The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

Harry August has a pretty ordinary life. He is born in Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1919 and dies in a hospital in Newcastle in 1989. In the meantime he has different jobs, various relationships and tries to move on from his difficult family life. But when he dies he finds himself as a child again, regaining his memories of his prior life. This happens again. And again.

Harry is an Ouroboran, destined to live his life again and again. He is one of hundreds, and through the overlapping lifespans of Ouroborans it is possible to send and receive messages from the distant past and distant future. But, in Harry's eleventh life, the messages from the future start changing: the world is ending, and it is accelerating. When Harry's fellow Ouroborans start permanently dying (by someone assassinating their parents before they conceived) or having their memories wiped, and amazing technology appears decades early, he realises that one of their number has betrayed them and is using their power for their own ends, with destructive consequences for humanity.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was released in 2014 and won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, as well as being nominated for the Arthur C. Clark Award. It gained surprising widespread prominence after being featured on the UK's biggest TV book show. It is written by Catherine Webb under the pseudonym Claire North, which she uses to explore protagonists with unusual abilities (The Sudden Appearance of Hope is in a similar vein).

Webb is a constantly intriguing and interesting author, shifting genres and prose styles with enviable ease as she explores different ideas and characters. At her best, she comes across as a restless, far more prolific and slightly less repetitive (but also somewhat more wordy) Christopher Priest, with her books dwelling on themes such as identity and motivation amongst shifting realities and points of view.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August may be her finest novel to date. The central premise is incredibly strong and it deals with the existential questions surrounding the idea in surprising depth and with logic. Questions are raised such as if the Ouroborans are living in the same world, changing it each time they live through it, or if they are skipping from one timeline to another, and the moral consequences of that for the timelines they leave behind upon death. The overlapping lifespans of different Ouroborans allow them to bring back knowledge from the distant future (since an Ouroboran born in say 1984 dies in the late 21st Century, is reborn, reveals that information to another one who was born in 1925, who can pass it back in their next life etc) and this raises moral quandaries about if they should hoard their knowledge or try to improve humanity's lot.

This latter question consumes much of the novel, especially when it becomes clear that trying to change things often results in far worse consequences. But the dry time travel shenanigans are contrasted against Harry's characterisation, especially the trauma he carries from his first life and his intriguing relationship with a sometimes-nemesis Vincent. The path of the Ouroboran can be a lonely, frustrating one and Harry's dislike of Vincent for his relaxed morality is tempered with respect for his intelligence and just the company of a fellow travel on a journey through their looping lives. This relationship forms the core of the novel and is developed with relish by the author.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (*****) is a smart and thoughtful reflection on life, love, loss, identity, science and the end of the world. It is available now in the UK and USA.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

No-one can remember Hope Arden. A minute after taking their eyes off her, she vanishes from people's memories. Photographs can be taken, text messages read, but the very fact of her existence simply cannot be retained by the human brain. Unable to get a job (her bosses forget about her the second she leaves the premises) or hold down any kind of meaningful human relationship, Hope turns to crime to survive. What was supposed to be just one more diamond job in Dubai goes south thanks to a disturbing new lifestyle app. A woman dies and Hope suddenly discovers a cause, something to fight and die for, but a battle even her extraordinary advantage may not be able to help her win.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope is the fourth of five works by Catherine Webb published under the name of Claire North. These five works are thematically linked by each character in these works having some kind of special ability, usually providing great advantages but also tragic disadvantages, and a situation they have to deal with. It's thought-provoking, interesting stuff, written with a literary bent thanks to her superior ear for language and a great eye for character.

Webb may be better known to SFF fans under her other pen-name, Kate Griffin, under which she wrote the splendid Matthew Swift urban fantasy series, as well as the YA material she publishes under her own name. She's now chalked up seventeen novels under her three pen names, giving her works a sense of confidence that comes from experience. But she's also a restless author, constantly moving between ideas and embracing new concepts (hence why the Matthew Swift series wrapped up after just four books rather than being strung out for twenty). The Claire North books - given a bolster by The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August being chosen for a TV book club in the UK and taking off as a result - seem to be her way of fully engaging with an adult readership and also experimenting in ideas and literary styles between books.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope is an aptly-named book: for me it came out of nowhere and staked a serious claim to being one of the best genre novels of recent years. The premise is simple: no-one can remember Hope Arden. If she spends more than a minute out of their line of sight, they simply forget she existed. She can be caught on video or audio, but a minute after the viewer or listener switches the device off they forget her again. It makes forging any kind of relationship, from a friendship to a romance or a professional collaboration. difficult. The only way Hope can really survive is by forging a secret online identity as _why, which she uses on the darknet to fence stolen goods and arrange commissioned crimes or pick up falsified documents.

What could simply be a gimmicky special ability is instead folded into the book's over-arcing themes of identity, validation and how people desperately try to stand out in a world swamped in social media and superficiality. The storyline revolves around Perfection, an app which monitors users' habits and advises them if they are being "perfect" or not. It rewards people trying to be perfect with points, and at higher levels they gain rewards, from stays in posh hotels and spas to money off expensive beauty treatment and lifestyle courses. When people using the app find themselves getting dream jobs, meeting their perfect partners and improving their quality of life, it explodes in popularity. But Hope soon finds something sinister lurking behind the App, both in the people that made it and the people who use it regularly, something that ties in with the media's idea of what makes people perfect and what makes people people.

The result is a timely reflection and analysis of the world we live in. An app like Perfection isn't quite possible right now, but it's probably not too far off. Of course, the book takes the concept to its ultimate conclusion, bringing in body horror and invasive brain surgery. When Hope discovers a second person like herself who has been made memorable by the surgery, she suddenly finds herself fighting the urge to use it herself, to rejoin the human race at the expense of the things that make her unique.

The result is a book with a killer high concept, a fascinating and psychologically complex lead character and which uses its premise as a prim through which to examine the world around us, from vacuous media culture to spin doctors to lifestyle gurus and tabloid editors wielding more power than any elected political official, all told through some tremendously skilled prose.

There are moments where the pace stalls a little, where the movements between story and theme and characters don't jar quite as well as they should, and occasional moments where you find yourself questioning quite how Hope's abilities work (most of which, to be fair, the book answers quite well), but these issues are pretty limited.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope (****½) is a jet-setting novel about a jewel thief which metamorphoses into a beautifully-written taken on life in the 21st Century and on the meaning of identity. It is available now in the UK and USA.

A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin

Matthew Swift is an urban sorcerer, someone who can channel the energies of the city to perform great deeds of magic. He is also dead, torn of pieces by a shadowy monster. He is therefore confused to be up and walking around again, with two years passing in the blink of an eye. As Swift struggles to find out what has happened to him, he learns many of his friends are dead, his greatest ally may now be a dangerous enemy and that his only hope of survival may lie with a band of ill-matched wizards, bikers and fortune tellers who hate one another almost as much as their mutual foe.

Urban fantasy is a crowded subgenre and stand out from the tosh is an increasingly hard trick to pull off. Fortunately, A Madness of Angels manages to do so through sheer skill and accomplishment. Unlike many series in the genre, which require multiple volumes to gain traction and confidence, this series gets off to a flying start with a book which is brimming with confidence.

Kate Griffin is a pseudonym for Catherine Webb, who had already published numerous YA novels (the first at the age of 16) before tackling this, her first adult work. That experience shows with a bold introduction to the world and characters that most authors would probably steer clear of. The novel opens in media res as Swift is dropped (almost kicking and screaming) back into the life he was snatched away from two years earlier. Strangers are living in what used to be his house and strange forces are chasing him down London streets and trying to murder him. Swift's uses of personal pronouns (he moves between 'I' and 'we' almost randomly) is confused. Bizarrity abounds. We're almost fifty pages in before things start calming down and can start putting the pieces of the puzzle together. It may be harder work than having information dumped in an obvious fashion, but it's also more rewarding (and unlike say Steven Erikson, we at least get the answers to the mysteries in the same novel).

Griffin's prose is a cut above the average for this subgenre, fairly sparkling as it moves between describing feats of magic and the city itself. London is the setting for many urban fantasy novels, but not even in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is it evoked as strongly as in this book. The rhythms and beats of the city are given vivid life, not just to merely establish background but also in the magic of the book. In Griffin's world, magic is an evolving, constantly changing force. It's moved into the city and taken its nature as its own, with bag ladies, bike-riding couriers and crazy back-street magic shops having unusual powers and trains and electricity developing their own types of magic.

Swift is our first-person POV character and, normally, the format would restrict any sense of mystery in the character. However, the circumstances of Swift's demise and resurrection are extremely confused, even to Swift himself, and this allows a fair amount of time to pass before we get the full picture of Swift's background and character. He is a well-drawn protagonist, more capable and powerful than many an urban fantasy lead character, but not overpowered or invulnerable (as a running joke about how he can't go more than a few hours between visits to cleaning shops to get blood and/or scorch  marks out of his clothes indicates). He's also undergone a fairly radical transformation of the soul as a result of his experiences, and Griffin explores this in interesting psychological detail. The 'old' Swift appears to be more humourous and sarcastic than the 'current' one, who bursts of black humour aside is more passive. The reasons for this are intriguing. The supporting cast is impressively-depicted as well, with the 'villains' having their own motivations and desires rather than being evil for the sake of it.

A Madness of Angels is highly impressive, especially for the opening novel of a series (though the books are somewhat episodic; this first volume doesn't have a cliffhanger ending or anything of the sort) and only has a few minor issues. The first fifty pages or so sees some clearing of the throat going on as Griffin attempts to find her voice. A laudable attempt to inject a slightly more offbeat writing style into the book ends up with a few instances of purple prose before she finds a more comfortable writing style. There's also probably a bit too much information given away early in the book about the central mysteries, allowing readers to deduce what's going on a little while before the characters.

Aside from these niggles, A Madness of Angels (****½) is an accomplished, highly readable novel and promises great things for later books in the series. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.