Wake
By Elizabeth Knox. Corsair. $29.99
Wake, by award-winning author Elizabeth Knox, was first published in New Zealand in 2013 and now appears in an international edition. In a scenario similar to Stephen King's Under the Dome, a small Tasman Bay community is cut off from the rest of the world. Knox focuses less on the how and why of the isolation, but more on the fate of the 14 survivors trapped with a mysterious alien presence. Knox probes how the "spectacle of madness" wreaks psychological damage on the survivors, emphasising how extreme events bring out both the best and the worst of humanity. Wake is a worthy addition to the closed-universe genre.
The Death House
By Sarah Pinborough. Gollancz. $29.99.
The SF elements are also sketchily delineated in British author Sarah Pinborough's The Death House. While set 100 years in the future, the settings are surprisingly contemporary. Children, with largely unspecified but dangerous defective genes, are isolated in a mansion, the Death House, located on a remote British island. The children know they will never return because of their short life spans. It is a closed environment, echoing William Golding's Lord of the Flies, as teenagers vie for power from their separate dormitories. Comparisons with Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go are also appropriate. The hopes and fears of the main teenage characters are superbly evoked before a heart-rending conclusion.
Magonia
By Maria Dahvana Headley. Harper. $19.99
The beginning of Magonia, from America's "glittering scrivener", Maria Dahvana Headley, sees Aza, a 16-year-old girl, struggling to breathe because of a terminal lung condition. Her life is transformed, however, when she is transported to the cloud realm of Magonia, where not only can she breathe, but she and her new mother are figures of power. Aza finds herself caught between two lives and two worlds on the cusp of war. She will need much resolve and courage to avert a conflict in which she is told "Heroes die young". Headley's staccato street-wise text superbly catches Aza's smart sardonic personality in an intriguing YA fantasy.
