Curandera by Irenosen Okojie (Dialogue, £20)
Like her first novel, the 2016 Betty Trask award-winning Butterfly Fish, this is made up of two storylines in very different settings. Zulima narrates the first strand, set in 17th-century Cape Verde, where she appears as a mysterious stranger in the village of Gethsemane. She proves to be a hard worker, with a talent for healing, but her behaviour draws suspicion, and she is soon in trouble. The other narrative takes place in present-day London, where Therese, a scientist who is also an alternative healer, encounters three men, lonely strangers to the city, in whom she senses “the mark of kin”. She invites them to join her in a magical project. Their rituals awaken a genetic inheritance of shamanism, and they find, or create, a set of bones from which grow magical berries, increasing their powers. Connections between the stories separated by time and space gradually become more evident, although what it all means is unclear. But the power of this weird, haunting fiction is undeniable, largely due to a wonderfully inventive prose style that verges on the hallucinogenic while remaining bracingly grounded in the physical.
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman (Del Rey, £20)
Collum, a young man with a burning desire to become a knight of the Round Table, arrives at Camelot to discover he’s too late: the king is dead. The few remaining knights include none of the legendary heroes, and even Merlin is gone, replaced by Nimue. Without a leader, the kingdom will fall. Collum proposes they ask for a miracle, as the king used to do, and it works: God (or a pagan spirit in the guise of another Green Knight) obliges. The age of miracles and wonders is not past. Soon, the motley crew set out on a new quest, determined to seek out Sir Lancelot and insist he take Arthur’s crown. Interspersed with Collum’s story are chapters set in the glory days of Camelot that provide backstories for all the characters, and some interestingly different reinterpretations of the originals. The result is a lively, gripping new epic in which the dreamy magic of the medieval romance is refreshed and made newly relevant for today.
