I'm an award-winning English writer of what's broadly termed science fiction and fantasy, at least in the sense that most of my work features strange events and fantastic settings. But I'm also deeply drawn to naturalistic fiction and have often found that one of the best and most exciting ways to explore the thrillingly odd without losing touch with the believably real is to take a step sideways in history. Alternate history isn't just about the Nazis winning World War Two, and the Confederate American South defeating the Yankee North. A good, original alternate history can open up the traditional novel into fresh worlds and new vistas.
Although it starts with a teasing prologue in which the main character, Ursula, prepares to shoot Hitler in a Munich coffee shop in 1930, this novel then goes back to Ursula's birth, or rather her stillbirth, on a snowy night when the midwife fails to reach her mother in time. The narrative continues through a series of dark moments and silly accidents of the kind that most children survive, but some don't. Yet Ursula does both: life after life, in other words. This might sound experimental and complicated, but in Atkinson's hands, it becomes a deeply involving saga of life, love, and war in the first half of the last century told with a brilliantly alternate twist.
What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
Moorcock might be best known for his sword-and-sorcery Elric novels, but he's also a writer of considerable daring and style. Gloriana tells of a Queen of Albion whose empire stretches from the great continent of Virginia to far Hindustan, and then on to Cathay beyond. Half-familiar figures and place names vie with pagan myths and strange ceremonies inside a palace so vast and rambling that every kind of wonder, and the darkest of secrets, have room to hide. The settings and the language are glorious, and the characters, and their schemes and machinations, come vibrantly alive. This is a vivid dream of an alternate queen and an alternate England.
Tiem and again, small numbers of Germans, civilian nad military, noble and ignoble, scheme to topple the Fuhrer, and on several occasions they came within minutes - or inches - of succeeding. Fest explores why they tried, why they found so little support either in Germany or outside it, and why they failed.
Seeker: As societies grow increasingly fragmented, hopelessness, nihilism, division, and despair are on the rise. But there is another way—a way of mystery and magic, of wholeness and transformation. Do you dare take the first step? Our path is not for the faint-hearted, but for seekers of ancient truths...
No question at all that this novel is set in an alternate dystopia. It's Britain in the 1990s, but the cloning of humans is not only possible but legal, and these clones are then compelled to gradually give up their organs so normal citizens can extend their lives. If that sounds pretty grim, in many ways it is, but somehow in this novel it isn't, as the quiet voice of Ishiguro's narrator, a clone called Kathy who is now a carer for other donors as their health declines, makes it all feel eerily normal. This book eschews the usual dystopian bombast in favour of telling how a dark and strange but compellingly plausible situation affects people's lives.
One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense…
We all have our own private "what if" moments and personal alternate histories. The party invites we wisely declined, the job offer we foolishly accepted, and—above all, I suspect for many of us—the person we did or didn't kiss. Irina, a successful book illustrator in a long-term relationship with a caring if somewhat boring Lawrence, faces such a crossroads when she encounters the laddish but glamorous professional snooker player Ramsey. Which way does she go? The answer, through the book's following alternate chapters, is both. We get to examine the trails, tribulations, and excitements that run through these alternate relationships through the scalpel of Shriver's characteristically sharp but always witty narrative.
From the Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, this is the novel Lionel Shriver wrote directly afterwards. The Post-Birthday World is an unflinching account of the choices that unfold before us and what our decisions really mean.
Irina McGovern's destiny hinges on a single kiss. Whether she gives into its temptation will determine whether she stays with her reliable partner Lawrence, or runs off with Ramsey, a hard-living snooker player.
Employing a parallel universe structure, Shriver spins Irina's competing futures with two drastically different men. An intellectual and fellow American, Lawrence is clever and supportive,…
Pretty much every historical novel is an alternate history, at least in the sense that it puts semi made-up scenes and characters into otherwise realistic events and settings, but Possession takes the "made-up" bit to another level. Two modern researchers are looking into a previously unknown love affair between the famous Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. All of which, of course, is fiction. But what boots this novel into the alternate stratosphere is the way Byatt interweaves and develops her story through the writings of these great alternate Victorian poets. There are love letters, poems, journal entries, short stories, all executed with great skill and heartfelt conviction.
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.
Amid the glamour of 1940s Hollywood, a failed actor named Clark Gable is ruing the advent of a new movie technology that allows the audience to not only see and hear the actors on the screen but to feel what they are feeling. Clark, now an unlicensed private eye specialising in seedy divorce work, is asked to stand in for a prominent screenwriter suffering from mental health problems with whom he bears a vague resemblance merely so that the contract for his next big feelie, Wake Up and Dream, can be formally signed.
It all seems pretty straightforward, at least until someone tries to kill him and he realises he needs to discover what's really going on inside a corrupt political system if he's going to survive.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band, they rob the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive pegasus. Thanks to Marani’s mysterious invulnerability,…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
