APOPHENY

Divine Cities series – Robert Jackson Bennett
(City of Stairs, City of Blades, City of Miracles)
Just as good as his other books, even though this was, I believe, his first trilogy written. His characterisation is always wonderful and entirely without the common flaws of male writers when writing women. I love that he writes old women, neurodiverse women, masculine women and so on. He writes fewer male characters, but they’re just as good when he does. 
     This is set in a world where the gods were real, but they were killed (or were meant to have been) by humans many decades earlier. The miraculous is now deeply forbidden, and the people who once ruled the world as the blessed of the gods are now the occupied subjects of their former slaves.

Lays of the Hearth Fire duology – Victoria Goddard
(The Hands of the Emperor, At the Feet of the Sun)
These books are not perfect. They could have done with a good editor to reduce the frequent reiteration. Yet despite this, I’m giving them five stars because I enjoyed them so very much. I love the worldbuilding, I adore the characters and wish they were all my friends, and I am going to be so impatient for the next book.

Murderbot series – Martha Wells
(All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Fugitive Telemetry, Network Effect, System Collapse + short stories)
Rereads spurred by the, at the time, upcoming Murderbot TV series, but I enjoyed them even more the second time around. (Plus the shorts and System Collapse were new to me and excellent.) I’ve already preordered the next one.

Rakusa series – Martha Wells
(The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, The Siren Depths, The Edge of Worlds, The Harbors of the Sun + short stories)
It’s rare for such a long series of full length novels to keep my interest throughout and make me desperately miss the characters and world once they’re over. In a non-trad fantasy set on a world with a myriad sentient species, we follow the adventures of Moon, a Rakusa consort who grew from being an orphan in hiding amongst other species to being First Consort to the nest that took him in. 

Usurpation – Sue Burke
This is the third book of the excellent Semiosis series. It speaks well of the first two that I still remembered them well enough not to have needed a recap. This final part takes place on Earth after the plant-based intelligences from the planet featured in the first two have been able to, in a mostly benign way, infiltrate Earth’s ecosystem. Whether they will be able to build a successful symbiotic relationship with humans, the way they did on the alien planet, is the basis of the tale.

Piranesi – Susanna Clarke 
I loved this novel, which was shorter and more competently compact than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. In a kind of side or pocket dimension to Earth, one that is never fully explained, a young man explores and catalogues endless rooms of giant statues bordered by a regularly encroaching ocean.