Featured Reads

FE AT UR ED _R EA DS

"What I am about to tell you is a fairy tale and so it is constantly repeating."

Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes (TOR | March 2021)

Veronica Schanoes masterfully sets familiar folklore and fairytales alight in this collection, burning away some parts and illuminating others. In her stories, we find a past we know well that bleeds into a fantastical present with eerily familiar echoes (in the intriguingly titled Emma Goldman Takes Tea With The Baba Yaga, Schanoes writes “only those who have thrown away the last vestige of their humanity put children in cages” and “a crude, knownothing leader who sailed to power on cheap racism, backed by elites who believed they could control him”). Her characters exist on the fringes of society, often blazing their way to the centre despite the odds, lending a hopeful slant to stories that are otherwise very heavy and dark. Schanoes’ protagonists tend to blur between stories (almost all of them wear liquid eyeliner and Doc Martens and have an endless capacity to make references to The Clash) and readers should go into the collection forewarned that there is violence, gore, substance abuse, and selfharm. Despite some weaker stories that lack focus, the stronger ones carry the collection with no effort and there are plenty of vivid, memorable tales packed into these pages.

Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor (TOR | January 2021)

She’d told them about how her garden was going and they’d all been impressed, saying that for someone who was fitted with the talent of taking life, she was also good at cultivating it.

In only about 180 pages, Nnedi Okorafor achieves what eludes many writers today: painting a picture of a hopeful future without turning a blind eye to a painful past or ignoring the realities of the present. Remote Control follows Sankofa, adopted daughter of Death who leaves destruction in her wake, as she comes to terms with her fate and learns how to wield her powers. Drawing on mythology and modern technology alike, Sankofa’s is a compelling story about regeneration and transforming tragedy and loss. And, faraway as the world might seem on the surface, her story hits close to home upon further inspection. At any rate, Sankofa teaches us the value of spending time lingering in nature and climbing trees.

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier (Picador | February 2021)

What Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils achieves most effectively is zooming out to show readers the big picture (or the “deep future”) and attuning us to the slow pace of the Earth’s “deep time”. In David Farrier’s own words, Footprints is his attempt to discover how we will be remembered by the very deep future”. Farrier, who teaches English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, weaves literary allusions and references throughout the text of Footprints. This, combined with his quietly poetic prose, lends the book a sense of timelessness, without compromising the integrity and clarity of the sections that deal with scientific findings. However, making us aware of the long term damage being done to the planet is not the same as giving us hope for a better future or getting those responsible for the damage to change their ways. One reviewer hopes against all hope that this book will somehow be preserved alongside our plastic debris so that future generations will know that “some of us wanted to try be better”. Unfortunately, wanting to try be better saves not a planet, and Footprints doesn’t offer much beyond permitting you to give yourself a welldeserved pat on the back for “wanting to try be better” before consigning yourself and your planet to a doom that, by the end of the book, feels far more inevitable yet still terribly distant.

Treating the planet as a succession of sinks and taps, as we have, has kept us focused on the present, concealing the fact that we also inhabit this flow. Earth’s long pulse shapes the arc of our lives, but to see this poses a tremendous challenge to our everyday imaginations. For the most part, deep time is “the strange sleep,” which, according to Shelley, “wraps all in its own deep eternity”