most common is the good old "let's eat Grandma" error (missing commas around terms of address), but there are a couple of misplaced apostrophes for plural nouns, missing question marks, and a few instances of sloppy typing around the end of a sentence (double period, no period, missing closing quotation mark). Numbers that are not between twenty-one and ninety-nine get hyphens they shouldn't have. There are a couple of vocab errors, but they're not frequent. I marked about 70 issues, which is two or three times the average for most books, but for a steampunk book is not terrible.

The most obvious worldbuilding mistake, which doesn't actually affect anything, is that the author seems unclear on how midnight works. Even in the far north (this appears to be former Canada, based on the wildlife, but a globally warmed version), even in the middle of summer, no matter how short the day is, the sun will never set after midnight. Midnight is the midpoint of the night - you know, the dark bit. It comes after sunset and before sunrise, roughly halfway between the two.

I did also wonder, though, how the city fed itself, given that the river and the plains were both full of monsters, and so not conducive to farming or fishing. Also, how an artificial limb fitted the princess both when she was a child and when she was an adult. And why so many contemporary references (like "didn't get the memo" or "harlequin" or the way people were named) had survived six hundred years of disruption and change. And why, now they had a magical power source which would be capable of driving it, nobody had brought back flight technology.

It's hovering on the border of the Bronze (lowest) and Silver (solid) tier of my annual recommendation list, but I think on balance it falls into high Bronze. Definite issues, both with the editing and the worldbuilding, but some good bones, strong character work and a compelling story.

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Review: The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I studied English literature at university, I deliberately stopped at the 17th century. The more 18th-century novels I read now, the more I realize what I was missing out on, though I might not have appreciated them as much back then. Yes, they're rambling and wordy, both in their individual sentences and overall, and I wouldn't put up with that style in a 21st-century novel, but I make allowances for the period. It still meant that I wasn't always in the mood to read this one, which is why it took me nearly two months to finish.

This is a comedy of characters. Told via letters, which have distinct voices for the different authors and often give markedly different perspectives on the same events, it chronicles the doings of a Welsh squire's family on a journey around Britain. It's also a travelogue, with reflections by the various characters (mainly Squire Bramble) on the good and bad aspects of the places they visit, to the point of satire sometimes on the more fashionable ones like Bath. If there's an overall theme, it's the difference between balanced and healthy prosperity, which increases and spreads through wise management and sensible development, and extravagance, which exhausts and finally consumes itself and leads to ruin and poverty, not only in money but also in character.

As well as being a comedy in the "intended to be funny" sense, it's also a comedy in the sense that it ends with marriages rather than deaths. There are several slowly unwinding plot threads that come together relatively quickly at the end.

The head of the family, Squire Bramble himself, is a querulous hypochondriac who comes off as a misanthrope, until you dig beneath the surface and discover that he's a kind and generous man with a short temper because of his real and imagined illnesses. His health improves towards the end of the book, on his visit to Scotland, about which he enthuses (the author was born there, by what I'm sure is no coincidence). Bramble's unmarried sister Tabitha is a type of 18th-century literature (or perhaps of English literature), the wrong-headed woman who can't be reasoned with. Their nephew is superficially a young coxcomb, but again has more depth to him once you get to know him. Their niece is a naive young woman who has fallen in love with an actor - who may actually be a gentleman going under a false name. Partway through, we get the advent of the title character, Humphrey Clinker (eventually revealed not to be his real name), an honest young man who the squire engages as a servant at a low point in his life. This kind act turns out well for everyone, particularly Clinker and the squire. A coincidence eventually comes to light which connects Clinker to the family in a different way.

Clinker becomes involved in the Methodist movement - then an evangelical awakening within the Anglican church, which appealed strongly to the poor - and his honest piety, leavened occasionally with credulous superstition, is a major feature of his character, treated sympathetically for the most part.

If the book has a fault, it's that there are too many characters to easily keep straight at first, some of whom are written to and others written about, and that you sometimes have to check the end of the chapter to see who's writing, though often you can tell from the voice or from the recipient. As I went on with the book, I became more orientated. The stage machinery is visible occasionally, when one letter-writer avoids retelling a good story that has been told by the previous one, saying "I'll tell you that story when I see you."

The Project Gutenberg version has occasional OCR/scan errors, where words have been mistaken for other legitimate words. Because a couple of the letter-writers provide amusement through their misspellings and malapropisms (to a degree that stretches disbelief sometimes, particularly when it's bawdy through no intent of the letter-writer), and because 18th-century English was often spelled (and punctuated) differently from modern English anyway, and had a lot of vocabulary that we've since lost, it's a pardonable fault. I will send them an email about the obvious substitutions I noticed, though. I know I will have missed some through not recognizing the original word.

Overall, though for modern taste it needs a bit of compression and streamlining, this is an enjoyable look at Britain of the later 18th century, its places, people, and social movements and conditions, and a mostly gently satiric comedy full of memorable characters and absurd incidents. If you enjoy, say, The Pickwick Papers or even Three Men in a Boat , you will probably enjoy this literary predecessor of both of them.

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