Most of China Mieville’s are worth reading, Unlundon and The City & The City are both very interesting.
Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August and Touch are both very good spins on older concepts, while Kate Griffin’s Matthew Swift Urban Magic series starting with A Madness Of Angels is very gritty, a whole new take on magic, where ASBO’s are used as spells against creatures masquerading as hoodies, our ‘hero’, Swift, is inhabited by the Blue Electric Angels, creatures that live in the telecommunications networks, are the ghost voices in the telephone lines.
There are six books altogether in the series.
One of my all-time favourite books has recently turned up on Kindle and iBooks; Tanith Lee’s When The Lights Go Out, read it as a library book when it came out in 1996, bought it straight away and read it countless times, managed to find a flawless hardcover copy in Canada recently, to my unbridled joy, and got the iBooks version as well!
It’s about life, love hate and true sacrifice in a slightly down-at-heel seaside town at the end of the season, and when the lights go out, it’s dark.