New releases in fiction, non-fiction and comics that catch our eye.
Night guest By Hildur Knútsdóttir
Anyone who has lived with a difficult-to-diagnose chronic illness and endured the frustrating process of trying to get proper treatment can tell you that it can sometimes be a living nightmare. To defend yourself, to fight to be taken seriously; it’s something I’ve dealt with most of my life as a person with autoimmune diseases. So when I read the description of Hildur Knútsdóttir’s psychological horror novel, Night guestimmediately resonated with me:
Idunn is in another doctor’s office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something is wrong, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests have revealed no cause. When she talks about it with friends and family, the refrain is the same – have you tried eating better? do you exercise more? set a night mode? He tries to follow their advice, taking everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a pedometer. Nothing helps. Until one night, Idunn falls asleep with his watch on and wakes up to find that he has walked more than 40,000 steps a night. . . What happens when he sleeps?
Night guest is a short, compelling read that puts a disturbing spin on an issue many people can relate to. I almost inhaled it.
Is the location exceptional? The Search for Space Life By Mario Livio and Jack Szostak
The question of the origin of life and whether it exists elsewhere is a topic I find endlessly interesting (as evidenced by how regularly books on it appear among these recommendations). In his new books Is the location exceptional? The Search for Space Lifeastrophysicist Mario Livio and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak examine what we know about the things that make life possible—the building blocks of life—and how they might have originated on Earth and hypothetically elsewhere. At the heart of this mystery is the still unanswered question of whether life is the result of a freak accident.
As the authors write in their introduction, “Even with the tremendous scientific progress we’ve witnessed in the last few decades, we still don’t know whether life is an extremely rare chemical accident, in which case we might be alone in our galaxy. or the chemical inevitability that will make us part of a giant galactic ensemble.”
To poverty by Zac Thompson, Hayden Sherman
As he imagined in 2034 To poverty, Earth is well past the tipping point of climate change. The planet has been ravaged by natural disasters and species have been wiped out en masse. In search of anything that might help improve the state of the world, a team of climate scientists with the Science Institute for New Ecology and Worlds (SINEW) set out to explore what appears to be a completely new environment that has sprung up out of nowhere near their camp. Out in Australia. But they are not prepared for what they find.
To poverty is a fantastic new sci-fi series that weaves in space horror. The first issue came out earlier this summer, and Part One wrapped up this week with the fourth issue. If you were logged in Scavengers rule or Southern Reach Trilogy, you will probably enjoy it To poverty. Art alone will swallow you.
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