Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Customers who bought this item also bought
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Top reviews from other countries
Johnner
"Where were you when we both were children?"
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2018
Johnner
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2018
Reynolds’ beat in part is the psycho-geographical territory visited in dreams, a false place with vanishing buildings, where a character might suddenly proclaim to have an interesting pie in the oven, and where thickly-inked environments seem always to be holding their breath. Set in a future that evokes a time when we were more in tune with other worlds—in this new world, after all, we have reminders of an alien presence—these lyrical stories drift from the elusive and the baffling to the poignant and the heartbreaking, and intimate a warm fascination for the things we live a little distance from. Largely, they’re a synthesis of dreams and memories, and the feeling of dreams and memories: there’s a corner around every corner in The New World, and Reynolds’ flirtation with dream logic often lurks with interruptions and new significances. It’s a beguiling push-and-pull that makes few concessions to reasonable explanation: generally the cause is no great matter, only the effect.
The New World is peopled by characters often occupied with tokens of the past, and future; characters confronted by endings, and beginnings, immediate and protracted—because change from the old world to the new is a process. (I was reminded of lines from Brendan Kennelly’s poem ‘Begin’: Though we live in a world that dreams of ending / that always seems about to give in / something that will not acknowledge conclusion / insists that we forever begin.) Nearly all characters are quaintly milquetoast and dutiful—investigative, but never in open revolt—and demonstrate resilience and perseverance as they carry off the ordinary, everyday challenges of the daily humdrum, utilising little mysteries as legitimate escapes. Perhaps this deference owes to the influence of the moral values ingrained in early youth by earth’s conquerors, The Aragon Union of Systa? Alien conditioning or not, it’s easy to relate to the sense of stifled protagonist hopeful for the dream-fate that awaits.
Reading this work again—and to hijack a line from John Banville—it seemed altered, as if some small, familiar thing had been quietly removed. Reynolds’ stories, you understand, simultaneously possess a defined, lucid presence and a vague, abstract absence. You won’t forget comics from Mauretania, but every reread is like reading them for the first time.
Images in this review
Elizabeth E
Beautiful, stunning. Get it!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 5, 2019