DESPITE ITS FRENCH TITLE, Adam Robert’s fourteenth novel, Bête, is very much a condition of England novel, albeit set in the near-future. Roberts employs the familiar trappings of shortage – rationing, artificial meat, the collapse of the car economy, urban ...

DESPITE INVOLVING GLOBAL apocalypse, planetary colonization, and an evangelical mission to preach to aliens, Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things is not the work of revelations that its title suggests. Nor is it the boy’s own tale ...

NEAR THE BEGINNING of Monica Byrne’s relentlessly kinetic debut novel, The Girl in the Road, her protagonist, Meena, comments that “some people are like superconductors … They have no resistance to the energy they receive. They just convey it.” This insight ...