I haven’t been reading as much during the time I was finishing Isolate, but I have read a few books in the last several months. I greatly appreciated Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Brightness Long Ago, and even if it is a more direct riff on post-Byzantine Italy than some of his other fantasies are of history, I still found it poignant and enjoyable. I do have a fondness for Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict, and Octavia Gone was entertaining to me, but I think a bit weaker in basic plot than some of the earlier novels. I also read the ARC of Re-Coil, by J.T. Nicolas, (forthcoming in March from Titan Books), which is a an intriguing mix of bio-tech and space opera, and, unfortunately, clearly the first book in a series, which left it with a weaker ending than I would have preferred.

I also got to read an advance, uncorrected, bound manuscript of The Freedom Race, by Lucinda Roy, a novel that I can only describe as American magic-realism meets the outcome of the Second U.S. Civil War in a well-told, but brutally jolting, strangely prescient, and soul-haunting narrative. Unhappily, because I got to read this early-on, it won’t be published until mid-2021.

And, as always, there were a few other books I won’t mention.