By JAMIE BUXTON Published: 09:50 BST, 28 August 2026 | Updated: 09:50 BST, 28 August 2026
Bodies of Magic by Freya Marske (Tor £22, 464pp) Bodies of Magic is available now Exam week at the Academie of Sieuxerr. Just like medical students everywhere, there’s been much drinking, fighting and partying but in the Grand Duchy there’s a big difference. The students diagnose and heal with magic, and one group starts with a massive disadvantage: the best of them is found murdered.This fabulous, complex, keep-you-guessing murder mystery is not about magic, but the people who do magic. We are led deep into the complex lives and loves of five students who must negotiate academic protocols, bitchiness and stress to uncover the truth.The beguilingly frenchified background is exotic, but the shifting swirl of emotion and motivation is pitch-perfect and wonderfully grounded.Blacktail by Scott Hawkins (Nightfire £20, 288pp) Blacktail is available now Blacktail is utterly unique: a crazed collision between Jack London’s Whitefang and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s an outstanding, majestic animal story – right up there in the pantheon.When humans kill Blacktail’s mate, he avenges her with gore-spattered, unreflective savagery.What follows is not a journey to wisdom, but a ruthless examination of what violence does and can do.On one level, it’s a literal lone wolf’s soul-searing tale of loss and retribution. On another, it’s about a fatherless hero following a gnomic prophecy to the path of awesome greatness.And the message is clear: mess with nature, and it’ll mess right back with reddened tooth and claw.Scion by James Islington (Gollancz £22, 240pp)A blast in every single way, Scion is funny and sad, humungously violent and rather sweet.Scion is one very enhanced human, a killer for hire protected by armour, tech and regenerative powers that make him pretty much unstoppable. Then his shadowy corporate employers give him a mission to protect – rather than kill – an elderly woman who turns out to be as cranky and secretive as you could wish.What happens next involves fights, explosions, great bants, psychopathic giant owls and a mystery that takes Scion back into his own past and a mission that went wrong. It’s ridiculously fast paced and fun: mangatastic-action with heart and soul.
