Recent Reading Roundup 62

Usually when I put together a recent reading roundup, I try to come up with some sort of common thread or guiding principle for the books discussed. This time around, we've just got a grab-bag of some of the best reads from the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025. Two of these books are short, weird exercises in pushing at the very edges of what fantastic fiction can do. Another is doing the same thing to literary fiction. One is core science fiction, and another plays fascinating games with what core fantasy can be. And the last one is a prototypical plotless, closely-observed literary novel, and a reminder of how great that can sometimes be. In other words, whatever you're in the mood to read next, you might find something to suit your tastes in this post.

The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball - The first half of Ball's short, disquieting novel plays out like a familiar near-future dystopia, with shades of 1984, The Trial, and Squid Game. A large group of people have been summoned for jury duty, a task for which they first have to complete several days of tests and evaluations. At the end of this process only one potential juror will be selected to enter the titular room, where they will experience the thoughts and memories of the accused (whose crime they will not be told) and render a judgment—freedom or death. Our point of view character is prospective juror Abel, a grey, emotionally-deadened man who can't even muster up a reaction when his interviewers deride his dead-end job as a garbage collector, or remind him that the state deemed him unfit to raise his child. As Abel proceeds through the evaluation process—a series of opaque, and often invasive and humiliating, tests and assessments—we gain glimpses of the society that has produced this system, in which citizens are assigned minutely-graded social rankings that affect every aspect of their lives, while those with the lowest rankings are excluded from society. It is implied that the jury selection process serves a dual purpose, allowing the state to evaluate a large number of people without their being accused of any crime. Eventually, Abel is told, everyone will be fully assessed and classified.

For Abel, however, none of this is as disturbing as the prospect of experiencing the repeat room, a fear that is only exacerbated by the fact that nobody, including the former jurors who arrive to brief him as he advances through the selection process, is able to articulate to him what the room does, and how it will feel to be in another person's mind. Readers of novels are, of course, accustomed to slipping into other people's heads, and yet when Ball reveals the repeat room to us, it's in a way that seems designed to disorient. The second half of the novel leaves Abel entirely—we never even learn what verdict he renders—and switches to the accused's tale, in what feels almost like a different book. In sharp contrast to the laconic, unemotional third-person description of Abel's experiences, the accused's stream-of-consciousness first person narration is vibrant and sweeping. The experiences it describes, however, are no less abusive than Abel's. Raised by parents who viewed their family as a piece of performance art, the accused and his sister were made, from an early age, to perform as a series of characters, with severe physical punishment if they refused or deviated from their roles. Isolated from the world for their entire lives, the two children become each other's whole world (though even then, only through the device of characters they invent for one another), leading to an incestuous relationship, and eventually, a terrible crime.

It's hard to square the dystopian panopticon of The Repeat Room's first half with the close-quarters surrealism of its second—the two narratives seem to come not just from different worlds, but from different genres. The fact that we never return to Abel after the accused takes over narrative duties contributes to the sense that these are two separate novellas rather than a single novel. But perhaps that disconnect is the point. It's hard to imagine a world that can contain two men as different as Abel and the accused—the one so beaten-down that he is incapable of either joy or sadness; the other so full of life that he leaps off the page even as he describes extremes of abuse and dehumanization, and even as he is led to what is probably his execution. And yet we know that this is true, that everywhere around us, behind the faces of strangers, there is unsuspected despair and exuberance. The novel's non-ending leaves us wondering whether its machine of empathy can truly lead to understanding, and justice, for two such different people.

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft - Translator of many luminaries of world literature including Olga Tokarczuk (with whom she has won an International Booker Prize), Croft turns her pen to fiction with a sly, satirical tale whose metafictional flourishes are dizzyingly complex. In a house on the edge of a Poland's Białowieża Forest, renowned author Irena Rey has gathered her translators to work on her latest novel, a 900-page magnum opus about the end of the world. This has been Irena's tradition for years, and in order to participate the translators must abide by strict rules. They address each other only by the language they translate into (English, German, Ukrainian, etc.), cut themselves off from social media, eat only vegetarian food, and in general sublimate themselves to Irena's values, desires, and opinions. As soon as the summit begins, however, Irena—who is a political activist as well as a writer, known for her tempestuous and domineering behavior in both spheres—announces that her new novel pales in importance before the looming catastrophe of the government opening the forest up to logging, an act which will have far-reaching ecological effects. Not long after, she disappears.

The events of the next few weeks, as the translators attempt fruitlessly to find their author, are related in a novel-within-the-novel titled The Extinction of Irena Rey, which was written by one of the translators (Spanish, AKA Emilia) and translated by another (English, naturally, AKA Alexis). It takes a while to identify these two figures, however—despite the copious footnotes by Alexis in which she comments on Emilia's philosophy of translation, argues that events didn't transpire as they are described, or simply complains that she is being made to look bad—because to begin with Extinction is narrated in the plural first person, treating the translators as an undifferentiated mass subservient to Irena's needs and demands. As they begin to emerge as individuals, however—as they start using each other's names, revealing personal information, or developing relationships with one another—both we and they start to question the hold that Irena has over them. Swedish, AKA Freddie, a new translator who met Irena for the first time shortly before her disappearance, immediately diagnoses the group as a cult. That verdict seems hard to argue with when one observes the almost Lanthimos-ian naivete and literal-mindedness of the translators—when we learn, for example, that Czech, AKA Pavel, did not die in an accident as the other translators were led to believe, but was discarded after an affair with Irena went south. But we also have to wonder how much is being imposed on the other translators by the perspective of Emilia, who increasingly seems like the sole true believer in the bunch. She is repeatedly shocked to discover that her fellow translators have lives and interests outside Irena, that they permit themselves to criticize the author and her writing, that they have even broken some of Irena's strictures and simply not told anyone.

As the weeks pass, the translation party descends into high farce and absurdism. The translators engage in occult rituals, investigatory expeditions, and wild parties. Emilia embarks on an affair with Freddie, and immediately begins worrying that Alexis is trying to steal him from her. (Alexis denies this vociferously in the footnotes.) Different characters, such as Irena's father, allegedly killed in a duel in her infancy, or her arch-nemesis, the "apolitical" superstar Polish author Barbara Bonk, appear to complicate the translators' understanding of Irena's  life story—to reveal, eventually, that much of that story has been invention—and to discuss the threatened destruction of the forest, Poland's bloody history, and its ongoing descent into authoritarianism. Reporters descend on the house on the day the Nobel prize for literature is announced, only to disappear as soon as Kazuo Ishiguro is announced as the winner. 

Through it all, Croft, and Emilia, hone in on a central question: who is the true creator, the author or the translator? Is the translator merely a conduit, invisible and depersonalized, or are they a force in their own right, without whom an author would remain siloed in their own language? Emilia's priggish, almost hysterical disdain when she hears the other translators passing judgment on "Our Author" is more than a little ridiculous, but so too is Alexis's insistence that it is her job to "fix" the work she is translating, to remove problematic content or streamline passages to suit an international audience. Emilia quickly ties this philosophical disagreement to issues of colonialism, ecological destruction, and creeping fascism—connections that we can't help questioning given Emilia's deteriorating mental state, even as Alexis's footnotes become more overbearing. (The fact that Alexis is American, while Emilia is South American, is surely significant, but is also complicated by the realization that both characters share components of Croft's biography.) The novel itself eventually transports this conflict from the philosophical to the literal, with a confrontation between the translators and the author whose conclusion is both deranged, and entirely in keeping with the romp we've been reading. By far one of last year's most distinctive, mind-bending novels, The Extinction of Irena Rey is, in its own right, an argument for the translator as a creator.

A Mourning Coat by Alex Jeffers - Therre is a costume designer who has spent the last five years caring for his father, a renowned actor, as he succumbed to dementia. With his father now dead, Therre is at loose ends, overwhelmed by funeral arrangements, by old friends trying to reconnect after years of radio silence, by professional contacts immediately wondering when he's planning to get back to work, and by the possibility of new love. Trying to make sense of his feelings and impose order on his newly disordered life, Therre throws himself into designing and constructing a new, striking mourning coat, into which he pours his anger over the standstill his life came to during his father's illness, his grief over losing his father long before his actual death, and his shame over the hatred he eventually came to feel towards the stranger his father became.

So far I might be describing any work of literary fiction. What's surprising and fascinating about Jeffers's novella—which is part of Neon Hemlock's extremely impressive 2024 novella line—is that it takes place in a fantasy world. That fantasy is at once insistent—at every turn, Therre tells us about the complex history of his world; about warring empires, conflicting religious and mystical traditions, and histories of exploration and conquest—and very far in the background. Therre's life is a familiar, modern one, featuring car rides, video calls with his half-sister, and binge-watching TV. But it is also inflected by fantasy worldbuilding. His ex gives him a spirit token to help in the grieving process. His sister argues against their father's burial on the continent of Yf, to which he and Therre moved years ago, because it, unlike their original home Kyrland, has no gods. Even the hallmarks of modernity are given a slightly foreign gloss—a car is an "auto"; instead of giving someone your phone number, you give them your codes. A long chapter in the middle of the novella describes the discovery of Yf by Kyrlander explorers, a tale that twists between royal courts, harrowing sea journeys, and deadly wildlife encounters. Even here, however, the mundane creeps in: Therre knows this history so intimately because he was once hired to design the costumes for a prestige TV series based on it. The mourning coat itself is suffused in worldbuilding details—it is white, the Kyrlander mourning color, but in other cultures present on Yf, the mourning colors are blue or red, and Therre incorporates these colors into his outfit.

Fantasy authors as diverse as Sofia Samatar, Jeff VanderMeer, Sarah Tolmie, and Isaac Fellman have all toyed with the idea of placing a thoroughly mundane story within a thoroughly fantasized setting, but Jeffers's commitment to these two poles is perhaps the most extreme of any of them. It produces an absolutely fascinating artifact, one that forces the reader to wonder how we define genre and how it inflects the stories we read. The heart of A Mourning Coat is Therre's journey back to life, a journey that is still in its early stages as the novella closes, and which involves a lot of painful yet familiar exchanges—renegotiating his relationship with his ex, including the guilt they both feel over how their relationship broke down as his father's illness made itself known; stepping back into the entertainment industry and immediately gritting his teeth at the way it has claimed his father now that he has died, after discarding him in his illness; having to face his father's former lover, a callow fortune hunter who is now making noises about contesting his will. And yet there is never any question that Therre, and everyone around him, are shaped by the alienness of their world; that their story, though it could take place in our world, would be very different if it it did. (Most obviously, because the setting of A Mourning Coat is much queerer than reality, to the point that Therre is quietly scandalized when someone suggests that his father might have been exclusively attracted to women.)

The story's end throws these two facets into conflict when it reveals that the fantastical has had an effect on Therre's life that he never suspected. But here, too, Jeffers avoids the expected next step. The significance of revealing magic in Therre's life isn't in how it changes the story, but in how it forces him to choose the genre of his life. Is he a fantasy protagonist, obligated to embark on a fantasy quest (albeit one mostly mediated by lawyers)? Or is he a grieving man who is trying to put his life back together? In the book's back matter, we learn that Jeffers has been writing stories set in the world of A Mourning Coat for years. I don't know if all of them feature the same juggling of genre conventions that this novella does, but I'm sufficiently intrigued by both the details of this world, and the moving story Jeffers has chosen to set in it, that I'd very much like to find out. 

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky - On a perfectly ordinary morning, valet Charles lays out his master's travel clothes, plans his itinerary for the day, liaises with the lady of the house's servants, and gives the master a close shave. The fact that there is no itinerary, no travel plans, and no lady of the house—and that this has been the case for years—does not impinge on Charles's tranquility, or on his satisfaction in crossing tasks off his list. More distressing is the fact that during the aforementioned shave, Charles, without ever forming the intention to do so, slits his master's throat, something that is supposed to be impossible since Charles, the rest of the staff, the house, the medical assistance they call, and the police inspector who eventually arrives, are all robots. The hullaballoo that follows, in which first the robot doctor, and then the robot detective, refuse to listen to Charles's confession of the crime because it doesn't fit in their preset decision trees, is our first glimpse of a world that has been fully automated, and which is spinning out of true. Dismissed from his position and sent to a diagnostic facility, Charles embarks on a picaresque journey whose constant refrain is that humans are nowhere to be found, that the landscape he moves through is crumbling and at least semi-destroyed, and that the robots he encounters are stuck in loops of conflicting priorities and contradictory tasks, with no one to untangle them.

Science fiction readers will quickly recognize the mode Tchaikovsky is operating in—within a few chapters, I found myself thinking of Wall-E, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and the Ray Bradbury story "There Will Come Soft Rains". (Though, as the novel's punning chapter titles suggest, Tchaikovsky's inspirations are also writers like Kafka and Orwell.) What sets Service Model apart from these tales is, to begin with, the breadth of its worldbuilding, with Tchaikovsky coming up with one elaborate, catastrophically malfunctioning setting after another for Charles to explore. At the diagnostics facility, he discovers that because no one has been authorizing the reports on robots who have completed their diagnostics, the queue outside the facility has been growing steadily. To address this problem, the robots in charge have invented a new department of Data Compression where robots awaiting diagnostics can be stored—through the simple expedient of being crushed into a cube. At a "farm" where surviving humans have been corralled to recreate traditional modes of living, they are shuttled back and forth from dingy apartments to crowded public transport to unpleasant offices (Charles compliments the farm's operator for forcing the humans to endure a commute despite their living and work spaces being right next to one another). In the wilderness, Charles encounters hordes of soldier robots who battle endlessly, disbanding and reforming into warring troupes, and cannibalizing each other for parts.

Through all these spaces, Charles moves like a holy fool, sometimes accompanied by a trickster-like figure known only as The Wonk, searching for a human who would like their trousers pressed and their schedule organized. After all, he reasons, there were so many days on which he did not slit his master's throat; why should one aberration disqualify him from the work he was made for? Charles's voice dominates the book, as he attempts, with the unfailing politeness and unflappable manner of a consummate gentleman's gentleman, to make sense of the deranged situations he keeps falling into. But like so many classic butlers and valets in fiction, Charles has a strong sense of his own dignity, and like those characters he can sometimes frustrate an unworthy master or alleged social superior with malicious compliance, over-literal interpretation of commands, or supposedly innocent actions—as when he halts the labor of a group of robotic librarians, who are intent on making sure they have the one and only copy of every bit of data in existence, with a logical conundrum. But does this, as The Wonk insists, mean that he is actually self-aware? That the death of his master was a deliberate blow against his human enslaver? Or is the truth, as Charles repeatedly claims, that he is simply operating within the confines of his design, pursuing the objectives he was programmed with (to serve humans and cross tasks off his list) with no sense of his own wants and desires? Throughout its length, Service Model maintains a tension between these two possibilities, making Charles an undeniable person while still stressing the ways in which his programming confines him—for example, making it impossible for him to understand things about The Wonk that the reader will have worked out fairly early on. Which is, we are eventually invited to consider, perhaps not too different from how humans function as well.

Service Model proceeds from one hilarious setting to another, as Charles continues to pursue his goal in the face of the world's complete dissolution, encountering rat-eating scavengers, marauding robotic monks on robotic horseback, and countless robots who are continuing their work long past the point where anyone has needed them to do it. This is at once the novel's greatest strength and greatest weakness. Each of these individual set-pieces is wonderfully wrought, with some pointed social commentary along the way. But taken all together there eventually comes the feeling that the point has been made—not helped by the fact that the book's climax, including the revelation of the reason for the world's state, feels a bit underpowered compared to some of the satirical excesses that have come before it. Still, there are worse things to say about a book than that it is too much of a good thing, and both Charles and his world are delightful enough that one can't really complain about getting to spend more time with them.

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery - The title character of Nieva's weird, trippy novel is a human-mosquito hybrid, with compound eyes, wings instead of arms, and a beak-like appendage with which he can deliver not just a sting, but an evisceration. Growing up in the slums of 23rd century Argentina, which rising sea levels have transformed into a sweltering, garbage-strewn archipelago, Dengue Boy is feared by his human mother and mercilessly abused by his schoolmates, and in the novel's opening chapter he snaps, embarking on a killing spree. Liberated from the impulse to fit in, and eager for revenge on a society that has mistreated both him and his mother, Dengue Boy—who, in keeping with mosquito biology, soon rechristens himself Dengue Girl, and then later Dengue Void and Dengue Destroyed—travels through what remains of human civilization, leaving behind eggs that quickly hatch into an epidemic of murderous mansquitos. As it chronicles this journey of revenge and self-actualization, the novel also moves away from its title character's point of view, traveling back in time to reveal the last few months in the life of their chief tormentor, or outwards from them to explore the workings of its future society.

Nieva's freewheeling, exuberant tone ties together what sometimes feel like extremely disparate genres and influences. The chapters focusing on Dengue Boy's schoolyard bully El Dulce, an ignorant, violent boy who is a perfect product of his cruel society and criminal family, feel of a piece with recent Latin American social realist writing. The glimpses we get of the how the future Argentina of the novel functions feel like plausible—albeit dystopian—SFnal speculation. A major industry in the novel revolves around predicting which pandemics will break out when, the better to speculate with the stock of pharmaceutical companies and protective gear manufacturers. The bright, wealthy centers of this future society are in Greenland and Antractica, where the elites ply the ocean on cruise ships that simulate life in the lost, pre-climate change era. Those with more gumption leave the Earth for outer space, where its lost era of habitability is recreated—for a price. 

At other points, however, Nieva's worldbuilding delivers unadulterated gonzo inventiveness, much of it designed to drive home how crass and violent this future society is. The world's premier consumer product is a "sheepie", a living sex toy comprised of a single orifice. Its bestselling video game is an immersive VR experience titled Christian vs. Indians, which simulates the European conquest of South America, permitting players to engage in carnage on either side. El Dulce's brother, a smuggler, has begun transporting a new product, telepathic stones retrieved from ancient—and now melted—Antarctic permafrost, which trigger visions of the origins of life on the planet, when all creatures existed in formless anarchy. Under the influence of this object, El Dulce finds himself, as he pursues a high score in Christians vs. Indians, occupying the mind of CEO Noah Nuclopia, a profiteer of Earth's dissolution and the rampant spread of disease.

Through this semi-plausible, semi-deranged world moves our hero, at once a harbinger of apocalypse and an avenging angel. As Dengue Boy transforms, dies and returns to life, and witnesses the cruelty and irrationality of their world, they also begin to learn the reason for their existence, which is related to the discovery, in the rapidly melting ice, of biological compounds that date back to the first emergence of life on Earth. This is, of course, a popular science fiction trope (and real-world concern), in which climate change unleashes diseases that have long lain hidden beneath the ice. In Nieva's hands it takes on a cosmic, but also political, significance, a leveling force that may finally be capable of eliminating the distinctions of class, race, and wealth that have so completely destroyed the world. As this deranged, delirious, yet compelling novel draws to an close, it's left to Dengue Boy to decide whether they want to end humanity, or help it become something new.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood - The narrator of Wood's novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker last year, is a lay sister in a cloistered convent in rural Australia in the early days of the pandemic. "Lay sister", though, is probably putting it too officially. The narrator, a former environmental activist who lost hope in the possibility of saving endangered species, stopping deforestation, and slowing down climate change, arrived at the convent—which is close to the small town where she grew up—and never left. She is thus both outsider and insider, a perfect point of view to the convolutions that rock this isolated, inward-looking community over the course of the novel: the dimly-felt effects of lockdown and border closures; the discovery, after twenty years, of the remains of a former sister, who disappeared while running a women's shelter in Thailand; the arrival of Helen Parry, a world-famous activist nun and former schoolmate of the narrator, whom she remembers as a wild, outcast girl, bullied by both children and adults.

There's been a recent fashion for nunnery novels, both contemporary—Lauren Groff's Matrix—and republished—The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete—that seems to reflect a fascination with how women can carve out a self-controlled enclaves by giving up parts of themselves, and how the resulting community can end up being a reflection of the outside world even as it purports to reject it. Wood's insight with Stone Yard Devotional is that these dynamics can persist into the present day. The fact that the novel takes place during a plague mirrors many medieval-set convent stories, all the more so when a drought causes a sudden surge in the local mouse population. The descriptions of the mouse infestation—they devour every bit of food not locked away in airtight containers, destroy the narrator's garden, chew up the insulation on kitchen appliances, forcing the nuns into preparing ever-simpler meals, and eventually start crawling into beds, closets, and shoes—have an apocalyptic tinge. Even when the nuns give into necessity and decide to trap and poison the mice, their corpses pose an environmental hazard, necessitating the excavation of a mouse plague pit.

Unlike a medieval-set nunnery novel, however, the era in which Stone Yard Devotional is set is no longer one in which the choice to sequester oneself is seen as laudable or even rational. One of the central questions of the novel, then, is that of renunciation. Are the nuns at the convent doing something grand and holy by stepping away from the world, or are they simply giving up? Are they enlightened, or just weird? The nearness of the convent to the places and people she knew as a girl, and the presence of Helen Parry, trigger in the narrator thoughts of her girlhood in the 60s and 70s, and particularly of her mother, a proto-environmentalist and do-gooder whose various projects—from composting to visiting newly-arrived Vietnamese refugees—baffled and outraged their conservative, hidebound community. As a girl, the narrator was embarrassed by these projects, and often failed to live up to her mother's values. As an adult, she tried to follow in her footsteps. But now as an old woman, after a lifetime of tilting at impossible challenges, she finds herself preferring the simple rhythms and comprehensible problems of the convent. 

To her friends and former colleagues, this is a choice that elicits rage and disgust, a fact that the narrator reports with equanimity, as yet one more facet of a world she no longer wants anything to do with. Which is not to say that the narrator is entirely at peace with her decision. She silently judges a nun who answered her calling while her children were in their early teens, and is frustrated by the sisters' refusal to acknowledge the Catholic Church's sins—its participation in the ethnic cleansing of the Australian continent, or the mass graves discovered on the grounds of former Magdalene laundries. For their part, the nuns often seem affronted by the suggestion that their life constitutes an abdication. One of them reveals that she quarreled with the murdered nun, her best friend, over the right way to serve god; the presence of Helen Parry, whose nunhood seems almost pro-forma, and who spends her entire time at the convent trying to wrangle a flight out so she can resume her work, rattles the sisters who have devoted their lives to prayer and reflection. A gentle, quiet novel, Stone Yard Devotional doesn't offer any answers to these questions. The closest it comes is when it reminds us that the rhythms of the world tend towards the resolution of crises: the rains return, the mice go away, the murdered sister is laid to rest, Helen Parry returns to her globetrotting projects, and the nuns are left behind. It's left to us, and to the narrator, to decide whether this is enough.