PotsandPlots

This month, I have so many books piling up that I’ve not been searching for new ones quite as hard. Yet, some books just sneak up on you anyway.

Tower by Bae Myung-hoon, I saw on a rare trip to Foyles up in London. It looks like a combination of Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec and Geoff Ryman’s 253 – possibly with a little Ballard via High Rise thrown in.

“Tower is a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. Each story deals with how citizens living in the hypermodern high-rise deal with various influences of power in their lives…Bae explores the forces that shape modern life with wit and a sly wink at the reader.”

Looking for a link on Bookshop.org, for Tower I also stumbled on Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan

“Awarded Japan’s highest literary prize, Sympathy Tower Tokyo is an extraordinary novel from one of the most exciting new voices in world literature. Partly inspired by conversations with an artificial intelligence, it offers an extraordinary defence of the power of language written by humans, a touching exploration of the imaginative impulse, and an often hilarious send up of our modern world’s unrelenting conformity.”

Sounds intriguing.

I recently discovered the Michael Moorcock Library from Titan Books. I’ve been fortunate enough to receive two new Hawkmoon books, which I’ll be reviewing soon which led me to realise there is a huge pile of Moorcock graphic novels that I didn’t know existed.

I loved the Eternal Champion books when I was a teenager, and would love to work my way through this library and, who knows, even revisit some of Moorcock’s novels. If only there were more time. In any case, if I enjoy the Hawkmoons, I might give Elric Vol. 1 a try.

Psalms for the End of the World by Cole Haddon has a brilliant title, and feels worth reading, whatever the subject of the book. It promises to be a novel “interconnected across space and time by love, grief, and quantum entanglement.” Not dissimilar to Nicholas Binge’s Dissolution that I read last year. I’m definitely up for more!

The Chemist by A.A. Dhand promises to be an adrenaline-filled thriller about methadone and drug cartels. I do like chemistry adjacent thrillers (well, I think he’s a pharmacist) and this one has piqued my interest.

In Feb 16th-22nd’s Big Issue, Annie Hayter reviewed The Age of Calamities. I’m not a huge short story reader, but this one has piqued my curiosity. It’s filled with stories that add a supernatural twist to history, Anne Boleyn continuously rising from the dead, increasingly annoying her bad-tempered husband. Joan of Arc replanted to 1926 or the story The Napoleons are Multiplying, which just sounds wonderful without knowing any more about it.

A late entrant to the list, which I’ve seen mentioned in a few places, including Nils Shukla on Bluesky (who often has great recommendations), is R J Barker’s Mortedant’s Peril. is a detective-who-speaks-to-the-dead fantasy-crime novel, which sounds great. I’ve been meaning to read a book by R J Barker for ages, and this might tip the balance. It’s not out until May, though.

Final link to Gareth Hanrahan’s The Dungeon Book, which is a Jungle Book retelling of a small child left to die by a wizard in a fantasy dungeon. Rather than eat her, the critters and the denizens of the dungeon decide to raise her instead. Feels like a light read in the vein of Django Wexler’s Dark Lord Devi books – which, by the way, I loved, but have never reviewed – so check those out too.

All links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.