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What a gem. A quick-paced, hilarious spec-fic mystery with a lot of heart. Its quirky, straight-forward protagonist reminded me of the lead character I adore from Rivers of London, but his "alcoholic super-computer" partner stands totally on his own. Ready to read anything else by this author.

Interesting premise but I found this book just technically difficult to understand.

Apocalyptic cyberpunk crime mystery, I read it in one go. As with The Gone World, its quite dark and has some horror elements (and trigger warnings galore) but its extremely engrossing. Would love to have more books from this author.

Fascinating tour of history's most famous cities. Leaves you way smarter about city life and its problems and possibilities.

Liked The Circle and this one is funnier and still thought-provoking but didn't really work for me as a whole. Too many ideas don't go anywhere and the ones that get repeated seem like freakouts about millenial wokeness that are too close to comedian's cancel culture complaints to be good parody.

Tense ecological mystery but in the end, no fun.

This is the second book I've read by Byrne and once again, couldn't remotely sleep afterward. I'm not sure what I was expecting but like the Actual Star, this book manages to be optimistic, disturbing and mystical in a way that is fully original. I don't think there is anyone else writing sci-fi like this.

The Girl in the Road is a climate change spec-fic novel with elements of the Odyssey, but that's about as much I can describe the plot because it's totally unhinged. Clearly an incredible amount of research and imagination went into creating the world of this novel, but the plot itself reads more like revealed text, or maybe something straight from a dream. I'm left with so many questions, among which the most important: how did someone think this up?!