The Other Life

3 years, 1 month, 1 week and 6 days since I’d seen daylight. One-fifth of my life. 98,409,602 seconds since the heavy, steel door had fallen shut and sealed us off from the world

Sherry has lived with her family in a sealed bunker since things went wrong up above. But when they run out of food, Sherry and her dad must venture outside. There they find a world of devastation, desolation...and the Weepers: savage, mutant killers.

When Sherry's dad is snatched, she joins forces with gorgeous but troubled Joshua - an Avenger, determined to destroy the Weepers.

But can Sherry keep her family and Joshua safe, when his desire for vengeance threatens them all?

The Other Life is packed full of teen speculative fiction cliches, including my pet hate of a burgeoning romance between the two leads which normally causes me to scream, "why can they never just be friends?" and then throw the book across the room for good measure!  However; against all odds, I found Susanne Winnacker's debut novel to be a great read.

Susanne Winnacker knows how to spin a good yarn, and The Other Life's success lies in it's pacing.  She explains a lot, and yet there's always something going on, propelling Sherry deeper into the rabbit hole, and I found myself literally unable to put this book down.  I think what I loved most were the Weepers; people who had been infected with a strain of rabies that had killed the other half of the population.  They are a clever way of not using your average zombie in this post-outbreak wasteland and I liked that they all looked different apart from their human-like weeping eyes.  Very unsettling!

I also have to mention, as I always do, that the cover work is beautifully creepy (look at that moth a bit closer) and extends to inside the book as well, with the barbed wire trailing across the chapter headers.  The last couple chapters take the story in a different direction, and I hope that will be explored in the second book of the series, due out spring next year.  So, if you can, get you hands on a copy if only to stare at that lovely cover!

Apocalypse Cow

The title alone made me order this crazily brilliant debut and joint winner of the inaugural Terry Pratchett Prize.  There are echoes of the movie Black Sheep and while there's nothing totally original about Apocalypse Cow, it's a fun ride nonetheless.  The characters are all literary/film cliches but they are well written cliches that made me laugh with their sometimes absurd actions and thoughts.  Logan holds nothing back, as there is plenty of gore,Apocalypse Cow has a somewhat creepy ending implying that while this could remain a standalone book, this strange world in which animals become zombie-esque could spawn a sequel. 

The Long Earth

This collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter came as a recommendation from a friend.  If I'm honest, even a few weeks after I finished reading The Long Earth, I am still unsure if I really enjoyed this speculative tale. 

1916: the Western Front, France. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong, and the wind in the leaves in the trees. Where has the mud, blood and blasted landscape of No man's Land gone?

2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Cop Monica Jansson has returned to the burned-out home of one Willis Linsay, a reclusive and some said mad, others dangerous, scientist. It was arson but, as is often the way, the firemen seem to have caused more damage than the fire itself. Stepping through the wreck of a house, there's no sign of any human remains but on the mantelpiece Monica finds a curious gadget - a box, containing some wiring, a three-way switch and a...potato. It is the prototype of an invention that Linsay called a 'stepper'. An invention he put up on the web for all the world to see, and use, an invention that would to change the way mankind viewed his world Earth for ever. And that's an understatement if ever there was one...

...because the stepper allowed the person using it to step sideways into another America, another Earth, and if you kept on stepping, you kept on entering even more Earths...this is the Long Earth. It's not our Earth but one of chain of parallel worlds, lying side by side each differing from its neighbour by really very little (or actually quite a lot). It's an infinite chain, offering 'steppers' an infinite landscape of infinite possibilities. And the further away you travel, the stranger - and sometimes more dangerous - the Earths get. The sun and moon always shine, the basic laws of physics are the same. However, the chance events which have shaped our particular Earth, such as the dinosaur-killer asteroid impact, might not have happened and things may well have turned out rather differently.

But, until Willis Linsay invented his stepper, only our Earth hosted mankind...or so we thought. Because it turns out there are some people who are natural 'steppers', who don't need his invention and now the great migration has begun...

Pratchett and Baxter present some interesting concepts and as you would expect that are some amusing pieces of prose, I especially liked Joshua's background and the mentions of the somewhat progressive nuns that raised him, but The Long Earth was more of a prologue than a proper stand-alone story.  I would have loved to have found out more about Lobsang and the Black Corporation, and about the history of the 'natural' steppers.

  Also, when it comes to the structure of a book, I'm normally of the opinion the shorter the chapter the better.  However, in this case, the chapters (which only consisted of a few pages and would often drift from the main story of Lobsang and Joshua) made the book read like collection of short stories.  I do hope that Pratchett and Baxter collaborate again and produce  a sequel for The Long Earth, perhaps they could combine the two in an 1Q84 books one and two to make a more comprehensive novel?