Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/26

Every week, I get mail from publishers, because I do things like this: I write up an annotated list of those books, trying to indicate what's interesting or special (or strange, sometimes) about each of them. Here's this week's list; I haven't read any of them yet, so there's always the chance that I'm horribly wrong about any of these details:

Chi's Sweet Home, Vol. 11 is the latest in the manga series about a cat and his family by Konami Kanata. I don't seem to have reviewed any of these, though I know my two sons like them quite a bit -- it's a semi-realistic (the cat addresses the reader, but otherwise acts just like a regular kitten) slice-of-life story, for those who can't get enough cat-romping. It's available now from Vertical.

Also from Vertical and available now: Knights of Sidonia, Vol. 10 by Tsutomu Nihei, continuing the space-opera series about the last starship of humans, the creepy space-tentacle monsters they fight, and the giant robots they fight with. I reviewed the first book in a round-up post a little ways back, but haven't kept up with the series since.

Speaking of series that I haven't kept up with, I also have the latest Malazan novel her: Assail by Ian C. Esslemont. (I read the first six of Steven Erikson's side of the series, and I think the first Esslemont, but have missed the last eight or so now.) If I remember correctly, Esslemont's novels are set slightly earlier in time than Erikson's -- or at least his first cluster was, because this is Esslemont's sixth. Anyway, this is big, bloody secondary-world fantasy -- a particularly complex, deep, and convoluted secondary world, as befits one created by two archaeologists -- deep in a series, and it's a Tor trade paperback arriving August 5th.

I saw Patrick Swenson's debut novel The Ultra Thin Man in bound-galley form a number of weeks back, and now I see it again in final hardcover form: Tor will release it on August 12. It's still a medium-future espionage thriller, set in the kind of interstellar human polity that's out of fashion these days.

And last for this week is another book I saw in galley form: Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone's third novel in the Craft Sequence. (I reviewed the first one, Three Parts Dead, here, and still fully intend to read Five and the intervening book, Two Serpents Rise.)  This one focuses on a priestess who builds bespoke gods and stumbles into a surprising conspiracy. It's a Tor hardcover, available now.