Book Review - No Way Home by Various Authors

This anthology brings together a handful of authors and their stories under a common theme of being unable to return home. Each story brings something different to the theme and that, along with the quality of the writing that I enjoyed about reading this collection.

A common issue with collections like this is the variance in quality between the stories. The anthology starts out strong with a couple of authors that I was already familiar with and after that point I half expected some filler, but that certainly wasn't the case!

They were all a good read, but three in particular stood out for me. The first was the opening story by Lucas Bale. This concerned a soldier fighting a seemingly endless war against an alien foe. While I found the plot a little predictable the tale is exquisitely told.

The second was from another author I'm familiar with and that's J S Collyer. The story is a dark tale of an underground existence. It also expands on her novels for fans of her series.

The biggest surprise was the concluding story, in part because the author came as a surprise. This is is a change in genre for him and is a fantastic debut into science fiction. Beyond that it's an intricate story involving time travel (of a sort) and an interesting experiment.

If you're a fan of sci-fi then is a collection well worth checking out. Each story is a decent read and the variety makes this an interesting read. Well worth checking out.

Click on image to buy from Amazon

Stories From Which There is No Escape.

Nothing terrifies us more than being stranded. Helpless, forsaken, cut-off. Locked in a place from which there is no escape, no way to get home.

A soldier trapped in an endless war dies over and over, only to be awakened each time to fight again – one of the last remaining few seeking to save mankind from extinction.

In rural 70s England, an RAF radio engineer returns to an abandoned military installation, but begins to suffer hallucinations, shifts in time and memories that are not his own.

A widower, one of ten thousand civilian space explorers, is sent alone to determine his assigned planet's suitability for human colonisation, but stumbles across a woman who is part of the same programme and shouldn’t be there at all.

A suicidal woman in a poverty-stricken near-future America, where political apathy has allowed special interests to gain control of the country, takes part in a particularly unpleasant crowd-funding platform, established by the nation’s moneyed elite to engage the masses.

An assassin from the future, sent back in time to murder an insurgent, is left stranded when he fails in his mission and knows he will soon cease to exist.

These sometimes dark, sometimes heart-warming, but always insightful stories and more are to be found in No Way Home, where eight of the most exciting new voices in speculative fiction explore the mental, physical and even meta-physical boundaries that imprison us when we are lost.

Click here to buy No Way Home from Amazon (and it's a cracking read)