Metal from Heaven
by August Clarke
Buy on AmazonOrphaned when her parents are murdered while on strike, Marney escapes with a band of rebels. She has the uncanny ability to manipulate ichorite, a metal so versatile that Yann Industry Chauncey has made a fortune manufacturing it – even when his laborers, like Marney, suffer from life-threatening allergic reactions. As Marney ages, her rage coalesces into a demand for revenge. This is the kind of novel that makes me pillage the thesaurus looking for words to describe it. It’s dazzling and disconcerting – a revolution spiced with kink, a queer manifesto and an anarchist raising a middle finger to capitalism with one hand and lobbing a molotov cocktail into a factory with the other. An epic poem crossed with an industrial fairy tale, August Clarke’s novel is, to put it simply, stunning.