#BlogTour - Notes From the Burning Age by Claire North

From one of the most imaginative writers of her generation comes an extraordinary vision of the future.

Ven was once a holy man, a keeper of ancient archives. It was his duty to interpret archaic texts, sorting useful knowledge from the heretical ideas of the Burning Age - a time of excess and climate disaster. For in Ven's world, such material must be closely guarded, so that the ills that led to that cataclysmic era can never be repeated.

But when the revolutionary Brotherhood approaches Ven, pressuring him to translate stolen writings that threaten everything he once held dear, his life will be turned upside down. Torn between friendship and faith, Ven must decide how far he's willing to go to save this new world, and how much he is willing to lose.

Notes from the Burning Age is the remarkable and captivating new novel from the award-winning Claire North that puts dystopian fiction in a whole new light.

NOTES FROM THE BURNING AGE is a thrilling story of future dystopia, a warning about global warming and man’s need for war, a lament that it may be too late for change and that we have already sown the seeds for the events in the novel, all of these… Like Claire North’s previous novel, THE PURSUIT OF WILLIAM ABBEY, the story can be read on many levels, and the more you think about it, the more you have to think about it.

The story is told by Ven, a former holy man, in a world devastated by climate change and the industry which led to it, now caught between his former life in Temple and The Brotherhood, a revolutionary organisation who believe that man should once again tame the planet and exploit her resources to humanity’s ‘benefit’… 

“The Burning Age was too short-sighted. We shaped the world; built towers, seeded the sky, dug the earth, walked on the moon, built wonders and cured diseases. We waged wars, drained seas, built palaces in the desert. But we consumed too much. Ran too fast. … We were nearly wiped out, the peoples scattered to the furthest corners by deserts and storms. This time, we will do better. Our mistake was thinking that the fruits of man’s Labour must be shared with all. Now we know it is only for the few to lead, wisely and well.”

So speaks one character, and it is impossible to read without hearing similar sentiments from current politicians the world over, those who refuse to accept the damage human beings are doing to the planet, those who believe a trendy pledge to work towards carbon neutrality is enough. The Burning Age is now.

NOTES FROM THE BURNING AGE is as thought provoking as it is entertaining. Like any previous Claire North novel I have read, it is a book that defies genre. It is an incredible novel which deserves, almost demands, to be read more than once. It is beautiful and horrifying, hopeful and heartbreaking, the writing is stunningly good. I cannot recommend this enough.

Thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers @Tr4cyF3nt0n, Orbit Books @orbitbooks and, of course, Claire North @ClaireNorth42 for the opportunity to share in the BlogTour.

#BlogTour - I Know What I Saw by Imran Mahmood

I saw it. He smothered her, pressing his hands on her face. The police don't believe me, they say it's impossible – but I know what I saw.

This is Xander Shute: once a wealthy banker, now living on the streets.

As he shelters for the night in an empty Mayfair flat, he hears its occupants returning home, and scrambles to hide as the couple argue. Trapped in his hiding place, he soon finds himself witnessing a vicious murder.

But who was the dead woman, who the police later tell him can’t have been there? And why is the man Xander saw her with evading justice?

As Xander searches for answers, his memory of the crime comes under scrutiny, forcing him to confront his long-buried past and the stories he’s told about himself.

How much he is willing to risk to understand the brutal truth?

I have had Imran Mahmood’s debut novel YOU DON’T KNOW ME on my To Be Read pile since it came out, in both ebook and audiobook, and have not got found to reading it yet. Having finished his second novel I KNOW WHAT I SAW, I have no idea what I was thinking - Mahmood has just moved closer to the top of the list.

I KNOW WHAT I SAW is a thriller which pulls you in from the first scene and doesn’t let go until the stunning conclusion. Set over a couple of weeks, the novel is narrated by Xander Shute, a homeless man, once a successful banker, now living on the streets of London. Taking shelter in a seemingly empty Mayfair apartment, Xander witnesses the apparent murder of a woman by her lover. Feeling guilty that he did nothing to prevent the crime, Xander reports the murder to the local police giving a detailed description of the flat and what little he saw of the couple. The police investigation reveals no body, no signs of a struggle, and the photos of the scene do not match the details of Xander’s recollection.

Xander Shute is an incredibly well-drawn character, a man on the streets, seemingly by choice, plagued with memory issues, possibly a liar, certainly an unreliable narrator. The more Xander tries to convince himself, and the reader, of what he saw, the more doubt creeps in. As he recalls his former life, his friends, his girlfriend, his brother, and, particularly, the latter’s death, the more pieces fall into place, the less likely it seems that Xander could have witnessed the crime he maintains he saw, the less likely things could have happened as he recounts them. When it becomes apparent that former friends recall events differently from Xander, the mistrust of him as a narrator grows. But, is Xander wilfully misleading the reader, could he in fact be guilty of some crime, perhaps even murder, himself?

Imran Mahmood weaves an intricate web from which it is impossible to unravel the truth. Xander is a sympathetic storyteller, and Mahmood makes us really empathise with his narrator’s life on the street. I imagine many of us are guilty of avoiding the homeless, passing by ‘beggars’ without taking the time to wonder how they got to this point. Do they, like Xander, divide the city into ‘zones’ of safety and peril? Have they experienced some tragedy from which running away seemed to be the only choice? I KNOW WHAT I SAW has certainly made me think and, I hope, I will not simply walk past in future.

Thanks to Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers @Tr4cyF3nt0n, Bloomsbury Raven Books @BloomsburyRaven and, of course, Imran Mahmood @imranmahmood777

#BlogTour - Mimic by Daniel Cole (Audiobook)

In life she was his muse . . .

In death she’ll be his masterpiece

1989: DS Benjamin Chambers and DC Adam Winters are on the trail of a serial killer with a twisted passion for recreating the world’s greatest works of art through the bodies of his victims. After Chambers nearly loses his life, the case goes cold due to lack of evidence. The killer lies dormant, his collection unfinished.

1996: DS Marshall has excelled through the ranks of the Metropolitan Police Service, despite being haunted by the case that defined her teenage years. Having obtained new evidence, she joins Chambers and Winters to reopen the case. However, their resurrected investigation brings about a fresh reign of terror, the team treading a fine line between delivering justice and becoming vigilantes in their pursuit of a monster far more dangerous and intelligent than any of them had anticipated…

* * * * *

MIMIC is a London-set novel about the pursuit of a ‘theme’ serial killer. The discovery of a naked bodybuilder on a plinth in Hyde Park, his body arranged in a recreation of Rodin’s Thinker, sets DS Benjamin Chambers on a mission to track down the killer, once he has convinced his boss that the victim didn’t climb up on to the plinth, naked, on a cold winter’s night, and commit suicide… Along the way Chambers picks up a couple of ‘sidekicks’ in DC Winters and DS Marshall. All three are well-drawn characters with talents and flaws, who complement, and hinder, each other in the progress of the investigation.

Starting in 1989, there are a couple of time jumps, the first of which felt, to me, slightly awkward, Daniel Cole having introduced his characters, only to have to reintroduce them and update the reader on where they have been. It’s a minor point though, and Cole quickly recovers, with Winters in particular injecting some humour to balance the startling nature of the crimes. The key to the book, as with the more successful narratives of this genre (think of, say, the movie ‘Se7en’) is a convincing villain and an absorbing ‘theme’ to the murders. In this case the killer arranges his victims in the manner of great sculptures, taunting the investigators as he does so. 

Half the fun - and it shouldn’t really be fun, should it? - in stories of this type is in the gruesome manner by which the killer sets about creating his ‘scenes’ or, in this case, ‘art.’ The tableaux that the killer creates, replicating great artworks, are horrific, and visceral, and thrilling. Of course, such intricately designed murders require quite a suspension of disbelief from the reader. It is to Cole’s credit that, while reading, you don’t stop and wonder just how the killer could have done what he does without being discovered; where did he get the time? But it is the discovery of the artist’s ‘muse’ which kicks the plot into top gear and, from there, Cole barely gives the reader time to breathe.

The story is well-constructed and, in the audio version, brought to life by the narration by Jude Owusu, who performs the dialogue especially well. He makes the interactions between the three main characters exceptionally convincing. A really entertaining listen.

Thanks to Orion Books @orionbooks, Tracy Fenton of Compulsive Readers @Tr4cyF3nt0n and, of course, Daniel Cole @danielcolebooks for the opportunity to join the Audiobook Tour.