On Black Thursday, 12 January 2012, three planes crash with only a single child passenger surviving from each flight.
South African novelist and screenwriter Sarah Lotz's The Three (Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99) starts with a simple premise and extrapolates a world gripped by fear, suspicion and conspiracy theories.
Laddish, wisecracking Bramwell finds himself in the thick of things, and we watch him mature and develop as he takes on the mantle of Hanuman, the monkey god, and confronts the Trinity in a wonderfully ambiguous set-piece denouement. Through the process of "theogenesis" the Trinity has transformed men into superheroes – the 10 avatars of Vishnu from the Hindu mythos – whom they plan to hire out as mercenaries. The novel hits the ground running when comics artist Zachary Bramwell is abducted by a quartet of thugs and spirited to the tropical island redoubt of the Trinity, ruthless businessmen whose greed threatens the planet with nuclear Armageddon. This time the gods are manmade and fighting for their lives as they attempt to outwit their creators and save the planet. What follows is Harry's investigations into the eventual apocalypse, and his fateful involvement with his friend Victor, a "fellow traveller" intent on accelerating the world's technological progress for his own ends … As might be expected from such a narrative, the novel is an examination of determinism and free will, but also a subtle study of friendship, love and the fluid complexity of existence.Īge of Shiva (Solaris, £7.99), James Lovegrove's latest volume in the bestselling Pantheon series – which brings the gods to Earth and pitches them against secular, hi-tech forces – rings the changes with an ingenious conceit. When, in his next incarnation, Harry duly delivers the message, he is told that there is no hope of effecting change. As he lies dying at the end of his 11th life he is visited by a seven-year-old girl with a message from thousands of years in the future that he must deliver to the Cronus Club: "The world is ending." The members of the Cronus Club are, like Harry, men and women who live their lives over and over. Harry August is fated to live his life again and again, a kind of identical reincarnation, born to the same parents, in the same body, but with memories of his previous lives intact. From first line to beautiful denouement, Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Orbit, £12.99) is a gripping read that is often quietly profound, emotionally affecting and intellectually dizzying.
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