February 2025 books

What’s new and good to read this month? Dan Coombes has a look at what’s on offer from publishers in February and chooses Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer and The Vanishing Point by Paul Theroux.

Shroud – Adrian Tchaikovsky

One of the most prolific, hard-working and consistently great high-concept science fiction authors around at the moment, with forty odd books since 2008, TV adaptations on the cards and a string of prestigious genre awards for sf, fantasy and horror under his belt.

His new standalone novel Shroud is full of big ideas, bags of atmosphere, decent characters and freaky aliens, like all the fines things in literature and life should be.

New planets are fair game to asset strippers and interplanetary opportunists. A commercial expedition to a distant star system discovers a pitch-black moon alive with radio activity.

Its high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen environment is deadly to human life, but ripe for exploitation.

They named it Shroud. Under no circumstances can a human survive Shroud’s inhospitable surface – but a catastrophic accident forces Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne to make an emergency landing in a barely adequate escape vehicle.

Alone, and fighting for survival, the two women embark on a gruelling journey across land, sea and air in search of salvation. But as they travel, Juna and Mai begin to understand Shroud’s unnerving alien species. It also begins to understand them.

On a planet shrouded in darkness…the darkness may have plans of its own.

Images: Shroud front cover, Author Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Impossible Thing – Belinda Bauer

Belinda Bauer has been one most underrated and unusual crime writers of recent times, usually writing something just that little bit more skewed, twisted and different than the norm.

From schoolkids writing letters to serial killers to strange encounters with psychics, and now a century old seemingly impossible egg-based crime and the high-stakes present day world of egg smuggling.

It will thrill you, confound you and consistently make you want some perfectly poached eggs for breakfast, probably. You know, where the yolk’s kind of halfway between solid and runny, and the white’s solid and cooked through but not like rubber. Eggs. Oh, the book’s great too by the way…

 On the towering cliffs of Yorkshire, men are lowered on ropes to steal the eggs of the sea birds who nest there. The most beautiful are sold for large sums.

But when small and hungry Celie Sheppard finds an ‘impossible’ red egg, it will forever alter the course of her life – and the lives of others. One hundred years later in a remote cottage in Wales, Patrick Fort discovers his friend, Nick, and his mother tied up and robbed.

The only thing missing: a carved case containing an incredible scarlet egg. Doggedly attempting to retrieve it, Patrick and Nick discover the cruel world of egg trafficking, and soon find themselves on the trail of a priceless collection of eggs lost to history.

Until now. A taut, wonderfully imagined novel brimming with skulduggery at every turn, The Impossible Thing is a blazing testament to Belinda Bauer’s status as one of our greatest living crime writers.

Images: The Impossible Thing front cover, Author Belinda Bauer

The Vanishing Point – Paul Theroux

It’s almost entirely impossible to talk about Paul Theroux without mentioning the fact that he’s Louis Theroux’ dad, so let’s get it over with. Hey everyone, he’s Louis Theroux’ dad, would you credit it?

Right, now that’s out of the way let’s focus on the fact that he’s also a journalist, novelist, travel writer and much heralded ‘master of the short story’, with an acclaimed career across fifty years.

After more than ten years since his last work of fiction he’s brought out an absolutely cracking collection of short tales at the age of eighty-four, still as sharp, insightful and nuanced as the works of any young whippersnapper, upstart or vagabond etc. you care to name.

 The stories in The Vanishing Point are both exotic and domestic, their settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. Each focuses on life’s vanishing points—a moment when seemingly all lines running through one’s life converge, and one can see no farther, yet must deal with the implications.

With the insight, subtlety, and empathy that has long characterized his work, Theroux has written deeply moving stories about memory, longing, and the passing of time, reclaiming his status, once again, as a master of the form.

Images: The Vanishing front cover, Author Paul Theroux