Guardian Review

Kaethe Schwehn’s gripping first novel The Rending and the Nest (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is an addition to the overflowing post-apocalyptic subgenre. In the aftermath of the Rending, which caused 95% of Earth’s population, animals and food inexplicably to disappear, a remnant of humanity scratches a living in scattered enclaves. Seventeen-year-old Mira lives with a disparate group of survivors in a midwestern settlement called Zion, where the sky is continuously grey and the temperature a cool 55F, strange new plants provide fruit for sustenance, and humans scavenge through the Piles – mysterious drifts of debris left over from the Rending. Mira is a complex, well-drawn character, by turns vulnerable and adolescent, then tough and resourceful, as everything she has ever known is ripped away and certainty is replaced by doubt. The reason for the Rending is never explained, and Schwehn is not so much concerned about the why of her premise as its consequences: Mira’s maturing humanity, her loves and loyalties, and how she comes to face situations even stranger and more disturbing than the initial Rending. Another first novel that eschews a rational explanation for its central apocalyptic event is Peng Shepherd’s ambitious road-trip epic The Book of M (HarperVoyager, £14.99). When citizens around the world lose their shadows, their memories rapidly follow, leading to the catastrophic collapse of society. Married couple Ory and Max have hidden themselves away from the apocalypse for two years, holing up in a Virginian mountain resort. When Max loses her shadow and becomes separated from Ory, she begins a journey fraught with physical danger and the terrible knowledge that her memory is disintegrating. The bulk of the narrative concerns Ory’s desperate search for his wife, and Max’s trek to New Orleans in search of a rumoured cure for the Forgetting. Interspersed with their stories are those of characters from around the world, each trying to make sense of and survive in a rapidly fracturing reality. The Book of M is a moving treatise on love and loss, with the bonus of a stunning denouement. AG Riddle knows how to pull the reader in with a narrative hook, which in his fifth novel, Pandemic (Head of Zeus, £8.99), is three-pronged. In Kenya, a doctor is confronted with a patient presenting Ebola-like symptoms. In the US, Dr Peyton Shaw is called on to fly to Africa at the head of a rapid-reaction team. Meanwhile, in a Berlin hotel, venture capitalist Desmond Hughes wakes up with no memory of who he is, to find a body in the room and police pounding on the door. What follows is a complex, multi-stranded narrative spanning 700 pages that reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton. In short, expertly interleaved chapters, Riddle describes how the protagonists come together in a bid not only to staunch the spread of the global pandemic but to work out who started it. Not the least of Riddle’s achievements is his ability to sustain interest over such a vast story while drip-feeding doses of up-to-the-minute medical research. Pandemic is the first novel in the Extinction Files series. Daniel Godfrey follows his popular time-travel novels New Pompeii and Empire of Time with an action-packed crime thriller set in a future London dominated and monitored by state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. The Synapse Sequence (Titan, £7.99) posits a neat technological innovation: the downloading of the memories of witnesses into a virtual-reality scenario, to be entered and examined by criminal investigators. When former air crash investigator Anna Glover gains employment with a company developing synapse sequencing, she finds herself utilising memory-immersion technology to investigate the violent attack on a young man and the involvement of the anti-AI Workers League, with far-reaching consequences for herself and society. Godfrey seamlessly integrates futuristic hi-tech into a fast-moving narrative and paints a convincing portrait of a woman haunted by past misdemeanours. Awakened (HarperCollins, £20) is the collaborative spawn of James S Murray, star of the US cable TV show Impractical Jokers, and Manchester-based SF and horror writer Darren Wearmouth. Excavation of a new subway deep below New York’s Hudson River has been going on for years, and come the triumphant opening of the line, the great and the good are there to celebrate. When the inaugural express train pulls in to the station, celebration turns to horror as the doors slide open to reveal not happy passengers but carriages slick with gore. The excavations have awakened a horde of evil creatures lurking beneath the city’s streets, and they are bent on revenge. What the novel lacks in psychological insight, it more than makes up for in pace and action: bloody set pieces come thick and fast, with impressive plot twists and a neat finale. It’s no surprise that the book has been optioned for TV. - Eric Brown.