I abandoned everything I had in progress when my copy of Alliance Unbound arrived so I could read that 'without salt' as it were.

By the time Id finished it, my pre-order of Nick Harkaway's Karla's Choice had dropped to the kindle so I'm now reading that. And so far, it's very good.

 

Just finished Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.  It won the Man Booker price in 2023.  It was very very hard to take. Set in near future Ireland, in which an authoritarian regime has just taken over due to some kind of unnamed “threat”, and follows a family trying to survive.  Flavors of Stalinism, Gaza, Ukraine, the Holocaust, and any kind of brutal civil war you can imagine.  It would not have been easy to read at any time, but with what I fear is coming for us here in the USA in January it was almost impossible to get through. Political enemies made to disappear, children seized, tortured and killed, censureship, the whole authoritarian playbook. 

Kokipy wrote:

Just finished Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.  It won the Man Booker price in 2023.  It was very very hard to take. Set in near future Ireland, in which an authoritarian regime has just taken over due to some kind of unnamed “threat”, and follows a family trying to survive.  Flavors of Stalinism, Gaza, Ukraine, the Holocaust, and any kind of brutal civil war you can imagine.  It would not have been easy to read at any time, but with what I fear is coming for us here in the USA in January it was almost impossible to get through. Political enemies made to disappear, children seized, tortured and killed, censureship, the whole authoritarian playbook. 

Interesting.  That description reminds me a little of Bernard Maclaverty's early 1980s novel Cal, about the Irish Troubles of the time, and a book I found to be quite depressing also (though I did really like the film adaptation).

As it happens, the book I most recently bought on kindle was the 2024 Booker winner, Samantha Harvey's Orbital.  We'll see how disturbing that one turns out to be.  I plan to get to that one next after I finish Karla's Choice, which is proving slower going than I thought it would.
 

I finished Karla's Choice, by Nick Harkaway. I thought it was very good.  Dense and rich in detail, it is set in the Cold War Europe of 1963 so about ten years earlier than the setting of the first book in Le Carre's Karla trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and uses many of the same major characters.  Having recently re-watched the most recent movie version of that book, i found myself visualising the characters as the ensemble cast of that film and I think that helped me a lot in remembering who was who in those books. (And a re-read of that trilogy is now part of my reading plan for next year.)

Up next is Samantha Harveys Orbital.