● Genre – sci-fi > space opera ● ISBN hardback – 978-1-80552-029-0 ● ISBN ebook – 978-1-80552-030-6 ● Pricing [USD] $26.95 (HB) / $4.99 (EB) ● Pricing [GBP] £20 (HB) / £4.95 (EB) ● Releases April 21 2026 ● Published by Flame Tree Press ● Distributed by Hachette UK / Simon & Schuster US
SYNOPSIS
A standalone story set in The Fractal universe, which began with the much lauded Fearless.
2121 AD. Three years after the first Mars conflict, the colony is still struggling to recover. Corporations fight to hold on to their investments. Old secrets resurface and new faces appear.
Magnus Sirocco should never have been allowed to come here. He is a vigilante turned revolutionary who has been given a cause. He doesn’t lose. Ever. Peter Iskander leads a new religious mission to deliver the promised land to their people. And after being investigated, exonerated and promoted, Commodore Ellisa Shann returns, but when a ship is stolen, she is drawn into another deadly duel.
When Clifford crash lands on the planet of Abaddon, he might as well be dead: a terrible plague and a strict quarantine mean that no one leaves Abaddon alive.
Clifford isn’t the only dead man walking. Corporate mercenaries and desperate survivors are looking for ways to live in a hostile world. Constantly on the run from flesh-hungry monsters, there’s no chance to escape or to build something more.
But when Clifford makes a discovery that could change the meaning of Abaddon, loyalty clashes with survival in a story about how to live with the certainty of death.
The Author
Andrew Knighton is an author of short stories, comics, novellas, and the novels The Executioner’s Blade (Northodox, November 2024) and Forged for Destiny (Orbit, March 2025). As a freelance writer, he’s ghostwritten over forty novels in other people’s names, as well as articles, history books, and video scripts. He lives in Yorkshire with an academic and a cat, growing vegetables and dreaming about a brighter future. You can find more of his work and social media links at andrewknighton.com .
My Review
I read this novella at the end of March and my brain being what it is, totally forgot to write a review.
Today I went to York.
That is not the non sequitur it might appear. I went to York for a BFS Yorkshire and Humber regional group meet-up. We went on a book crawl after meeting at the amazing Portal Bookshop. My trains were horrendously late, and I had time for a lemonade and cake in the tiny café before we left for the next bookshop. I intend to do an order for the books I didn’t get round to buying when I next get some money. As we, a group of about 10 weirdos in a very strange city, strolled in the afternoon sun towards our second bookshop, The Minster Gate Bookshop, a gangly looking fella in a red Schrodinger’s Cat joke t-shirt, by the name of Andy, started talking to me. I should have run away right then, especially after he asked if I could review his book. Once he told me what it was called, I realised that ‘Andy’ was Andrew Knighton.
I informed Andy I’d already read it, and enjoyed it. We had a bit of a chat about the story and then went on to talking about how much we both love Luna Press Publishing. Not surprising, Andy has two Luna Novellas and I fell in love with Francesca at my first Fantasycon in 2021. Alright, I fell in love with the selection of academic and Tolkien-adjacent books they print, Francesca just happened to be standing behind the table. I spent so much money! I regularly buy books from Luna Press Publishing and I recommend them.
So, that’s how I met an author and remembered to review this novella.
Clifford crash lands on an interdicted planet as a spoil scientist working for an organisation that sounds really dodgy. Actually, the entire society sounds very dystopia and authoritarian. On the planet, he meets a priestess dying of cancer, and a mixed group who show him how to survive on a planet where a disease can mutate you into bizarre forms and will kill you in days. He’s terrified of dying and desperate to get off the planet.
He isn’t getting off the planet.
As part of his travels he discovers a possible cure for the disease and tries to use it as a bargaining chip to get off the planet.
He isn’t getting off the planet.
This story is a meditation on facing the inevitability of death and deciding to live. You get the one chance, and even if it’s short and possibly painful, you can still find a way to face it all and live.
The priestess is a delight in snarkiness and her wisdom helps Clifford see that life continues even in terrible circumstances and there are ways to make the best of things even when you want to despair. There is so much potential for the world Andy built in this novella, but this story works well in the novella format; it’s just the right length for the story.
I enjoyed it immensely. It was a satisfying little read for a midweek evening. Definitely recommend it.
I did not stay in my budget today, but I only bought eight books, one of which was a recommendation from Andy and another was a new edition of Carpe Jugulem, because I need a new copy. The trains were an absolute mess all day and I had to leave early to catch a train to Doncaster that would mean I could catch my originally planned TransPennine Express back to Grimsby. I finally got home just before 7 p.m., having been out for 10 hours! I am in pain! I ended up ordering take away because my brain refused to cook, even though I have a fridge full of food. It was UC and shopping day yesterday. Also, some scum bag racist put cheap, nasty looking flags on the lampposts during the night, it was quite disconcerting when I went out this morning. Going now, I need painkillers and to put rubbish in the bin.
Extinction Horizon meets Contagion in this sequel to 2025’s sci-fi thriller Symbiote, where the biological threat has escaped the South Pole and is now wreaking havoc upon Antarctica.
The survivors of the South Pole massacre will find that getting off the Antarctic continent may cost them their lives…
Months after the events of Symbiote, sunrise has come to the ice continent, bringing with it the beginning of the annual tourist season. where 1,500 summer visitors will soon call the coastal McMurdo Station home. With them are the architects of the classified CIA program that unleashed the deadly microbes, who are determined to uncover what happened with their experiment and harvest samples of the mutation to turn into a biological weapon.
However, when Ben Jacobs returns from an impossible journey to the Pole and is reunited with Penny – an asymptomatic carrier of the symbiotic microbes – all hell breaks loose. When the sea ice surrounding the station becomes a fertile breeding ground for a new and more dangerous infestation, Rajan Chariya and his friends will have to join forces with the CIA to fight the onslaught of infected “sea people” roving the streets. With tensions high and stakes even higher, the question becomes when will the group stop being useful, and start becoming targets who know too much?
Worse, there may be more than one asymptomatic carrier….
With a heart-stopping pace and twists that will leave readers breathless, Sentient is a thrilling sequel that brilliantly combines all the best horror tropes with real world scenarios.
ENTER THE FUNGALVERSE. Blade Runner, True Detective, and District 9 meld with the weird worlds of Jeff VanderMeer, Philip K. Dick, and China Miéville in Adrian M. Gibson’s award-winning fungalpunk noir debut, now with a foreword from acclaimed author Nicholas Eames and six pieces of original interior artwork.
Two years after a devastating defeat in the decade-long Spore War, the island nation of Hōppon and its capital city of Neo Kinoko are occupied by invading Coprinian forces. Its fungal citizens are in dire straits, wracked by food shortages, poverty, and an influx of war refugees. Even worse, the corrupt occupiers exploit their power, hounding the native population.
As a winter storm looms over the metropolis, NKPD homicide detective Henrietta Hofmann begrudgingly partners up with mushroom-headed patrol officer Koji Nameko to investigate the mysterious murders of fungal and half-breed children. Their investigation drags them deep into the seedy underbelly of a war-torn city, one brimming with colonizers, criminal gangs, racial division, and moral decay.
In order to solve the case and unravel the truth, Hofmann must challenge her past and embrace fungal ways. What she and Nameko uncover in the midst of this frigid wasteland will chill them to the core, but will they make it through the storm alive?
SPFBO X 2nd place. Shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Winner of the FanFiAddict Award for Best Indie Debut, the Literary Titan Gold Book Award, and the Next Generation Indie Book Award.
My Review
I picked this book up at World Fantasy Convention 2025 in Brighton, from the Broken Binding table in the dealers room. I got a lovely signed and illustrated hardback edition. Usually I’m uncomfortable with mushrooms – I saw that episode of Hannibal where a killer was using bodies to grow mushrooms and one of the victims was alive and sprouting, and I’ve had an issue ever since. It’s weird, anything with parasites also upsets me, but I managed to read Alien Clay, so I can manage to read Mushroom Blues.
This novel was originally self-published in 2024 and did well in a variety of awards. The edition produced with The Broken Binding is a hardback, signed and illustrated. It’s published by Kinoko Book Co. which is hard to find anything about, so I’m assuming it’s the name the author has chosen for his self-publishing venture. Gibson is, according to his bio, “an award-winning Canadian SFF author, podcaster, illustrator, and tattoo artist. He is the creator of the SFF Addicts podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow authors M.J. Kuhn and Greta Kelly. The three host in-depth interviews with an array of science fiction and fantasy authors, as well as writing masterclasses.”
This is his debut novel. And it’s really quite enjoyable. We follow Hofmann, a detective sent from the homeland to work for the NKPD, and she’s struggling. In a world of men, she’s a divorced older woman in recovery from alcoholism – caused by the job, worsened by the death of her daughter in a car crash Hofmann caused. She hates mushrooms. Not just the people of Hoppon, but mushrooms in general – she can’t see them or eat them without feeling sick. And she’s stuck in a place where humans are a minority, and the majority are fungal people who live in fungal architecture. It’s her worst nightmare. She’s been fed a load of manure in the form of propaganda and holds all sorts of prejudices about the Hopponese.
Children are going missing. Hipponese and ‘half-breeds’ – mixed human and Hipponese children. An Elder finds the dismembered body of one of the children on a sacred island. The NKPD assign the job to Hofmann, and the force’s only Hopponese officer, Koji Nameko, since he was the one to first arrive and to speak to the elder who found the body.
They uncover the fates of the missing children and race to prevent a disaster that involves Nameko’s own family at a major midwinter festival.
As the pair investigate, Hofmann finds herself overcoming her prejudices and learning to appreciate the culture of the people her own are occupying. She even eats mushrooms and doesn’t vomit, at one point.
It’s obviously based, in part at least, on conditions in Japan between 1945 and 1970. After the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the yanks imposed a military occupation on Japan. Japan had been the aggressors, attacking China and Russia from the 1930s, before joining the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, Japan) and attacking Hawaii in 1940. There are still people alive who were children at the time and had relatives who fought with British, Commonwealth/Imperial forces in the Pacific, and who have inherited hate for Japanese people. Australian forces were expecting a Japanese invasion, British colonies around the Pacific were invaded and occupied. We’ve all heard about the horrors of Singapore and the POW camps that murdered thousands.
After the war, the USian Americans felt particularly aggrieved, as though they were the only ones to lose people in horrible ways, to be traumatised. And they took it out on the ordinary people of Japan during their occupation. Soldiers and civilian occupiers had been fed a diet of dehumanising propaganda for years and as a result treated everyone as though they were personally responsible for the actions of prison camp guards and commanders.
No one gets out of this looking good, by the way. There were massacres of people protesting for equal treatment in their own home, soldiers killed with impunity, the General in charge was a nutter. Japanese survivors of the hydrogen bombs were stigmatised because of fears of mutations and genetic damage and the institution of the Japanese Emperor got out of everything without a stain. Blame bad advisors, for the throne is divine and can do no wrong. Where have we heard that before?
Anyway, I recommend learning a little post-war Japanese history, after reading this novel, because the context adds depth.
Of course, this book is about an imaginary world, an imaginary war, and imaginary species, an imaginary occupation…
The mystery is well-paced throughout and the climactic race to stop the murder of children and incite a riot at a temple is exciting and balanced by the post action resolution. The description of the city is a blend of cyberpunk futurism and early 20th century detective noir, gritty and flashy, destruction and growth. The main characters develop as people and we learn about their back grounds as they move through the story. It was a quick read, although it’s not a short book, and I really couldn’t put it down.
Format: 126 pages, Hardcover Published: October 14, 2025 by Head of Zeus — an AdAstra Book ISBN 9781035911448 Format: Audible Audio Published: October 14, 2025 by Head of Zeus — an AdAstra Book
City-by-city, kingdom-by-kingdom, the Palleseen have sworn to bring ‘Perfection’ and ‘Correctness’ to an imperfect world. But before these ruthless Tyrant Philosophers send in their legions, they despatch Outreach – the rain before the storm.
Outreach is that part of the Pal machine responsible for diplomacy — converting enemies into friends, achieving through words what an army of five thousand could not, urging the oppressed to overthrow the bloody-handed priests, evil necromancers and greedy despots that subjugate them.
Angilly, twelve-years-old, a child of Pal soldiers stationed in occupied Jarokir, does not know it yet, but a sequence of accidents and questionable life choices will lead her to Outreach. As she travels from Jarrokir to Bracinta, Cazarkand, Lemas, The Holy Regalate of Stouk and finally, Usmai, she’ll learn that the price of her nation’s success is paid in compromise and lost chances, and that the falling rain will always be bitter.
LIVES OF BITTER RAIN is a novella in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s award-winning Tyrant Philosopher series. It is a prequel to the third novel in the sequence, DAYS OF SHATTERED FAITH.
My Review
I’ve listened to all of the books in this series, and have them all in hardback, so obviously I had to get this novella.
We follow the life of Angilly from the time her parents die in Jarokir to the day she fights a duel in Usmai. Each important moment of her life as she rises to the rank of Resident is catalogued.
If you’ve read Days of Shattered Faith this will give you some insight into the actions and character of Angilly and extra background to the events in that novel. If you haven’t, you should, and this novella will give you a taste of the style of writing and the worldbuilding.
The narration is excellent as ever and it is easy to listen to. At just over 4 hours, this novella can keep you company for half a work shift if you can’t get away with reading at work.
PUBLICATION DATE: 29 JANUARY 2026 PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £ 9. 99 | ORENDA BOOKS
The year is 2082. Climate collapse, famine and war have left the world in ruins. In the shadow of the Alpha-Omega regime – descendants of the super-rich architects of disaster – sixteen year-old Boo Ashworth and her uncle risk everything to save what’s left of human knowledge, hiding the last surviving books in a secret library beneath the streets of Hobart.
But Boo has a secret of her own: an astonishing ability to memorise entire texts with perfect recall. When the library is discovered and destroyed, she’s forced to flee – armed with nothing but the stories she carries in her mind, and a growing understanding of her family’s true past.
Hunted and alone, and with the help of some unlikely allies, she must fight to save her loved ones – and bring hope to a broken world.
The paperback is 283 pages. Genre is sci-fi, cli-fi and dystopian.
Blurb:
When the past lies buried beneath the waves, and the present hides behind a veneer, what power do we have over the future?
As high-flying energy magnate, Parsley Ringland, prepares for maternity leave, tragedy strikes. She passes out after a health complication and wakes up elsewhere. In the tower that sustained the life she had once known.
As she fights to protect herself and her unborn child, Parsley begins to fear for humanity itself. She is faced with an impossible dilemma. Does she keep the world in comforting darkness? Or expose a cruel truth that might destroy it?
Is it better to endure a terrible truth than to lounge inside a lie?
Format: 352 pages, Paperback Published: January 24, 2023 by Tor Trade ISBN: 9781250778543
Titanic meets Event Horizon in this SF horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn’t yet ended.
Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed―made obsolete―when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate.
What they find is the Aurora, a famous luxury spaceliner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick search of the ship reveals something isn’t right.
Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Messages scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold on to her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.
My Review
I ordered this book after seeing it on one of the GoodReads challenge lists. I hadn’t heard of it before although the author’s name pinged something in my brain. I liked the description and thought it would be entertaining.
Oh boy! I read the hype at the beginning of the book when it arrived and thought it might be exaggeration, just a touch.
I was wrong! It’s really good!
I read this book in an evening. At one point I had to skip forward to find out what happened, and then I went back once I was reassured at least some people would be alright.
The story is told from the perspective of the traumatised and quite likely psychic Claire Kovalik, team lead for a maintenance crew. The five-person crew service the comms network that’s scattered across the solar system, they live for weeks at a time on a tiny space vessel, being picked up and dropped off by larger freighters. It’s Claire’s last rotation, at 33 she’s considered too old, and due to her history, too unstable, to carry on.
Then, they hear a beacon. After an argument, they head out into uncharted territory to find the source of the beacon. What they find is the first and only luxury space liner. Twenty years lost, the Aurora’s disappearance destroyed the company that built it, allowing Verux, the company Claire works for, to take over. It’s worth a fortune to those who find and salvage it. But there are secrets.
Claire and her crew go aboard the Aurora and find terrible things.
We swap to Claire in the mental hospital, some time after she boards the Aurora with her crew. She doesn’t remember much. Her old mentor, Max, and a bully from Verux, Reed, a nepo-hire, who is determined to prove she murdered her crew for money, are questioning her. Claire tells them everything she can remember, up to the point where her skull is fractured. The hallucinations, the violent deaths of her colleagues, the developing romantic relationship between her and Kane, her number two, and the plan to get the Aurora back to the comms network so they can call for help.
Reed fails and Max recruits Claire to go back to the Aurora with him – she’s the only person who survived. Her mental illness might actually have helped. When they get there, Claire finds the neatly wrapped bodies of three of her colleagues and the last hallucinating in a room padded with mattresses. She also finds a conspiracy that Verux really don’t want to get out.
There is madness. There are explosions.
I loved it!
Claire is a beautifully flawed character. She blames herself for everything when it’s clearly not her fault, she refuses to let people care for her and fears what will happen when they do – convinced she’ll cause their deaths somehow, and she’s severely traumatised by events of her childhood. Also, she can see ghosts.
The relationship between Claire and Kane is sweet and develops naturally as they go through difficult events. The resistance Claire feels about getting close to people is a response to her trauma, and Kane’s calming presence, knowing her past, slowly helps her build trust in herself and him.
The corporate evil of Varux is entirely believable – destroy a competitor and then try to clear up the mess by murdering people. I know this has happened in real life, although usually the firms involved distance themselves by saying it was rogue contractors – see VWs slave plantations in the Amazon during the 1980s, or mining companies that regularly allow their ‘security contractors’ to murder local activists – especially in the Amazon. Putting it in space makes it sound like fiction, but this shit is happening in the real world now. I direct you to Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard ( I have a Left Book Club copy that I’m reading at the moment) for more information.
I was absolutely rivetted by this book, by the mystery of how the people went mad and what happened to Claire, allowing her to escape and return to rescue what was left of her crew. Definitely going on my favourites list for this year.
Moojag and Nema are back for a final roller coaster of an adventure, this time to save Box Hill from total destruction and rescue a bunch of mossy sloths from nasty Brix’s celebration feast.
But their new, slow-moving friends have a secret weapon and together they’re all set to prove that saving the Real World literally takes guts!
My Review
Moojag and Nema are back, the Conqip have invaded and are threatening to destroy Box Hill. With the help of various parents and grandparents (Adam’s dad and granddad reappear), a colony of sloths, the fruit-happy Pofs, and a gang of Gajooms, the evil plans of the Conqip are defeated and the island saved, although not without loss. We learn more of the history of the families, the secrets of the Conqips and how they came about, and see the responsible use of future technology in action.
This one was fun, and the cover is very colourful. There are bits of information sprinkled about and it ends with hope for a better future, even if Moojag does go off to live in the woods with the sloths. The families are reunited, and the danger to their world is removed. Some of them have gone to London Tops to help others surviving in London. There’s a future in sight.
There are also a lot of Beatles references, most of which I didn’t get because I don’t listen to the Beatles.
Reading the books one after the other, I might have got a few events mixed up; the stories follow straight on from the one before and I read them in quick succession. The overall arc is visible to me, and it’s a lovely story, but the details get a bit jumbled. There is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing for the characters, as they race across islands and Gajoomdom, and I got a little confused at times about who was doing what. It is the nature of children’s fiction that sometimes adults don’t quite get the story.
I actually really enjoyed this one, and the sloths digestive victory made me laugh. The development of the relationships over the course of the stories makes sense, as the reader learns with Nema about how things got the way they were and the reasons people act the way they do. There was something satisfying about the conclusion.
A lovely series of bonkers adventures for children, in a possible future world. Age recommendation for series 8+
The stand-alone sequel to ‘Moojag and the Auticode Secret’, endorsed by award-winning authors Patience Agbabi, Alex Falase-Koya, Ben Davis, and Daniel Aubrey.
A multigenerational story, featuring a neurodivergent cast and audhd, non-binary, POC, main characters, for readers 8 years and over.
When Nema returns to Gajoomdom, she discovers three forgetful grannies who have totally lost track of time. If she and Moojag can’t help them remember, everyone’s memories are in danger. But turns out not everyone is who they thought they were. Who will they rescue? Will they rescue them in time to save their perfect Real World from the nasty Conqip?
‘Lost Memories’, inspired by the author’s grandmother, and living with dementia and disability during the pandemic, shows us the impact of loss and the power of memory, as well as the importance of future technology when used for good.
Paperback
Everything Is Better With Dragons 