The first in a gripping new trilogy, The Book of Koli charts the journey of one unforgettable young boy struggling to find his place in a chilling post-apocalyptic world. Perfect for readers of Station Eleven and Annihilation.
Beyond the walls of the small village of Mythen Rood lies an unrecognisable world. A world where overgrown forests are filled with choker trees and deadly vines and seeds that will kill you where you stand. And if they don’t get you, one of the dangerous shunned men will.
Koli has lived in Mythen Rood his entire life. He knows the first rule of survival is that you don’t venture beyond the walls.
What he doesn’t know is — what happens when you aren’t given a choice?
“The two sides is this: I went away, and then I come home again.”
M.R. Carey’s THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS was a stunning take on post-apocalyptic zombie/vampire tropes which made him one to watch for me. THE BOOK OF KOLI, the first of a trilogy, may eclipse that novel.
In the first half of the book, Koli, a fifteen year-old boy, tells of his life in the northern English village of Mythen Rood. The society is medieval-like although there are remnants of ‘old tech’, items of great power that have survived from times before ‘the Unfinished War, and which bestow great power on those who can ‘wake’ them. These masters of the tech, the Ramparts, are the village leaders and Koli desperately wants to become one of them, and he has reached the age at which he be tested for the ability to wake tech.
The joy of the novel is that we are evidently many years, possibly centuries, after the collapse of advanced society. Villages have become isolated, travel almost non-existent (very apt given the state of the world at publication), and fewer babies are being born. The ‘old tech’ is ‘future tech’ to us but, crucially, not so far advanced from early 21st century to be unrecognisably plausible.
“That’s the heart of my story, now I think of it. The old times haunt us still. The things they left behind save us and hobble us in ways that are past any counting. They was ever the sift and substance of my life, and the journey I made starts and ends with them.”
Koli’s narration is naturalistic, jumping around at times, running off at tangents as something else occurs to him. He pulls you into the story, his innocence and inquisitiveness, his jealously of the Ramparts, his wonder at, and desire to possess, the old tech.
“I risked everything I hard to grab a piece of tech I could own. I broke the law to get my hands on the Dreamsleeve. Got myself made faceless, and almost got my whole family hanged on the gallows.”
The second half of the book tells of Koli’s journey beyond the walls of Mythen Rood, into the unknown where “everything that lives hates us.” The forests are full of carnivorous trees, another result of the old tech, a runaway experiment to grown plants in soil devastated by global warming. There too, live cannibalistic shunned men, outside village society and preying on those who become lost or detached.
The book is incredibly entertaining - thrilling, scary and funny. Koli is a wonderful character, as is his companion, Monono, but it is only fair to let the reader discover her themselves. If the following books, the next of which is coming in only a few short months, live up to this, with promises of finding out more about mythical places like Half-Ax, Birmagen, even London, THE BOOKS OF KOLI may well become one of the classic sci-fi/fantasy trilogies. I can’t wait.
Thanks to Orbit Books and Compulsive Readers for the invitation to the Blog Tour.
@michaelcarey191 @orbitbooks @Tr4cyF3nt0n
