DNF @27%With pretty much no SF elements so far I'm left with a book about the disappearance of a sister and the impact on the family of her return. Nearly a third of the way through a 400 page book and we're just going round and round on the sense of alienation, abandonment and detachment that the remaining sister has towards the returning one.I get it from a literary point of view, but I don't find it interesting in any way. The key here is that by this stage in the book I've had all curiosity

This book is about discovering truths. It poses as a mystery, but I believe it is more about relationships. The central mystery should be more than enough to keep readers turning pages. This is my second N. A. read, and I will likely read the rest of her work now.There were only a few places in the novel where the writing style slipped or pulled a 180. The first was in a good way. During the short story of the creef, which employs prose that resembles that of her 'partner,' Christopher Priest. I...

The Rift is the story of two sisters, Selena and Julie Rouane. When Julie is 17, she goes missing, seemingly without a trace. Selena, three years Julie's junior, shoulders the burden of her sister's disappearance and grows up in the shadow of an unsolved mystery. When we meet Selena, she is in her mid-thirties, still bogged down in survivor's guilt. Almost as soon as she is introduced, she receives a phone call that turns her life upside down – a call from a woman who claims to be Julie. She is

I'm so grateful to Titan for an advance copy of this book, which was one of my most anticipated of 2017 after Allan's stunning The Race last year.The books have some similarities. Like The Race, The Rift is complex in form - the story is told both through viewpoint narratives and through interpolated artefacts: letters, lists, newspaper articles, school essays, bits of stories, diaries. These aren't all written by the main characters, so for example we get a section from the diary of a specialis...

Originally published at Risingshadow.Nina Allan's The Rift is one of the most compelling, ambitious and immersive reading experiences of the year. Besides being a thought-provoking exploration of love, loss, alienation, memories and identity, it's also a thoughtful meditation on relationships and mental health. It's different from and more original than other new speculative fiction novels, because the author has written an incredibly enticing story that features challenging themes and issues. T...

I bought this novel on a whim, encouraged by positive reviews and how much I enjoyed Allan's earlier novella The Art of Space Travel. And this book didn't disappoint me: it was memorable, creepy and ambiguous, full of thematic depth and emotional resonance, and terribly unputdownable. I really enjoyed the way it played with genre conventions; its intertextuality and the conclusion. There are some aspects I wish we could have learnt more about, but I am fine with the way it leaves the reader to t...

I am loathe to tag this as science fiction even though it straddles the border in weird and not quite definable ways. At the same time, I wouldn't call it not science fiction. I guess if I had to say something I'd say it's a book that's profoundly not interested in the question of "is this science fiction or not?"; it's interested deeply in its characters as people, and in very little else. I did not expect that to be enough to pull me in, and yet it was.

The Rift is an example, in a long line of examples, of why you never, ever read the back cover copy.It's a truly magnificent novel. So smart, and thematically rich and populated by flawed people who you can't help but care about. It plays in a sandpit of ambiguity but in a manner that never feels pretentious. It's intimate and tragic and wonderous. The prose mixes reportage with passages that are intricate and lyrical. It's structurally inventive without being gimmicky. And it showcases a writer...

The Rift is one of the most extraordinary, hard-to-categorise, and unsettling novels I’ve read. (I'm sure there are others along the same lines and that use similar techniques but I can't think of any right now). I hadn’t read its blurb beforehand, or any reviews, and I really do think this novel is best read with no preconceptions whatsoever. In this case I also didn’t read any other reviews before reviewing it myself - I just wanted to set down my reactions and later see how others reacted.It'...

Selena had an older sister, Julie. When they were young, they were close. When they were teenaged, they started drifting apart. When Selena was 14, Julie disappeared. And for 17 years, there was no sign of her.And now, all of a sudden, Julie appears again. She wants to explain. Wants to come back. Wants Selena to keep this a secret, even from their mother, at least for now.This isn't a mystery story, and it's SF/F only in a soft, subtle way; around the edges, as it were. This book's focus, as th...

The Rift is one of those books that can sit comfortably on a scifi bookshelf or nestled in general fiction. Which shelf you find it on – and where your general reading sympathies lie – is likely to influence how you read it and how you feel about each of its characters. As such, it’s a brilliant study in perspective and bias – for the reader as well as for its protagonists.As such, I think this may appeal to non-SF readers even more than to many SF fans, but those who enjoy works of literary SF

This book is touted as “science fiction,” and indeed, that’s the bookstore section in which I found it, but I think it is mislabeled. Rather, I would say it is primarily about family and trauma and possibly mental illness, with a bit of a "Twilight Zone" flavor. This story is narrated alternately by two sisters, Selena and Julie Rouane. It begins when Selena is 34. Twenty years earlier, when Selena was 14 and Julie 17, Julie disappeared. Suddenly after all this time Selena receives a call from J...

Actual rating: 4.5 stars! This was INCREDIBLE!!!I truly cannot understand why it has such a low rating on GR. It was a mixture of sci-fi, psychological thriller and mystery. And I was LIVING for that. Just, seriously, if you like your science fiction with twists and turns and not quite believing what is happening, then this is for you! I LOVED IT!!!Highly recommended! Happy readingHannah xoxo

This is an unusual book with one of those soft, ambiguous story-lines that will drive some people batty but I enjoy. I'm not sure I understand it all, but I found myself re-reading passages, drawing and re-drawing connections, and thinking about how tricky it can be to differentiate between what's real and what's not. I found it moving and subtle, quietly weird, and it was a surprise because the jacket copy sounds very SF mystery and it doesn't read like something that straightforward.

Well, this book was a hot mess. The sci-if aspect was the one that made me want to read this book but that aspect is barely explored in this book and when it is , it is explored in the most confusing way ever. We are given “excerpts “ from books that have come from the different “dimension, world, reality “ and then we are given nonsensical geographic lessons without them being needed...it’s just felt like the author wanted to fill the pages . Then the book goes into a completely different direc...

What an extraordinary, beautiful, strange novel. Perhaps my favourite science fiction novel of the decade.

A powerful and moving tale of love and loss - and other worlds.

Ahoy there me mateys! This be the eighth book in me Ports for Plunder – 19 Books in 2019 list. The story of reading this book can trace it’s roots back to the 2015 John W. Campbell award finalists. For reasons that escape me now, I decided I was going to eventually read all of the 16 candidates for that specific year. Nina Allan appeared on that list and reading her book from that year, the race, marked the half-way point of me goal. I liked it enough that I wanted to read more of her work. Then...

I finished this book totally confused about how to rate it. At times I loved it, like in the beginning, during Selena's point of view. Then Julie came in and it all went pear shaped. The long excerpts from books, the huge swaths of story not addressed, and maybe a bit that I didn't get a solid sense of Julie and ended up not liking her very much. I skimmed a little, during the excerpts, like the one about the giant catfish, and at times thought of not finishing it, but I made it through. At the

Sisters share some of the closest bonds two human beings can share. They also share rivalries and jealousies, turning them into frenemies. But their loyalties to each other run deep. This the story of two such sisters, a story that tests their knowledge of each other, and their connection and loyalty to each other.When Julie disappears as a teenager, her sister Selena is left to ponder, with her parents, the big questions of what happened to her and why. The pain recedes over time, until Julie s...