This will be a somewhat recurrent post, detailing some of the Advanced Reader’s Copies of books I’ve received recently. The frequency of this post will depend on what ARCs I get sent or approved for. Sometimes it might be often, sometimes not as often. Enjoy! I am looking forward to read these books, let me know if any of them have caught your eye too.

Synopsis:

A novel of a life built on the ashes of childhood

In the 1950s Tropical Republic, a boy lives amid opulence and privilege, spending days at the beach or in the cool hills above the sweltering capital, enjoying leisurely Sunday lunches around the family compound’s swimming pool. That is, until the reign of The Mortician begins, unleashing unimaginable horrors that bring his childhood idyll to an end. Narrowly escaping the violent fate visited on so many of his fellow citizens, he and his brother follow their parents into exile in the United States where they must start a new life. But as he grows, he never feels at home, and leaves his family to travel across Europe and outrun the ghosts of the past.

A searing novel of a life lived in the shadow of history, The Delicate Beast portrays the persistent, pernicious legacy of political violence.

Synopsis:

You are being played.

Your every move is being watched by businesses hoping to manipulate your behaviour. Every picture, every post, every like, every follow, every purchase, every search.

When 17-year-old Riya Sudame inherits her father’s secret AI algorithm, she and a handful of carefully selected Keyholders hold the power to predict people’s future using their online data. But with great power comes great responsibility, and they must safeguard it from falling into the wrong hands.

Enter Jim Booker, a powerful social media tycoon, who will stop at nothing to steal the technology for himself. Soon Riya faces a critical choice. Fighting ruthless tech giants seems like an impossible task—wouldn’t it be easier to relinquish her father’s creation in exchange for a normal teenage life?

But if she does, she will have to live with the knowledge that she is the reason that, like everyone, you are being played.

Neil Taylor marks his debut in this dark, twisty AI YA thriller.

Synopsis:

A warrior struggles through an apocalyptic landscape and the world after death

Kree Toronto has been raised as a warrior in a ravaged postapocalyptic, posthuman, the population decimated by wars and civilization long since collapsed. After her attempt to avenge the death of her dog, Loka, goes horribly wrong, Kree finds herself lost in a world after death and wanders into the city of the terrible mendicants.

Under the Brothers’ totalitarian rule, Kree can lead a quiet life and forget her violent past, even if needles grow in her skull and hallucinatory blood rains pour down now and then to remind her. She can make a shamanic healer with a shaking tent, a mysterious stranger hatched from an egg, and a gruff Tibetan electrician in a world without electricity. And she can have her Loka as long as she toes the Party line and does as she’s told. When she can’t—when her friends start to disappear and the Brothers turn against her—Kree sets out on a quest, searching for a new way forward.

Multiply reincarnated and unstuck in time, Kree is the characteristically marvelous creation of Manuela Draeger, whose extraordinary stories, in the words of author China Miéville, “are as close to dreams as fiction can be.”