“In Northaven, songlight is a burden; it’s treacherous. Occasionally I’ll sense a note on the air like the colours of the loom, or a sigh like water falling down a drain, or thought-wreathes hanging like the crackling of a fire. And then the singer notices and suddenly it’s tight and hard to breathe.” In this picture-perfect town, telepathic powers are “an unhuman stain upon our souls”; “adulterers, degenerates, runaways and thieves” also have much to fear. Teenage girls like Lark, the central protagonist, must hide anything unseemly about themselves, particularly as it is time for men to choose their wives.
Alongside the repression and control, there is propaganda – the Brightlings are at war with the Aylish, allegedly due to the latter’s own terrible actions, and the fear of returning to the olden days when the “Light People” ruined the planet (that’d be contemporary civilisation, folks) – hovering over everything. All of these are familiar elements in dystopian fiction, though this is a bit like noting that there’s a murder in a crime novel – we can note the expected tropes appearing without viewing it as a flaw in the work. The more interesting question is whether it’s handled well.
Short answer: yes. Songlight (Faber, £8.99), the first in a planned trilogy, is the prose debut from veteran playwright and screenwriter Moira Buffini. Themes she’s explored in script form creep in at the edges here – brothels, politics, complicated women – and she is also well-versed in the literary form she explores here (the world is a nod to John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, but there are echoes of Atwood and Orwell as well). The polyvocal narrative allows for a range of nuanced perspectives as well as providing insight into different corners of Brightland; Lark bears witness to – and causes trouble in – her small town, but we also see what life is like in the cities and behind the closed gates of power. An immersive, gripping, thought-provoking read.
Moving from the distant to the near-future, there’s a debut from software industry professional Neil Taylor, Anticipation (Neem Tree Press, £8.99), which draws on his own experience to present a thriller about predictive AI. Seventeen-year-old Riya loses her father in a suspicious plane crash and is nominated as his successor as Keyholder – one of a select group who can decide what to do with Art, software that can predict the future with unsettling accuracy.
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Riya is sceptical at the notion that past behaviour – as monitored by omnipresent technology – can be this influential for determining future acts, but she’s told, “You don’t have free will, you never did. People are just a bunch of algorithms; you take in information from the world around, run it through the algorithms in your brain, and out comes your behaviour.” Art, though, is not inherently evil – it proves helpful when Riya and her allies are trying to figure out how to escape from Jim Booker, a social media mogul whose platform, Indigo, outstrips all others in analysing its consumer data and finding sales opportunities for itself. In Booker’s hands, we see clearly, this technology would be exceptionally dangerous.
All of this is, of course, only a tiny step away from reality. This is a book light on characterisation but heavy on action, and its strength is how creepily topical it is – particularly as Riya, like most people, is informed about the choice we all make when using these platforms or thinks she is. We give the tech companies our data and we get a free space to play in, to communicate within, and we convince ourselves that we are sufficiently independently minded not to be manipulated. Future books in this series are en route, and it will be fascinating to see where the story goes next, and what philosophical questions may be posed.
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RTÉ Nationwide presenter Zainab Boladale makes her fiction debut with Braids Take A Day (O’Brien, €11.99), focusing on Abidemi’s last summer in her small town before heading off to college in Dublin. It’s just Abi and her dad at home, since her mother’s death, and she sometimes wishes she had more family around: “The idea of a shared bond, especially in something as personal as Black hair, created a sense of connection and warmth that went beyond the surface of a casual friendship. Would this have been what it was like if I had lived in Nigeria surrounded by extended family?”
A friendship with a Nigerian woman she meets on Instagram provides some of what she needs, serving as a counterpoint to the moments when Abi – whose knowledge of such things is gleaned mostly from the internet – is asked by girls at school to give her official opinion on cultural appropriation and Black history. It’s handled with a light touch, and although it does feel a little more like journalism than fiction, reported and summarised rather than dramatised, it’s brilliant to see this play out in an Irish context.
Boladale does a great job at capturing smalltown Irish life, with the routine of the “big shop” at the weekends and the negotiating to be done in order to get to the nearest disco; we also have subtle nods about her dad’s accent switching depending on whether he’s talking to international colleagues or the locals. Abi’s an endearing heroine, and it’s particularly lovely to see her figure out what she really wants to focus on post-school.
The what-to-do-with-my-life dilemma also pops up in Maggie Horne’s thoughtful Don’t Let It Break Your Heart (Penguin, £8.99), where American smalltown life is put under the microscope. Alana’s final year of school is marked by the arrival of new girl Tal, who “feels too significant for the whole world not to take notice”, and who nudges Alana into re-evaluating the status quo – her codependent relationship with her ex-boyfriend Gray, her plans for college, her tolerance of the friend who outed her the previous year. First love is such an important trope in YA fiction not just because teenagers are hormonal fiends (though that too), but because it’s a powerful way into seeing yourself differently and seeing the world differently. It’s handled brilliantly here.
“Why an oboe?” people keep wondering in Almost Nothing Happened (Bloomsbury, £12.99), the latest gem from the acclaimed Meg Rosoff. Callum has spent the summer in France on an exchange trip, falling in hopelessly unrequited love with an older girl while still struggling to actually speak the language: “I wanted love so badly, it caused me actual physical pain… God, it’s hell being young.”
Suddenly convinced that bad news awaits back home, he runs away from the Eurostar back to London at the last minute. His avoidant personality is almost immediately tested when, after an evening out with his cousin, he realises he “had somehow managed to entangle my benevolent host with a ruthless gang of criminal wind instrument masterminds”. Ending up on the back of a motorbike hurtling around Paris, not entirely sure if he’s ally or victim of kidnapping, he embarks on the kind of whimsical coming-of-age adventure most of us can only dream of.
As ever with Rosoff, the voice is pitch-perfect – that beautifully adolescent mix of longing and sharp, clueless and world-weary – and the story compulsively readable.
