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Dave Hutchinson's The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man is a rather strangely structured novel. Despite the pulp SF title, for the first three-quarters of the book it's a slow-build technothriller with shades of Twin Peaks. The hero, Alex Dolan, is a seriously underemployed freelance journalist whose life is turned upside down when he receives a letter from multibillionaire Stan Clayton, the fifth richest man in the world, offering him a job. Clayton has bought an entire county in northern Iowa and built a giant supercollider underneath the fields, and he wants Alex to write a book about it, something that will counteract the negative press the project has received to date. Despite some misgivings, Alex accepts the job and moves to Sioux Crossing, where he finds that however friendly and welcoming the locals are (with the exception of his deeply cantankerous next-door neighbour) he can't escape the sense that something strange is going on. And then, just as it starts to feel that Alex might finally be going to find some answers, Hutchinson flips everything on its head and the final 25% is a very different story, one that seems like a much better fit for the title. I found this a bit disconcerting, especially as the second part doesn't answer many of the questions posed in the first. (I gather that Hutchinson published a short story called 'The Incredible Exploding Man' a few years ago, and from the synoposis I think that may have been substantially similar to the final section of the novel, with the earlier part forming an origin story for the characters in the short story.)

Aside from the slightly odd structure, I really enjoyed this; it's generally lighter in tone than Hutchinson's Fractured Europe series, but shares its wryly humorous tone and is a similarly easy, plotty read with interesting and mostly likeable characters.

(Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC for review.)

I really enjoyed Alix E. Harrow's Hugo-winning short story, A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies, so I was very interested to read her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which came out this autumn.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is the story of January Scaller, an awkward, stubborn girl with odd red-brown skin which marks her as a curiosity in turn-of-the-twentieth century America. January's father spends his time travelling the world collecting curiosities for the wealthy businessman Mr Locke, who is almost like a foster father to his employee's daughter. At the age of seven, January finds a Door to another world. At the age of seventeen, she finds a curious book which tells a story of Doors and love and adventure which changes her life for ever.

This was an absolutely delightful book; a clever fantasy with an engaging heroine which weaves its two narratives (January's own, and the book she finds) together so that they become a single, seamless whole, with vivid, beautifully-described secondary worlds, chilling but complex villains and an underlying critique of imperialism and conservatism which warmed my lefty heart. I wasn't entirely convinced by the romance subplot, and I did see a lot of the plot twists coming a long way ahead of January, but overall I loved this, and it turns out that a beautifully-written fantasy about escaping into magical worlds and books was just what I needed in a cold, dark, miserable December.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC for review.

Julia Simpson-Urrutia's Wax Works was described on NetGalley as 'an eerie Swiss boarding school paranormal crime novel', which intrigued me so much I absolutely had to requst a copy. I suspect it was the Swiss boarding school aspect, given that I am a Chalet School fan, though the school in Simpson-Urrutia's novel is actually very different from the Chalet School. Château Mont Rose's main function was to teach French to girls from wealthy families, but it was closed down following the death in suspicious circumstances of popular teacher Mlle Schwartz. Eight years later, it reopens as a combined hotel and waxwork museum. Several former students visit the hotel, and mysteriously disappear within days of leaving Switzerland. Inspector Cloquet of the Lausanne police, the officer responsible for the investigation into Mlle Schwartz's death, is suspicious, and when two more former students, Lauren and Rachel, arrive at the hotel as part of a team filming a ghost-hunting show he assigns his nephew and junior officer Paul to infiltrate the ghost-hunting team and protect Lauren and Rachel from supernatural interference.

Wax Works doesn't quite seem able to decide whether it's a police procedural, a psychological thriller or a full-blown horror story, but it's a fun read and surprisingly funny in parts (I was particularly entertained by the director of the ghost-hunting film, a man who is not only convinced that Frankenstein was the name of the monster but that he was the creation of Lord Byron and not Mary Shelley). I did think that there were probably too many characters, and some of them only seemed to appear very briefly with no connection to the main action of the novel, but it was generally enjoyable, diverting and not too taxing a read (important in a week when I have been utterly exhausted and needed undemanding books).

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a free eARC for review.

I was only vaguely aware of Kate Humble as a TV presenter (I don't think I've ever watched a show she presented), but I have been looking out for books about walking that aren't written by men and had noted her Thinking on My Feet: The small joy of putting one foot in front of the other as a book I might want to try.

Thinking on My Feet is written in diary format, chronicling a year of Humble's walking (and sometimes running). I wasn't entirely enamoured of it to start with; the early sections involve rather a lot of walking in far-flung locations where Humble is working (Kenya, India) or on holiday (the Caribbean), and I was a little uncomfortable at these countries, where for many of the locals walking is the only option, being used as a backdrop for a white woman from a privileged Western country's narrative about the benefits of walking. However, I enjoyed the descriptions of walks nearer to Humble's home in the Welsh Marches, and as I kept going I found myself liking the book more. It didn't really seem to settle into its stride until about half-way through, when instead of being a day-by-day diary of short walks the whole "Summer" section is devoted to a single nine-day walk along the Wye Valley Way, from the river's source to Chepstow, while the "Autumn" section that follows has a much stronger thematic unity, exploring the connections between walking and mental health and including interviews with other people who have found that walking has positive effects on mental health and a New York therapist who conducts his appointments while walking. I felt that the second half of the book was much stronger than the first half, and wondered whether Humble had found that her theme only emerged gradually through the writing process, and she wasn't able to reshape the earlier material enough to completely fit it.

In the end, what I liked most about Thinking on My Feet (and the reason why the bits set in other countries worked least well for me) was the way it captured the everyday pleasure of walking and reminded me just how much I like getting out in the fresh air and countryside (not that I need reminding, really, but I don't always think about walking while I'm reading a book).

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a free eARC for review.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Gods of Jade and Shadow is a fantasy set in Mexico in the 1920s and based on Mayan mythology. It begins in a small town in the Yucatán, where Casiopea Tun lives a Cinderella-like existence, treated as a servant in the house of her wealthy grandfather and bullied by her cousin Martín. All of this changes when she opens the trunk at the foot of her grandfather's bed and revives the Mayan god of death, Hun-Kamé, who demands that Casiopea helps him to find the three missing parts of his body which will restore him to his full powers and enable him to defeat his brother, Vucub-Kamé, who has stolen the throne of the underworld, Xibalba, after beheading Hun-Kamé and giving his bones to Casiopea's grandfather to guard. Casiopea and Hun-Kamé's journey takes them across the length and breadth of Mexico, from the Yucatán to Baja California, encountering demons, gods and necromancers in their quest before the brothers finally confront one another.

It was fascinating to read a fantasy based in a mythological tradition I wasn't familiar with at all, and Casiopea is a likeable and sympathetic heroine, but overall I didn't enjoy Gods of Jade and Shadow as much as I'd hoped I would. Mostly I think that was down to the writing style; I can see why Moreno-Garcia decided to opt for a narrative voice reminiscent of fairytales, to underline the mythic subject-matter of the novel, but I found it quite distancing, flattening emotions and the descriptions of the landscapes Casiopea and Hun-Kamé travel through and the places they visit, so that instead of the richly textured, vivid read I felt the book should have been it seemed muted, one-dimensional and ultimately rather forgettable.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC for review.

Jaime Lee Moyer's Brightfall is a fantasy novel inspired by Robin Hood. Rather than revisiting the familiar legends, it's set some twelve years later, when the Merry Men have settled back into normal life. Robin has retreated into a monastery, abandoning Marian to bring up their two children without him. Her peaceful life in the forest with her children is interrupted when she receives the news that several of her old friends have died in mysterious circumstances. Abbot Tuck suspects a curse, and asks Marian to use her magical powers and craft to track down the killer.

I liked this a lot; it's an enjoyable new take on a well-known story, with an engaging plot and interesting, likeable characters. (And of course, I'm always predisposed to like fantasy with older female protagonists.) Moyer mixes the Robin Hood legends with fairytale elements; magic, mythical beasts and a Fae Court that reminded me of 'Thomas the Rhymer' to tell a story about love and loss and moving on. I had some minor niggles, both historical (I don't think a 13th-century miller would actually be selling flour, rather than the services of the mill) and geographical (it being two full days' walk from Hucknall, north of Nottingham, to Mansfield, when Google Maps tells me they're only nine miles apart), but they certainly weren't enough to stop me enjoying the novel. I don't think it's necessarily a book that will stay with me for a long time, but I was in the mood for some fluffy, undemanding fantasy after reading The Handmaid's Tale, and this definitely fit the bill.

(I would note that Brightfall does include the death of a child, so may not seem as fluffy to those who are sensitive to that in books.)

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a free eARC for review.

Peter Fiennes's Footnotes is subtitled 'A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers'. Given the title, I had been expecting the journey to be on foot, but in fact although there is some walking (including a walk up Snowdon in a fog, which exactly mirrors my experience when we climbed Snowdon some years ago) the writers in whose footsteps Fiennes is following use a variety of modes of transport, particularly horseback and train, while Fiennes's journey is mainly by car. He starts in Swanage, Enid Blyton's preferred holiday destination and the inspiration for the fantasy Devon of her books, all cream teas, smugglers' caves and lashings of ginger beer; he then moves on to Cornwall, where he follows Wilkie Collins and the surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun around the coast. The seventeenth-century diarist Celia Fiennes' journey takes him from Launceston to the Welsh borders; he then follows medieval cleric Gerald of Wales through South Wales and the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Anglo-Irish writers Edith Somerville and Violet 'Martin' Ross through North Wales. Returning to England, J.B. Priestley and Beryl Bainbridge take him to Birmingham, Bradford and Liverpool, and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to the Lake District and Doncaster. He follows Boswell and Johnson around Scotland before returning to Priestley and Bainbridge who take him from Newcastle to Lincoln, and then, finally, he shares Dickens' final journey from his home in Gad's Hill to Westminster Abbey.

Fiennes's narrative merges together background information on the authors he has chosen to follow, many of them writers who are not particularly well-known, and key facts about their journeys, with his own observations as he follows in their footsteps, and, linking them, a meditation on the ways in which Britain has changed over the centuries; what has been lost, what has been gained, and the impossibility of ever really quantifying this. It's a interesting and thought-provoking book, and also a very enjoyable one, as Fiennes has a chatty, self-deprecating style which makes his narrative a pleasure to read. I very much appreciated that he managed to include equal numbers of women and men among the authors he follows (which can't have been that easy to do, given the male dominance of the travel genre) and now very much want to seek out the writing of some of the ones I hadn't previously encountered, in particualar Ithell Colquhoun, Celia Fiennes and Somerville and Ross.

(Because I had an e-ARC for review, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, I can't comment on the maps and illustrations, though a quick glance at the hardback in the gorgeous Highland Bookshop in Fort William suggests that it is also a beautifully presented book.)

Kameron Hurley is someone whose work I've been meaning to read for ages. I was going to buy The Stars are Legion after hearing it described at Nine Worlds a couple of years ago as "lesbians in space", which seemed very relevant to my interests, but then it turned out that it's no longer available as an ebook in the UK, so when I received a e-ARC of her new short story collection, Meet Me in the Future, via Netgalley, it seemed like the ideal opportunity to give her work a try.

There are sixteen stories in Meet Me in the Future, all set in far-distant futures. Some are clearly set on other planets, some in space, some might be on far-future Earth. Some of the futures feel like the future, with spaceships and imagined technology; some are futures which feel more like fantasy, set in more low-tech societies. The latter category includes two stories which I particularly liked, 'Elephants and Corpses' and 'The Fisherman and the Pig', which are about the same character, body mercenary Nev, who has the ability, at the moment of death, to transfer his conciousness into any corpse within range. Other favourites included 'When We Fall', an absolutely delightful love story about an orphan and a spaceship; 'The Sinners and the Sea', which is set in a society of floating islands above a drowned, dead world and reminded me rather of Le Guin; 'The Plague Givers', set in a world of steamy, plesiosaur-haunted swamps, with a wonderful too-old-for-this-shit middle-aged heroine racing against time to prevent the lover and enemy she defeated thirty years earlier from unleashing a plague that will destroy everyone in their world, with bonus multiple and fluid genders; 'Tumbledown', the story of a paraplegic woman racing across a frozen planet to try to deliver a vital serum to a plague-threatened community; and 'Warped Passages', which I gather from Hurley's introduction is a prequel of sorts to The Stars are Legion, set on a hige space fleet which has been trapped for three generations by an anomaly which holds their ships in place.

Hurley's writing vividly evokes the very different worlds her stories are set in; her characters are sympathetic and human and interesting. Some of the stories make for difficult reading; there's a lot of war and violence and destruction in them, and some body-horror which I struggled with ('The Corpse Archive' was almost too much for me), but they are often beautiful and generally hopeful stories, ending with the prospect of better things to come even where the futures they describe are darker. The collection is also delightfully diverse; there are lots of queer, trans and non-binary characters, women in traditionally 'male' roles such as soldiers and priests, and societies where women are privileged over men, and there are also explorations of disability and race issues through a science fictional lens. I liked this a lot, and will definitely be reading more of Hurley's work in future.

Clara Parkes is a well-known figure in the world of knitting and crochet. Her website, Knitter's Review, was a source of online information on all things knitty long before Ravelry came into being; she wrote The Knitter's Book of Wool, The Knitter's Book of Yarn and The Knitter's Book of Socks, invaluable resources for crafters seeking to understand more about the ways that fibre content and construction influence the way a yarn will behave and what it will work well for. Her more recent books, The Yarn Whisperer, Knitlandia and A Stash of One's Own, have been collections of personal essays about yarn and her life with it; she's probably one of the few people to have become a big name in the yarn world because of something other than dyeing or designing.

Her new book, Vanishing Fleece, tells the story of what happened when a farming acquaintance offered her a 676-pound bale of superfine fleece from his small flock of Saxon Merino sheep. Parkes accepts the challenge, and embarks on a journey to learn about the stages of processing by which her bale of fleece will become yarn; scouring, carding, spinning, dyeing. It's also a look at the declining American textile industry, tenaciously clinging on despite stiff competition from overseas production, weaving the stories of the people she meets together with descriptions of the processes her fibre goes through. I found it a fascinating read, and a hugely entertaining one as well, thanks to the chatty, humorous tone of the writing. I knit a lot less these days than I used to, but this made me long to have needles and yarn in my hands. If only I could knit and read at the same time! (I sort of can with ebooks, but don't ever quite manage either as well as I'd like.)

Thanks to Netgalley for an advance review copy of this.

Yoon Ha Lee's new short story collection, Hexarchate Stories, is entirely made up of stories set in the universe of his Machineries of Empire trilogy, set at various points before and after the trilogy. (I really liked that the stories were in chronological order, with the first set before the foundation of the original heptarchate and the final one being a sequel to Revenant Gun.) Most of the stories had previously been published elsewhere, although I think the only one I'd read before was the novella 'Extracurricular Activities', which I very much enjoyed the first time round and was happy to re-read.

Many of the stories in the collection are very short, and seem to have originated as flash fiction on Lee's blog; there are scenes from both Jedao's and Cheris's childhoods and later lives, as well as a few vignettes of other characters. I thought some of them worked better than others; I really enjoyed the glimpses of Jedao as a child, seen from the perspective of his brother and sister, and also liked the vignettes of Cheris's childhood, but some of the other stories did less for me, in particular a couple which dealt with various characters visiting zoos. There was also one story, 'Gloves', which turned out to be just a very explicit sex scene and which I would quite honestly have preferred not to be reading on the bus.

Interspersed with the flash fiction are five longer pieces. 'The Chameleon's Gloves' is probably the most standalone story in the collection, a nicely-done heist story set in the days before the foundation of the heptarchate. 'Extracurricular Activities', which I'd read before, is about as close to an entertaining space romp as anything featuring Jedao could be. 'The Battle of Candle Arc' is also set during Jedao's first lifetime, showing him as a military commander in action, achieving one of his great victories while also wrestling with his moral discomfort at the regime he works for. 'Gamer's End' is set-post canon, and tells the story of a Shuos training exercise which may or may not be all it appears, and manages to pull of a second-person narration. And finally, the previously unpublished novella 'Glass Cannon' takes up the last 40% of the book. 'Glass Cannon' revisits Jedao and Cheris two years after the end of Revenant Gun; it moves both their characters on, resolves some of the threads that were left loose at the end of the trilogy, and also feels like it's setting things up for potential future adventures (or at least, I certainly hope it is, as the end is definitely a cliffhanger!).

I wouldn't recommend this collection to anyone who hasn't read the Machineries of Empire trilogy; so many of the stories revisit characters and events from the trilogy that I think it would be hard to understand them without having read it, but as someone who's read and enjoyed it I really liked returning to that universe and getting to see a bit more of characters I'd liked and fill in some background. I also really enjoyed reading Lee's author's notes on each story, explaining a bit about the inspiration behind it and his writing process; I felt that they added a lot to even the shortest stories in the collection.

(Thanks to Rebellion Publishing for a free review copy via NetGalley.)

The title of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's forthcoming novella, This Is How You Lose the Time War, was almost enough on its own to make me want to read it. Add to that the fact that this lifelong Doctor Who fan can't ever resist a time-travel story, and how much I have loved everything of El-Mohtar's I've read, and you may understand why I spent several months stalking the book on Amazon waiting for the kindle version to be available to pre-order, and why, when I saw that the publishers were offering review copies via NetGalley, I jumped at the chance to read it sooner than the July release date, dusted off the NetGalley profile I'd set up ages ago but never used and requested a copy.

This Is How You Lose the Time War is just over 200 pages of stunningly beautiful prose, every word weighed and considered and placed in just the right place to create a series of amazingly vivid scenes from across time and space: the far future, the distant past, alien worlds and alternate Earths. Across this broad canvas, an epistolary romance plays out between two characters known only as Red and Blue (neither entirely human, but both referred to with she/her pronouns), agents of opposing factions in a conflict spanning the entire multiverse. I loved following the progress of Red and Blue's relationship, from the taunts of rivals to a breathtaking depth of emotion; I adored their witty, allusive letters and gradual realisation of their feelings for each other. Reading this book was an utterly immersive experience, and I never wanted to come to the surface.

I suspect this book won't be for everyone; it's all dazzling use of language and close focus on the two main characters, with the background merely sketched in, and I'm sure there will be people who would have preferred more everyday prose and detail of the whys and wherefores of the time war and its two combatants. I absolutely loved it, though, and have updated my pre-order from the kindle version to the paperback; this is a book I will want to re-read again and again, and to lend to anyone I can persuade to try it because it is just so good.