Mailbox Monday 25.02.13

After a couple of weeks with no books at all (haven't I been good?), I've fallen off the wagon a tad this week, but at least it means I have something to bring to the party for Mailbox Monday, hosted in February by Unabridged Chick.

First, we have Waterline by Ross Raisin, which arrived courtesy of Judith from Leeswammes' Blog after I won it in her Literary Blog Hop giveaway. Thanks, Judith, it looks really good!

Mick Little used to be a shipbuilder on the Glasgow yards. But as they closed one after another down the river, the search for work took him and his beloved wife Cathy to Australia, and back again, struggling for a living, longing for home. Thirty years later the yards are nearly all gone and Cathy is dead. And now Mick will have to find a new way to live: to get away, start again, and try to deal with the guilt he feels over her death.

In his devastating new novel Ross Raisin brings vividly to life the story of an ordinary man caught between the loss of a great love and the hard edges of modern existence. Tracing Mick's journey from the Glasgow shipyards to the crowded, sweating kitchens of an airport hotel, to the streets and riversides of London, it is an intensely moving portrait of a life being lived all around us, and a story for our times

Next, a book that's been sitting on my wishlist for ages, ever since I saw an intriguing review of it at Annabel's House of Books. I Have Waited and You Have Come by Martine McDonagh looks just the thing to ease my recent dystopia cravings.

The world has been ravaged by climate change and Rachel is left to fend for herself. Living amid a clutch of disparate communities whose inhabitants she chooses to avoid, she rarely ventures beyond the safety of the storm wall. But when Jez White disturbs her twilight existence, Rachel finds herself in a murky territory somewhere between stalking and being stalked. A story of survival and obsession, this is a complex psychological portrait framed by compelling drama. It is by turns sensual, poignant and sinister.

After the success of last year's Sci-Fi Challenge, science fiction is rapidly becoming one of my favourite genres, so I decided to treat myself to a couple of books from this year's British Science Fiction Awards shortlist. Intrusion by Ken MacLeod looks like an interesting take on the theme of genetic engineering.

Imagine a near-future city, say London, where medical science has advanced beyond our own and a single-dose pill has been developed that, taken when pregnant, eradicates many common genetic defects from an unborn child. Hope Morrison, mother of a hyperactive four-year-old, is expecting her second child. She refuses to take The Fix, as the pill is known. This divides her family and friends and puts her and her husband in danger of imprisonment or worse. Is her decision a private matter of individual choice, or is it tantamount to willful neglect of her unborn child? A plausible and original novel with sinister echoes of 1984 and Brave New World.

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett is much more "hard" sci-fi than I'm used to, but I like trying new things and it does look really good.

You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of two marooned explorers. You huddle, slowly starving, beneath the light and warmth of geothermal trees, confined to one barely habitable valley of a startlingly alien, sunless world. After 163 years and six generations of incestuous inbreeding, the Family is riddled with deformity and feeblemindedness. Your culture is a infantile stew of half-remembered fact and devolved ritual that stifles innovation and punishes independent thought. You are John Redlantern. You will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. You will be the first to abandon hope, the first to abandon the old ways, the first to kill another, the first to venture in to the Dark, and the first to discover the truth about Eden.