Adding to our new material from our friends in Canada, I’m delighted to be stocking these two novels.
Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye by Paul Tremblay is a satirical science fiction story. I can’t explain any better than the blurb:
Farm is the mega-conglomerate food supplier for City, populated with rabidly bureaucratic superiors, and sexually deviant tour guides dressed in chicken and duck suits. City is sprawling, technocratic, and rests hundreds of feet above the coastline on the creaking shoulders of a giant wooden pier. When the narrator’s single mother, whom he left behind in City, falls out of contact, he fears the worst: his mother is homeless and subsequently to be deported under City to the Pier. On his desperate search to find his mother, he encounters ecoterrorists wearing plush animal suits, City’s all-powerful Mayor who is infatuated with magic refrigerators and outlaw campaigns, and an over-sexed priest who may or may not have ESP, but who is most certainly his deadbeat dad.
Jeff Ford and Lucius Shepard love it. What more do I need to add?
The Indigo Pheasant is an entirely different animal. It is the sequel to The Choir Boats, completing Daniel A. Rabuzzi’s Longing For Yount series. Delia Sherman describes the books as, “Dickens by way of C.S. Lewis and Jane Austen, set in a London where literature, history, science, and magic are all real.” I’ve been wanting to read these books for some time. My apologies to Daniel for not having made time to do so yet.