”’And you’re returning to South Africa after your vacation?’‘Yes, that’s where we live,’ proud of the fact of it. Away from everyday Nazis and school shootings so regular they were pract...
If Broken Monsters was Lauren Beukes’s great Clive Barker novel, then Afterland is her great Stephen King novel. By the way, I personally hate it when blurbs state breathlessly that if you loved ‘...
Afterland is an okay dystopian story. Somewhat of a rehash of the graphic novel series Y: The Last Man. How much knowledge Beukes had of that story or if she was influenced by it at all, I cannot say....
I was worried about picking up a book centred on a pandemic, I mean the timing is interesting isn’t it. But two things quickly became clear:1. The pandemic here is different - it only kills men2. Th...
"You can’t imagine how much the world can change in six months. You just can’t." Except that, now, of course we all can...3.5 stars rounded up to 4. I’ve read all of Lauren Beukes nov...
By now, a lot of us have read a lot of dystopias featuring sexual politics, often accompanied with some major disaster that leaves women a huge minority (The Book of Etta) or (The White Plague) or any...
3.5 starsI have read most of Lauren Beukes’s books and loved all of them. She has always had this undefinable element to her stories that made them stand out. From the bizzaro world of Zoo City to t...
Unfortunately this book was not for me. I almost DNFED it at 25%, 50%, and again even at 75%. As you can probably tell I do not like to DNF books, I think I owe the publishers and authors more than th...
With transmisogyny fundamentally baked into the premise, and apparently a long history of cissexism before this, the author's presumed insights into gender, power and humanity are nothing but a trainw...
Hmm, sounds promising. I LOVE The Handmaid’s Tale, and this book said it would focus on a different type of dystopia, one where men were the rarity. Unfortunately, this book failed to live up to its...