MOONKING TRILOGY
Billy Cowie (idiolect, £9.95)
Moonking came out in 2008, its sequel Second Coming in 2013, the trilogy was completed with Exodus in 2017 and now they’re all available in one bumper book. Suitable for older children and young adults, they’re highly enjoyable science fiction novels which deserve to be far better known than they are. Erikson lives with his mother on the Martian moon of Deimos, where they’re descended on by two interplanetary criminals who intend to hold them hostage while stealing the valuable cobalt they’re mining. Erikson escapes to Mars, where he knows no one but is befriended by a semi-criminal girl, Magda, and a network of sentient machines which regard Erikson as an honorary brother. The cobalt heist is only the beginning of their adventures in a series which is engaging, pacey and full of interesting concepts, with just enough exposition to fill us in on this unfamiliar future solar system but not so much as to slow down the plot.
CLEAN
Michele Kirsch (Short Books, £12.99)
When 19-year-old Michele Kirsch went to college in Boston, she took on a cleaning job to make ends meet. Medicated from an early age for stomach problems and anxiety, she was addicted to Valium, but didn’t equate the rattling bottles of legally prescribed medicines in her handbag with the substances her hippy friends took. Twenty years later, by this time living in London, she had the lifestyle she’d always wanted but lost it through her dependency on drugs and alcohol. Aged 50, she was back to cleaning again. Showing great insight into the mindset of addiction, Clean is not a happy story, but Kirsch is conscious of all the ironies in her life, poking fun at her early naiveté and daring us not to laugh at her mishaps. Which, when confronted by anecdotes like the chiropodist pressured to declare her grandfather dead, or her mother being sacked from a soft-porn magazine for lacking gravitas, is just as well.
I WILL NEVER SEE THE WORLD AGAIN
Ahmet Altan (Granta, £9.99)
The title of this book isn’t hyperbole or poetic metaphor. Turkish author Ahmet Altan was imprisoned by the Erdoğan regime for comments he made during the failed 2016 coup, sentenced to life without parole for purportedly giving “subliminal messages” of encouragement. If the campaign for his release supported by 51 Nobel laureates fails, he may well never know freedom again. But his words have escaped in this memoir, an eloquent and profoundly affecting record of his impressions of incarceration in a “stagnant place” where time can flow forwards or backwards depending on one’s thoughts. His ability to endure captivity and keep alive the spark inside him is grounded in a moment in a police car when he effectively split himself in two, his physical self overseen by “a mind … that believed itself untouchable”. Altan’s account of living with courage and dignity in grossly unjust circumstances is a testament to human endurance, joining the ranks of the greatest prison memoirs.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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