Look beyond the bleeding-edge technology and apocalyptic anxieties, however, and you’ll find a cautionary tale as old as time: a woman invents something, a guy takes the credit. In keeping with the credo of its backdrop (“Change is everything”), Anam is out to disrupt this narrative, embedding her efforts in a quest for love and self-determination, and swiping as she goes at an industry in which innovation has far outpaced regulation, leaving ethics in the dust. The end result may not be entirely persuasive philosophically, but as high-octane entertainment that hits notes poignant as well as savagely witty, it soars.
Within a neat 100 pages, Natasha Brown’s precise, powerful debut novel says more about Britain’s colonial legacy and what it’s like trying to exist within that as a black British woman than most could achieve with three times the space.
Most of all, perhaps, this is a novel about the effect we all have on each other, unstable or not, diagnosed or not, especially where love is concerned.
Author Egill Bjarnason in "How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island" views his home island with the combination of the wry humor of Bill Bryson, the pointed observations of Anthony Bourdain and the meanderings of a mildly befuddled history professor.
You loved the squareness of square,
the hardness of it, its resistance
to symbolism.
Its emptiness lies
in the forest.