Recent Reads: The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks – someone recommended this to me, IDEK who, but I’m grateful to them for it: it’s surreal and fantastic and a thrumming good read.
The premise is roughly that the moral equivalent of the East India Company has built a railroad connecting Moscow to Bejing, through the walled-off wasteland of Siberia, which has long-since become a surreal expanse of inexplicable and encroaching magical change that threatens everything normal beyond the Walls. The Train is the only thing that can pass through it safely, and even so, its passengers are not always safe.
It’s absolutely wonderful. Written in present tense, which often doesn’t work for me but is perfect for the continuous motion of the Train and the emotional turmoil of the viewpoint characters, it’s eerie, breathtaking, and often heartbreakingly beautiful. A real success simply in terms of wordsmithing, but also the story is pretty compelling as things fall apart.
This is one of those books that I think will either Work For You, or Not. I’m extremely happy it worked for me, and recommend it wholeheartedly while also recognizing that it just might not work for some people. :)