It’s always good to keep up with the Clarke Award, Britain’s premier SF award which this year was awarded to Tade Thompson for Rosewater.
The book is set in a future Nigeria, where Kaaro is earning a living using his special skills to find things. He is a “sensitive” and he’s been recruited by a mysterious governmental organisation to carry out some work for them. Things are not necessarily going well.
This is a world where the aliens are here, but nobody is really sure how to deal with them. Something has happened in London and that didn’t work out so well. America has cut itself off entirely from the rest of the world – going “dark.” But in Nigeria, the aliens have built a dome, around which the city of Rosewater has emerged.
Every year the dome opens a little, seemingly curing everyone nearby of their illnesses and diseases.
There’s an awful lot of world-building going on here, but the setting adds to everything, adding a different feel to things.
I enjoyed Rosewater immensely and will certainly be reading the next two titles in the series.