Are you a Kobo reader? Do you like Sci-Fi?

Check out these books, hand-picked just for you by their authors!

PS: Most of these are available on KoboPlus too!

https://bf.sophiemaddon.com/june2026scifikobo/v2e7pcazo1

#Kobo #KoboPlus #ReadfreewithKoboPlus #scifi #scifiReading #scifibooks

My favourite reads in #koboPlus for May. Heavy on the indie fantasy this month.

#books #reading #indie

http://wendypalmer.au/2026/05/31/books-favourite-kobo-plus-reads-may26/

Books: Favourite Kobo Plus reads, May’26

Hello to new subscribers; I will reiterate my usual assurance that I won’t overload your inbox. I only post once a month, mostly these short book reviews and every now again a new-release announcement for my own books.

The choices are ever-growing on Kobo Plus – either Kobo’s algorithm finally worked me out, or more authors are breaking out of the Kindle Unlimited exclusivity prison, or both. These were my favourite books this month, all available on the K+ subscription, but also through your favourite retailer, and some on Hoopla too.

Fiction

Curse of Bronze by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Beth, the unassuming and sensible member of a family of adventurers and daredevils, unexpectedly inherits her aunt’s townhouse and promptly has to solve a mystery or two. An enjoyable novella with a hint of romance-to-come, riffing off Beauty and the Beast (what with Beth’s cursed talking furniture and the lion-man next door). I look forward to reading the follow-up, Tomb of Brass, out in June. (I also read and enjoyed the Castle Charming collection by the same author this month).

The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

Tetley lives on one of the last floating refuges in drowned world, Garbagetown aka the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. We follow her life as we learn how she got her name, why she’s hated, and her new secrets. Technically a dystopian tale of our future if we don’t take climate change seriously, but told with dark humour and hope in Valente’s usual expansively lyrical fashion. Highly recommended.

Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows by James Lovegrove

The Conan Doyle/Lovecraft mash-up you weren’t expecting and didn’t know you wanted. In this version, the original stories, and Holmes’s lauded rationality, are the anodyne cover for the eldritch horrors he and Watson must battle. Lovegrove also writes straight Sherlock stories, so is very good at the voice and world while adding a suitably supernatural twist. The Cthuluhu Casebooks has three stories in its original run, plus a more recent fourth volume.

Uncanny Aviator by Jenya Keefe

A steampunk-ish m/m romance. Lord Cay, a Cinderella rags-to-riches type, is suddenly iced out by his formerly loving husband and falls afoul of blackmail. To escape, he makes up a plausible lie, promptly plunging himself and everyone around him into even more trouble. I found this very charming, and truly felt for Cay whenever Adrio was mean to him. At first I thought it was an honest-talking-would-have-solved-this situation but ended up finding both parties’ actions believable. Satisfying, will happily read more by this author.

Clockwork Heart by Heidi Cullinan

An actual steampunk m/m romance (from 2017, so perhaps back when steampunk was big last time?). Cornelius is a tinker, a clockwork engineer, with a medical specialty. He, slightly traitorously, saves a enemy soldier from death…by implanting into him a clockwork heart it turns everyone wants. Keeping Johann hidden involves a fake relationship, of course, which soon turns real, of course, with plenty of plot (and sex) along the way. It is a complete story, but there were two more planned which did not eventuate (or at least which aren’t yet on Kobo) — you can see those pairings being set up in this story, but otherwise nothing is left hanging.

Flowers by Night by Lucy May Lennox

Samurai Tomonosuke and blind masseur Ichi develop a relationship in nineteenth-century Edo, negotiating class (/caste) differences, Tomonosuke’s unimpressed wife, and disasters natural and manmade. This is phenomenal in its evocation of Japan’s bygone history at the cusp of the big shift into modernity, the very non-Western acceptance of unconventional masculinity/femininity, and also where the lines of acceptance were drawn across the many different sub-groups.

Non-Fiction

Bodysnatchers by Suzie Lennox

A non-fiction account of the prolific theft of corpses, mostly in Scotland and Northern England, to supply anatomy schools, using the newspaper articles and court reports of the time (it reached its peak in the 1820s and early 30s, in the gap between a boom in medical student numbers and the Anatomy Act which provided the many bodies needed for practice1). This is a Today I Learned sort of book. TIL Burke and Hare never dug up a body, they jumped directly to life-snatching (thus this book doesn’t cover their murder spree in anything more than a paragraph or two). TIL early medical students had to source their own corpses for their anatomy lessons before the industry “professionalised”. TIL sometimes the bodysnatchers would cut to the chase and break into homes to steal the laid-out bodies before burial. TIL they’d send bodies cross-country in public coaches, stuffed into trunks; a pair of students even Weekend-at-Bernies’d their prize. TIL the quickest (and least respectful) technique to get a body out of a buried coffin without having to dig the whole thing up. It does get a little repetitive at points (there’s only so many ways this story can go, really), and I would have liked more exploration of the tension between the very blasé thieves and surgeons, the angry, disgusted parishioners trying to save their departed loved ones with overnight watchers, locked cages and booby traps, and the judges who would openly tell juries such acts were necessary for medical advancement and hand out light sentences, but this is a truly fascinating and macabre eye-opener of a read.

A Clear Case of Genius by Admiral Sir Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall and Philip Vickers

Hall’s autobiography (incomplete as not all chapters survived the sixty years between writing and post-embargo publishing) about his time leading the secretive early Intelligence unit known as Room 40, simplistically, the WWI precursor to Bletchley. Vickers added the explanatory notes and maps for helpful context. I’ll be honest, I read this as research for a future WIP and didn’t think I’d enjoy an old-fashioned and rambling account of some self-important admiral with one of those twee upper-class in-joke nicknames, but I was wrong: Hall’s voice is clear, self-deprecating, and droll, with many fascinating spying titbits and anecdotes. The Blinker nickname comes from a facial twitch, because this is the same era when an Enid Blyton character could be nicknamed Fatty without anyone raising an eyebrow.

And

I have a second draft (technically, a sixth(?) draft, given the back and forth, but let’s just go with second), and a cover (check it out on my Books page if interested), and a planned release month (early August). I will soon have a blurb, because that’s what I will make myself write while I take the usual short break before tackling the make-it-good third draft. Ahem, “third” draft.

I also have something almost as painful to complete as this bloody manuscript: an author photo. It only took me a solid fifteen years of publishing (you can see it over here, if you happen to want to know what I look like2).

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