Fantasy Book Critic: Cave & Julia, Kindle Single from M. John Harrison (with comments by Liviu Suciu)

“That whole year, and to a lesser extent the year after, bodies were washed up all along that part of the coast, some whole, some in pieces … In the south of Autotelia, especially, it was a bad year for bodies; but the body of the vanished brother didn’t show up among them. Passive and silent, full of some incommunicable anger, the sister attempted suicide, spent time in institutions; then, her work suddenly becoming popular, left the country for a new life on our side of things.”

When Cave meets Julia, he finds himself sucked into her strange alienated history of loss and sacrifice. “Cave & Julia” is a love story set between our world and Autotelia.

Cave & Julia is a Kindle Single from M. John Harrison that can be ordered HERE (US) or HERE (UK) and which I have just found about by pure chance (and of course bought it on the spot), so I decided it to give it a quick mention here. Just beautiful prose where each word counts. The author talks more about it and upcoming releases of his work HERE.

The earlier story, In Autotelia, is available in the Arc 1.1 magazine which contains quite a few goodies for that matter like an excerpt from the upcoming Margaret Atwood trilogy ending Maddaddam, short stories by S. Baxter, H. Rajaniemi and A Reynolds and non-fiction from a stellar cast including C. Mieville and A. Roberts.