Release Week: Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker, Mark L. Van Name's Jon and Lobo series, two series from Greg Bear, and more

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Release Week: Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker, Mark L. Van Name's Jon and Lobo series, two series from Greg Bear, and more

Posted on 2012-03-28 at 13:12 by Sam

Another jam-packed release week, led for me by Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker and the first four books in Mark L. Van Name’s Jon and Lobo series.

ANGELMAKER: The second novel from Nick Harkaway, author of the Locus- and BSFA-nominated The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker was published in hardcover by Knopf last week after a February print release in the UK. Here, narrated By Daniel Weyman for AudioGO, is a long-anticipated audiobook for me, hailed by William Gibson as “You are in for a treat, sort of like Dickens meets Mervyn Peake in a modern Mother London. The very best sort of odd.”

“Joe Spork repairs clocks, a far cry from his late father, a flashy London gangster. But when Joe fixes one particularly unusual device, his life is suddenly upended. Joe’s client, Edie Banister, is more than just a kindly old lady - she’s a former superspy. And the device? It’s a 1950s doomsday machine. And having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the government and a diabolical South Asian dictator, Edie’s old arch-nemesis.” Over on Scalzi’s Whateverblog, Harkaway describes the Big Idea behind Angelmaker.

JON and LOBO: The first four books inMark L. Van Name’s Jon and Lobo series (One Jump Ahead, Slanted Jack, Overthrowing Heaven, and Children No More) come to audio, narrated by the outstanding Tom Stechschulte (The Road, Swan Song) for Audible Frontiers:

Published in print and e-book by Baen, book 5, No Going Back, is due in May/June. The series stars Jon, a genetically-enhanced super soldier, and Lobo, “the hyper-intelligent assault vehicle who is his only real friend”. Each book stands on its own, for me the entry point to the series was Children No More, in which Jon faces his own past as a child soldier while setting out on an interstellar mission to rescue children from the same fate. At first, I wasn’t sure about Audible’s casting of Stechschulte as narrator. He is absolutely fantastic — his narration on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is one of the best performances I’ve ever heard, and I’ve read great things about his work on Swan Song — but his voice is quite a bit older than I imagined Jon’s. However, getting a little deeper into Children No More, his job with Lobo is wonderful, capturing the “coming from nowhere and everywhere” by being this deep, open, wide sound. Hopefully having such a high-profile narrator will pull some of the narrator’s fans over to Van Name’s series.

ALSO OUT TUESDAY:

EARLIER THIS WEEK:

MISSING IN ACTION:

SEEN BUT NOT HEARD:

LATER THIS WEEK:

  • The so very, very long-awaited Buzzy Multimedia produced audiobook of Clay and Susan Griffith’s The Greyfriar: Vampire Empire, Book One (Pyr, September 2010) is finally coming, read by James Marsters — reviewed quite positively here by The Guilded Earlobe’s Bob Reiss — official release date was March 22 
  • A Book of Tongues and A Rope of Thorns by Gemma Files, read by Gordon Mackenzie for Iambik — “Two years after the Civil War, Pinkerton agent Ed Morrow has gone undercover with one of the weird West’s most dangerous outlaw gangs-the troop led by “Reverend” Asher Rook, ex-Confederate chaplain turned “hexslinger,” and his notorious lieutenant (and lover) Chess Pargeter. Morrow’s task: get close enough to map the extent of Rook’s power, then bring that knowledge back to help Professor Joachim Asbury unlock the secrets of magic itself.” — The first two books in Files’s Hexslinger series, originally published in print by ChiZine, already available in digital audio directly from Iambik
  • Trash Sex Magic by Jennifer Stevenson, read by Arielle Lipshaw for Iambik — originally published in print by Small Beer Press, already out in digital audio directly from Iambik
  • The Return Manby V. M. Zito(Orbit, Mar 28, 2012) — no audio news
  • Assassin’s Creed: The Secret Crusade by Oliver Bowden, read by Gildard Jackson for Tantor Audio (Mar 30)
  • Time and Robbery, a novel by Rebecca Ore (Aqueduct, 31 March 2012) — no audio news
  • Grail By: Elizabeth Bear (Recorded Books, March 2012)
  • The Neverending Story By Michael Ende Read By Gerard Doyle for Tantor Audio (March 2012, originally published many years ago)

RANDOM UPCOMING BOOK FOCUS: This Book is Full of Spiders by David Wong (Thomas Dunne, October 2, 2012) — sequel to John Dies in the End

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged angelmaker, children no more, mark van name, nick harkaway, release week