![]() ![]() But as events send them on a collision course their worlds are about to change in unexpected - and explosive - ways. Toby, a roguish blogger, discovers that the video games he plays for cash are much more than they seem.įour hurt and damaged individuals trying to make lives for themselves in a broken, uncertain future. ![]() Tendeka, a hot-headed activist, is becoming increasingly rabid. Lerato, an ambitious AIDS baby, plots to defect from her corporate employers. She's the author of the critically-acclaimed international best-seller, The Shining Girls, about a time traveling serial killer, Zoo City, a phantasmagorical Joburg noir which won the 2011 Arthur C Clarke Award, the neo political thriller, Moxyland. Kendra, an art-school dropout, brands herself for a nanotech marketing program. Lauren Beukes writes novels, comics and screeplays. ![]() 'Beukes deals with slightly surreal things in very real ways. In a troubling, near-future Cape Town four broken people try to carve out a place for themselves before a brutal storm of change hits them. FROM THE AUTHOR BEHIND BRAND NEW APPLE TV HIT SHINING GIRLS Moxyland Kindle Edition by Lauren Beukes (Author) Format: Kindle Edition 158 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle 6.99 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0.00 Free with your Audible trial Lauren Beukes's frighteningly persuasive, high-tech fable follows four narrators living in a dystopian near-future. ![]()
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![]() This much we learn right at the start from the novel’s narrator, who like many others, is intrigued by Babu’s story and hungry for answers.Ĭhoudhury (who passed away just before his book was published) structures the entire novel as a biography of sorts in which the narrator attempts a ‘literary recreation’ of Babu’s life and times. ![]() The saga ends abruptly in 2021, when this ‘Rasputin-like antihero’ mysteriously vanishes-from centre stage and planet earth, leaving a whole lot of unanswered questions in his wake. They gladly place their ‘hopes, their dreams’ in him. In his prime, the spotlight shines relentlessly on Babu, both in his home country as well as globally. BABU ABDUL MAJUMDAR, popularly known as Babu Bangladesh or Babu, the fictional figure around whom Numair Choudhury’s debut novel revolves, is remembered as a charismatic politician and environmentalist, writer, visionary and ‘something of a mystic’. ![]() ![]() ![]() We even travel to the UK, where a number of caracaras have been (and still are) held captive.Ī note: I wished the author had taken a critical tone toward the practice of using birds for entertainment, the only sections of the book I found off-putting.Īnd I suspect William Henry Hudson would agree. Then we climb the mountains of Chile, travel upriver into the forests of French Guyana. We begin in the Falklands where we live among researchers and meet the striated caracara. ![]() ![]() There are about ten species of caracara and Meiburg takes us around the world to seek them out. In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Bird of Prey Jonathan Meiburg has crafted an epic ode to the caracara, a long-overlooked (and often derided) group of birds who deserves more attention and more protection. A striated caracara (with a rockhopper penguin in the background). ![]() ![]() I started going to my local comic shop, got myself a pull box, and read each issue of the dueling minis multiple times. Hickman’s House of X/Powers of X got me back into comics in a big way. Who knows how much of Hickman’s grand plan had to be changed or scrapped entirely. The Way of X series, meant to spin-out of X-Men #7, didn’t debut until over a year after that issue released. The big crossover, X of Swords, was pushed back from the summer to the fall of 2020. ![]() By then, the excitement had died down.īut, worse than that, storylines, future plans, and the launch of other new series had to be delayed, reworked, or completely thrown out. Issue #2 released in March, but issue #3 didn’t come out until July. ![]() Take, for example, the Wolverine series, which debuted in February 2020. ![]() We just couldn’t wait for next week’s X-titles to be released.Īnd then everything came to a screeching halt and all momentum was lost abruptly. The first wave of Dawn of X titles had just finished their first story arcs, and the second wave of titles was launching. Hickman’s House of X/Powers of X reignited our excitement in the franchise in the summer and Fall of 2019. One example: What if the sudden spread of COVID in the spring of 2020 hadn’t shut down the distribution of comic books for two to three months? The X-Men franchise was still riding high on a huge swell of momentum. When I now look back on the two-and-a-half years of Jonathan Hickman being the “Head of X,” I can’t help but ask that familiar Marvel Comics question, “What if?” ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Few things have changed on the Niger since Park's time, and Salak is open-minded as she accepts the traditions of the villagers' lifestyle and appalled by their practices of mutilation and slavery. Though tough as nails, she's easy with her feelings, especially her constant fear of not knowing if the villagers near where she camps will be like the friendly Fulani herders, who embrace her as a wayward traveler, or like the Bozos, "young toughs" who mock and threaten her. Just as readers might expect from someone who prepared her parents for the chance that she might not return, Salak seems ready for, or at least accepting of, all obstacles, whether a ripped muscle in her arm or kayak thieves. ![]() The book juxtaposes Salak's physical strength with delicate prose. As she begins her harrowing solo kayaking journey 600 miles down the Niger River, Salak writes, "Though we may think we chose our journeys, they chose us." This sensitive notion is representative of most of Salak's account of her quest to follow the same route that doomed Scottish explorer Mungo Park paddled 206 years ago, hoping to reach Timbuktu. ![]() |