BLOOD KIN, by Ceridwen Dovey

(originally posted on March 22, 2008)

The prose is stunning. The structure is interlocking and brilliant, gender lines divided into two parts. The unnamed characters are brilliantly delineated, lushly drawn and teeming with the full spectrum of terror and looming destruction. Dovey's debut should feel post-modern and bloodless in the way she handles the aftermath of a coup but instead feels the exact opposite, the seams barely containing all the suppressed emotion within. The attention it's received since its UK release last year is wholly, absolutely deserved.