NYRB round-up

In addition to Black Wings Has My Angel, I've been reading some other New York Review Books novels. Time to catch up...

The True Deceiver
Tove Jansson
A chilly psychological novel set in a chilly place, it was worth reading, but not much of it has stuck with me.

The Alteration
Kingsley Amis
An alternate history in which the Reformation failed, and the Catholics are running England in the 1970s. Our hero is a choirboy with the voice of an angel and puberty not far off, which turns out is not a good situation if you want to avoid "the alteration." It's no Lucky Jim, but Amis has plenty of fun dropping names of historical figures whose roles turned out a little different (e.g. Pope Martin Luther) and keeps the plot moving.

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
D.G. Compton
A near-future dystopian 1974 novel about love, celebrity, privacy, media over-saturation, and death with dignity. Despite the heavy topics, it is touching, and charmingly quirky in its fashion. Perhaps the best of this batch.

Chocky
The Chrysalids
John Wyndham
Two sci-fi books from the author of The Day of the Triffids. Both enjoyable reads, offering some food for thought; of the two, Chocky, about a boy with an unusual and not-necessarily-imaginary friend, is the lighter and perhaps more compelling story, while The Chrysalids (1955), with its repressive religious fundamentalists and post-nuclear environmental badlands, captures the obsessions and anxieties of its time... and ours.