– Reviewed by Daisy English – Melissa Reddish’s captivating novella, Girl & Flame, tells the story of how a girl builds a relationship with a fragment of ember remaining from the fire which consumed her closest relatives: her father, her brother and her lover. The narrative is told through alternating voices, each one with a…
-Reviewed by Sarah Gonnet– Karen Little writes characters with a surface oddness. Whether they are floridly psychotic or merely displaying a level of everyday delusions and compulsions of creativity; they are all unusual and unique. As the book goes on it becomes easier to absorb the deeper psychological movements that the characters have as well…
The spotlight turns to the Best Novella category, and if these morsels don’t make you want to make space on your shelves, I don’t know what will! Naomi Booth, The Lost Art of Sinking (Penned in the Margins) I am delighted that The Lost Art of Sinking has been shortlisted for Best Novella. The Saboteur Awards have…
-Reviewed by Richard T. Watson– The Shapes of Dogs’ Eyes is part of Dead Ink Books‘ New Voices 2016 series – which also includes Lochlan Bloom’s The Wave and Wes Brown’s When Light’s Are Bright – which aims to promote new books from new authors. The same publisher has form in the Saboteur Awards, with…
– Reviewed by T. F. Rhoden – Those thoughts of ours, the ones that, if they do not haunt us, do whisper to us in a way which causes one to pause and reconsider some moment, some decision, some action of one’s life—those pangs of shiftless consciousness carry both the theme, and many ways, the…
– Reviewed by Bethany W. Pope – Sofia Banzhaf’s Pony Castle is a work of beautiful entropy that centres on a dark metamorphosis. Over the course of the novella we witness the nameless narrator’s slow dissolution into a flurry of drugs and sex. There are two central images; the plastic Barbie pony and the image…
– Reviewed by Elanor Clarke – I have to admit, I came to this book with certain expectations, as I enjoy sci-fi. Though I soon found it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d usually go for, it didn’t let me down – how could I not enjoy a book where someone wins an entire planet…
– Reviewed by Bethany W Pope – Oliver Langmead’s Dark Star combines many seemingly disparate elements into one beautiful and entertaining story. Drawing on strands of science-fiction, hardboiled detective noir, and formal poetry, Langmead tells the story of a planet where fuel burns darkly and only the wealthy (who own the power companies) can afford to generate…
– Reviewed by Elanor Clarke – The Running of the Tyrannosaurs, a stand-alone story, not quite a novella but a longer short story, tells a first-person account of a ritualistic, barbaric dinosaur race, run by naked, scientifically modified young women in some distant, dystopian future. Despite being short, the scene-setting works well. Stant Litore manages…
-Reviewed by Bridey Heing– In her latest independently published fantasy tale, Angelika Rust brings about the apocalypse. In the story, a hapless writer named Francis accidentally agrees to bring about the end of time when his shotgun marriage turns sour, which kicks off a string of events that lands Francis, his wife, and his muse…