novels

The Flight of the Arconaut

Three thousand years after a catastrophic comet impact, declining fertility and plummeting IQs have continued to decimate the earth's population. Two factions have risen from the ruins: the Atlantean Empire and the nomadic Barbarics. As prejudice and politics mix, a second great war appears imminent. On the isolated island capital of Atlantis, Nyx Cormorant is shielded from the harsh realities of Empire in decline. She spends her days toiling away in an underground laboratory and her nights testing her skills as an arconaut on the city streets. Her dreams of establishing herself as the greatest arconaut in the Empire seem like they might just come to fruition when she's pitted against the mysterious Brigadier Omar B. Prendergast. How is Nyx to know that the brigadier's sinister past is deeply entwined with her family's own? Or that he has come to Atlantis with one purpose alone: vengeance against the Cormorants? As he charms her family, and indeed all of Atlantis, Nyx is the only one who sees him for who he is. She must unmask the man, and quickly, before the foundations of all she holds dear are destroyed. Sophia Khan weaves an entrancing, disconcerting world in the first instalment of her Atlantis trilogyand, in Nyx, a heroine for the ages.

Dear Yasmeen

Irenie, a young girl coming of age in upstate New York, has a secret at the core of her life. Her mother – the striking, charismatic Yasmeen – disappeared five years earlier. Her father, James, a distant, eccentric academic so bewitched by his late wife, has never spoken of this gaping absence from their lives. Yasmeen is presumed dead, though Irenie has doubts. In a hidden loft space above her father's study, Irenie wafts her mother's perfume across the room, causing James to enter haunted reveries centred on the silent memory of Yasmeen. In that same space, Irenie discovers a box containing old love letters exchanged between her mother and a man named Ahmed, who remained in Yasmeen's native Pakistan as she immigrated to the US. The lovers never reunited; as the story unravels, we discover the details only as Irenie does. Yasmeen's past and ultimate fate are revealed gradually, in part through Irenie's visit to her relatives in Islamabad. As this heartbreaking, unusual and utterly unputdownable novel reaches its dénouement, Irenie and James learn to become the protagonists of their own lives as they uncover the secrets ruling them both.

short stories

FICTION

NONFICTION

REVIEW