FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023

The explosive literary sensation: a mother faces a terrible choice as Ireland slides into totalitarianism

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, Larry, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. Soon, she must decide just how far she is willing to go to keep her family safe.

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating vision of a country falling apart and a moving portrait of the resilience of the human spirit when faced with the darkest of times.

[SomeSteve]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Penguin in the UK has a bunch of dystopian fiction on sale today. Here's some of it:

A couple of others are Facial Justice by L. P. Hartley

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/facial-justice

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Facial-Just.../dp/B00MQCSBW4

and The Death of Grass (a.k.a. No Blade of Grass) by John Christopher.

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/the-death-of-grass

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Grass.../dp/B002RI9R2U

[Hollow Man]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Penguin in the UK has a bunch of dystopian fiction on sale today. Here's some of it:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)
This one includes a lot of extra material that the US edition that is currently on sale doesn't have.

Thanks for pointing out the USA one is on sale. I had a different one that's not on sale on my wishlist (which seems to be older/similar to the two or three decades old trade paperback I own), so this is a pleasant surprise!

[salty-horse]

The Outcast Mage (The Shattered Lands #1) by Annabel Campbell is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

In the glass city of Amoria, magic is everything. And Naila, student at the city's legendary academy, is running out of time to prove she can control hers. If she fails, she'll be forced into exile. Or worse, be consumed by her own power.

Luckily, the most powerful living mage, Haelius Akana, finds Naila a kindred spirit. He will teach her to harness her abilities. But Haelius also has many enemies, and they would love nothing more than to see he and Naila fail. Trapped in the deadly schemes of Amoria's elite, Naila must dig deep to discover the truth of her latent powers or watch the city she loves descend into civil war.

[salty-horse]

The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Contents: https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?298915

A collection of 98 enthralling and pulse-quickening stories, spanning five decades, venerates the remarkable imagination of J. G. Ballard.

With a body of work unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, J. G. Ballard is recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers in the world. With the much-hailed release of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, readers now have a means to celebrate the unmatched range and mesmerizing cadences of a literary genius. Whether writing about musical orchids, human cannibalism, or the secret history of World War III, Ballard's Complete Stories evokes the hallucinations of Kafka and Borges in its ability to render modern paranoia and fantastical creations on the page.

[salty-horse]

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Spanish magical realism. I know that terrible things happen. Translated by Magda Bogin.

The House of the Spirits, which introduced Isabel Allende as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, brings to life the triumphs and tragedies of three generations of the Trueba family. The patriarch Esteban is a volatile, proud man whose voracious pursuit of political power is tempered only by his love for his delicate wife Clara, a woman with a mystical connection to the spirit world. When their daughter Blanca embarks on a forbidden love affair in defiance of her implacable father, the result is an unexpected gift to Esteban: his adored granddaughter Alba, a beautiful and strong-willed child who will lead her family and her country into a revolutionary future.

One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, The House of the Spirits is an enthralling epic that spans decades and lives, weaving the personal and the political into a universal story of love, magic, and fate.

[Cactus Chef]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard by J. G. Ballard is $4 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Contents: https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?298915

Haven't read any of his stuff except whatever might have been pulled into Dangerous Visions anthologies, but seemed like too good a deal to pass up.

I keep meaning to pick up Empire of the Sun (which admittedly is unlike his other works), but it never seems to drop to impulse-buy prices.

[salty-horse]

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken is £2 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)
Zombie novella. Winner of the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Recommended by Jeff VanderMeer. Review by Ian Mond.

The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another. A tale for our dispossessed times, and one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love.

[SomeSteve]

Because I posted about this in another thread ("Any fat FANTASY or HORROR books with the word JADE as part of the title?"), I thought I'd mention it here as well. I haven't read it.

Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen is $1.99 at Amazon US and Kobo US.

Kobo says the offer ends tonight (Sunday, May 11).

Mulan meets Iron Widow in this thrilling silkpunk fantasy about a girl who must disguise herself as a boy and enter the famed and dangerous Engineer’s Guild trials to unravel the mystery of her father’s murder.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/of-jade-and-dragons-1

https://www.amazon.com/Jade-Dragons-.../dp/B0CJBQ1V8Q

[salty-horse]

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

The bestselling author of the Mars trilogy boldly reimagines the past seven hundred years in this “exceptional and engrossing” (New York Post) saga, constructing a world vastly different from the one we know. . .

“A thoughtful, magisterial alternate history from one of science fiction’s most important writers.”—The New York Times Book Review**

It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur—the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if the plague had killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? The Years of Rice and Salt is a look at the history that could have been—one that stretches across centuries, sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, and spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation.

Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, inventors and exiles, renowned storyteller Kim Stanley Robinson navigates a world where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions, while Christianity is a mere historical footnote. Probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power—and even love—in this bold new world.

[salty-horse]

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger is $2 on Amazon.com (should be price-matchable on Kobo)

From the author of the #1 bestselling The Time Traveler's Wife, a spectacularly compelling novel—set in and near Highgate Cemetery in London, about the love between twins, men and women, ghosts and the living.

Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls’ aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.

The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)
Podcast review - SFBRP

Now $1.

[salty-horse]

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

An exhilarating novel about an isolated town neighboured by its own past and future, and a young girl who faces an impossible choice...

Would you sacrifice the future for love?

Sixteen-year-old Odile vies for a coveted seat on an elite council that decides who may cross her town's heavily guarded borders. To the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it's twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn't supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he's still alive in Odile's present.

Edme-who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly know Odile-is going to die. Sworn to secrecy to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the top candidate. Yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, jeopardizing the future and her place in it.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

Got it from Kobo UK.

Thank you!