Two for the Future. . .

Two new books have just crossed my desk and both are tempting me this weekend, but oh, I have such a huge pile of reading on the go at the moment. Still, if you have patrons who have read and loved Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood, or Ian McEwan's recent Solar (or are too far down on the holds list), these two new books set in the future might appeal.

Robert Edric's last book, In Zodiac Light, a novel about the last years of the WWI poet and composer Ivor Gurney, was a Dewey pick of mine, so he's a writer I'm always keen to read. Salvage is set in England, one hundred years in the future where climate change has led to increasing problems with toxic soil that threatens the population as the rains come. The main character Quinn is a government auditor, trying to assess a proposed site for a new model town, but comes up against all sorts of corruption and secrets.

All That Follows by the very talented and original writer Jim Crace, is also partly set in England, just a few decades into the future and involves a jazz musician forced into a moral quandary surrounding a hostage taking. Asylum has a very good review of the novel here.