James Nicoll Reviews

Destroyer of Light by Jennifer Marie Brissett

The Matrix meets an Afro-futuristic retelling of Persephone set in a science fiction underworld of aliens, refugees, and genetic engineering in Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Destroyer of Light.

Having destroyed Earth, the alien conquerors resettle the remains of humanity on the planet of Eleusis. In the three habitable areas of the planet – Day, Dusk, and Night – the haves and have nots, criminals and dissidents, and former alien conquerors irrevocably bind three stories:*A violent warlord abducts a young girl from the agrarian outskirts of Dusk leaving her mother searching and grieving.*Genetically modified twin brothers desperately search for the lost son of a human/alien couple in a criminal underground trafficking children for unknown purposes. A young woman with inhuman powers rises through the insurgent ranks of soldiers in the borderlands of Night.Their stories skate across years, building to a single confrontation when the fate of all — human and alien — balances upon a knife’s‑edge.

Warning: This book is designed for audiences 18+ due to scenes of physical and sexual violence, and themes that some may find disturbing. 

Ghost Forest: A Novel by Pik-Shuen Fung

How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings? 

This is the question the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong ​“astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China. 

As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs. 

Buoyant and heartbreaking, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family. 

The Cabinet by Un-Su Kim

Winner of the Munhakdongne Novel Award, South Korea’s most prestigious literary prize. Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet…Except this cabinet is filled with files on the ​‘symptomers’, humans whose strange abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species. But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker whose job it is to look after the cabinet, the symptomers are a headache; especially the one who won’t stop calling every day, asking to be turned into a cat. A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most everyday lives, from one of South Korea’s most acclaimed novelists. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert