Today's ARB review is of a book I found on a browse in December, and have read about a third of, and quite enjoyed. TAKE THAT, anti-browsers.

Maybe the hit rate is less reliable than my more targeted purchases in SF, but so what? Don't have to finish everything I start.

I mean, that's true for SF, but I regularly find things in sections where I'm not as saturated in Discourse but do quite enjoy, like travel and nature writing. And very often find mainstream-published novels with speculative elements that I didn't know about in general fiction.

The one I haven't read that I would be most interested in hearing about is the Sola.

In short, interesting novel, well worth a look.

But as I say, it is does end in the future, and I felt there was also a shift, over the course of the novel, to a more science fictional voice, by which I mean a voice which assumes and notices different things than a contemporary voice does.

Narayan isn't a successor to Modi, he is a replacement. More importantly, even, the climate stuff isn't an extrapolation, to start with anyway. When I saw Johal interviewed about the novel he described it as in part a response to Ghosh's challenge for realist fiction to depict the anthropocene.

Although it certainly ends in the near future there specifically isn't, as the review has it, a "firebreak in the historical record". One character is working on a restoration of a 1930 film for its centenary, several years after the novel starts, meaning that it starts now, or even just before now.

I finished it yesterday and am wrestling with how to review it, but I thought it was excellent (as was The Singularity, which is a thematic sequel to EH but made it to English first).

Both of Balsam Karam's novels will probably scratch this slipstreamy non-specific itch.

Someone bought me a Hotel Chocolat "velvetiser" for Christmas a couple of years ago, unprompted, and I thought "this is very generous and I do like hot chocolate but do I need this?" And turns out: yes.