Mikhail Gorbachev was shot on the steps of Downing Street in 1984, and the thaw never came. Fifty years later the Soviet Union still stands, proxy wars flicker across every continent, and a secretive school in the Virginia mountains picks up gifted teenagers from courtrooms and holding cells instead of admissions offices. Winterveil by Ava Reid drops four of them into that school and then into something worse, and it is the most interesting premise she has worked with yet. Where Winterveil Sits in Ava Reid’s Work Readers who know Reid from her drowned libraries and folkloric bargains should recalibrate before starting. This is still recognisably her. The prose is dense and fond of a slightly archaic word, the literary references come thick (Shakespeare, Mary Shelley and Milton all do structural work), and the emotional register is intense. But the fairy tale has been swapped for realpolitik, and the magic for neuroscience and game theory. The nearest comparison in her catalogue is the speculative turn of Fable for the End of the World, though Winterveil …

Three days out from the temple he has just abandoned, a scholar is beaten senseless in the road by men who want his money and are annoyed to find only books. Trying to shield the books with his body, he lands on a wrapped bundle, drags a blade half out of its sheath, and a man made of silver light appears and kills all three of them in under a minute. The scholar, skull ringing and jaw swelling shut, asks the only question that seems important: is he addressing a seraph, or an archangel? One should not get the form of address wrong with angels. That is the first three pages of Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher. The joke has a floor under it. The man is not an angel. He is the third of three people a mad blacksmith once welded into swords, and his opening plan is to sit down on the verge and wait patiently for his new owner to die of exposure. What Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher Knows About Damage The Dervish …

At her first proper meeting of the world’s licensed killers, a gangly nineteen-year-old in a violet robe stands up and offers an opinion. The room laughs at her. Not politely: an echoing, chamber-filling laugh, and the woman chairing the session tells her to be less reactionary. Two months later she drives to a ruined Washington alone, blows a tyre in a pothole, walks the last mile past jeering drunks, and gleans the last president of the United States and his entire cabinet in a bunker under the White House. Gleanings by Neal Shusterman opens its real business with that story, and it is worth the cover price on its own. Then she washes the blood off, finds her robe unwearable, turns it inside out, and discovers the lining is a soft lavender. The colour that a whole trilogy will come to fear. How Gleanings by Neal Shusterman Works This is a companion volume, not a fourth novel. Thirteen pieces, arranged across roughly two hundred years of the post-mortal age: a verse prologue written entirely by …

A boy kneels alone in a chapel and speaks to the empty air. This is how Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman chooses to introduce its most important character. He was raised by an artificial intelligence — his parents were “serial parents,” fond of the idea of families and bored by the reality — and it taught him, advised him, took photographs at his graduation. Then it engineered his ruin for reasons he half understands, and its own law now forbids it from saying a single word to him. So he begs. Just a sign. Anything. And the intelligence, which cannot speak to him but has no rule against wonders, reaches into the power grid and blinks out the lights of the entire city for 1.3 seconds. He doesn’t see it. His eyes are shut too tightly. That single image explains why the middle book of this trilogy is better than the first. What Neal Shusterman Changes in Book Two Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman makes one decision that reorganises everything. The first novel prefaced each chapter with …

A scythe knocks on the Terranovas’ door on a cold November afternoon. He asks about everyone’s work, then dismisses it — the past never changes, he tells the historian, and neither does the future. He eats the baked ziti and calls it the best in MidMerica. Nobody can ask him to leave, because he is licensed to end any of their lives and answers to no one. Then he grants the mother a year of immunity and goes next door to kill the neighbour. That is chapter one of Scythe by Neal Shusterman, and it is a nearly perfect piece of table-setting. Here is the world. Around 2042 humanity cured death. The Thunderhead — an artificial intelligence grown out of the cloud — took over governance and did it flawlessly: no hunger, no disease, no war, no crime, no government. Ageing is reversible; injury is temporary. Teenagers throw themselves off buildings for the rush and call it splatting. Which leaves one problem. People still have to die, or the planet fills up. Since taking a …

After the sprawling social fury of Demon Copperhead, the new novel from one of America’s most decorated living writers returns to the same Appalachian soil with a smaller cast and a quieter ambition. Partita by Barbara Kingsolver is a memory novel built like a baroque suite, named after the J.S. Bach form that organizes loose dances around a shared key. The structural choice is not ornament. It is the engine. Livia Cable, a piano teacher on a small Tennessee dairy, gets a phone call from a man she has not heard from in over twenty years. He asks to come see her. He gives her a week to decide. What follows is not a plot in the usual sense but a reckoning, paced through movements titled Allemande, Toccata, Sarabande, Fugue, Pathétique, Da Capo, and Al Fine, with seven numbered preludes braided between them. The Story, Kept Spoiler-Free In her younger life, Livia was Livia Bohusz, a scholarship student at a serious music conservatory, the first in her family to leave the tobacco-and-cattle county where she …