Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Dystopia is a desert, a bleak place of sand and howling winds known to its inhabitants as the Cirque. Across its shifting landscape several families search for the mysterious Sarkpont, locked in a life-or-death struggle where there can be only one winner. In Fairfax Virginia, a teenage girl experiences memories of living in this strange world that she, logically, cannot have. As time goes on the line between the two realities grows ever thinner, making her doubt everything, including her own identity.
This is a large book, both in its physical size, clocking in at nearly six hundred pages and this is only the first installment of a trilogy, and in the ideas it addresses. That is does so in a way that never fails to entertain and to touch its readers is a remarkable achievement.
As is often the way with fantasy novels The Book of Sand is about way more than a scavenger hunt for the ultimate McGuffin. It deals with complex ideas about consciousness, mortality and the way human beings have degraded the environment. These are made even more powerful by the fact that Theo Clare, better known to readers of crime fiction as Mo Hayder, passed away earlier this year.
The imagery she calls up of shifting sands, endless skies and ruined cities is powerfully evocative and reinforces the environmental message that manipulating nature has a cost that needs to be paid eventually.
The fantasy genre is a tough one to crack, not least because the shadows cast by authors like Philip Pullman and George RR Martin are impressively long, as are those of past legends like Frank Herbert and the father of them all JRR Tolkien. This first installment suggests that Theo Clare has the chops to give then a run for their money, it is also a fitting memorial to her remarkable talent.
