Every writer of feminist speculative fiction owes a debt to Ursula le Guin, whose 1974 The Dispossessed neatly turned conventional notions of gender, power and property rights upside down. That debt is explicitly acknowledged by Liz Williams — even if the first fantastic novels she remembers reading were by Jack Vance.

Joe Abercrombie’s Before They Are Hanged: Book Two of the First Law (Gollancz) puts some very modern preoccupations — the nature of war and the motivation of torturers — under the fantasy glass. His main protagonists are, in his own words, ”a crippled torturer, a sneering, self-serving nobleman and a psychopathic barbarian with a bloody history”, writes Gwen Ansell.

Marianne Merten Voting is still a tale of two cities on the Cape Peninsula where just a busy highway makes all the difference. In the coloured area of Bonteheuwel on the Cape Flats, residents spent election day at home, visiting friends and making the best of an extra public holiday in the little gardens where […]