New Arrivals!

Ok, this week’s New Arrivals has a theme: Science-Fiction types of books. But in that genre, each is very different. So, how it happened, I don’t know, but these week’s books are all Speculative Fiction.

I think my TBR is growing again. So, a quick post, and then it’s back to reading!

Book I got for review

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I got this book from Crown Publishers as I am a judge for the Independent Literary Awards. With thanks!

From the publisher’s website: “It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them. “

Books I won

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

I won this book from Amy McKie in her birthday/blogoversary celebrations. This book was one of the books that could be won, and it was on my wishlist, I think because I’d seen Amy’s review about it. I’m looking forward to reading this book, hopefully next month, if I have time, during Adam the Roof Beam Reader’s Magical March challenge.

From the publisher’s website: “In a far future, post-nuclear-holocaust Africa, genocide plagues one region. The aggressors, the Nuru, have decided to follow the Great Book and exterminate the Okeke. But when the only surviving member of a slain Okeke village is brutally raped, she manages to escape, wandering farther into the desert. She gives birth to a baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand and instinctively knows that her daughter is different. She names her daughter Onyesonwu, which means “Who Fears Death?” in an ancient African tongue.

Reared under the tutelage of a mysterious and traditional shaman, Onyesonwu discovers her magical destiny-to end the genocide of her people. The journey to fulfill her destiny will force her to grapple with nature, tradition, history, true love, the spiritual mysteries of her culture-and eventually death itself.”

The Other Life by Ellen Meister

I won this book in a Shelfari group competition. The group Play Book Tag held a competition in which we had to read random books (as decided by the dice) from our own combined TBR and wishlists. I got third place and chose this book as my prize from the Amazon voucher that I won (this had been on my wishlist for a while).

From the Publisher’s website: “Happily married and pregnant, Quinn Braverman has an ominous secret. Every time she makes a major life decision, she knows an alternate reality exists in which she made the opposite choice-not only that, she knows how to cross over. But even in her darkest moments-like her mother’s suicide-Quinn hasn’t been tempted to slip through…until she receives devastating news about the baby she’s carrying.

The grief lures her to peek across the portal, and before she knows it she’s in the midst of the other life: the life in which she married another man, and is childless. The life in which her mother is still very much alive.

Quinn is forced to make a heartbreaking choice. Will she stay with the family she loves and her severely disabled child? Or will an easier life-and the primal need to be with her mother-win out?”

Book I swapped

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

I got this book via Bookmooch. I’d seen it in the shops a few times. Another wishlist-book that I finally got hold of! I love time travel stories!

From the publisher’s website: “Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life. ”