We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are widely known and universally appreciated dystopian novels, not many people have read We by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. I had also been ignorant of this important work until a student of mine loaned it to me.

We was written in 1920-1921, so I am stunned by how contemporary this 105-year-old novel seems. One of the reasons for that must be the excellent English translation, but the groundbreaking ideas conveyed in the novel give credit to the author alone. The book is set in the 26th century in a totalitarian country called OneState, whose absolute ruler is The Benefactor.

Clarence Brown, the translator, writes in the Introduction that in OneState, "men have finally become, if not actually machines, as machine-like as possible, utterly predictable and completely happy. " Everything is carefully planned and scheduled for all citizens of OneState, including Sex Days. People's names are replaced by numbers, and the narrator, D-503, says, "[...] everybody and I add up to the one We." For citizens who do not follow machine-like routines, operations of imagination removal are available as well as executions, naturally.

One of the central tenets of OneState's ideology is that freedom and happiness are incompatible. The author also presents a parallel dichotomy, which partly explains the incompatibility: "[...] there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy. One of them leads to blissful tranquility, to happy equilibrium. The other leads to the disruption of equilibrium, to the torment of perpetual movement."

The plot describes such a disruption of equilibrium. D-503, is a mathematician and one of the main architects of the space vehicle INTEGRAL, whose construction is about to be finished. D-503 falls in love with I-330, who is a rarity—a rebel citizen. She seduces D-503 to get him to join their cause. I am not going to spoil the further trajectory of the story.

I love the frequent references to mathematics and science, and although in my view the plot is not fully convincing, I wholeheartedly recommend this trailblazing novel. It must have had some influence on Orwell. In fact, he published a review of the novel in 1946, where he effusively praised Zamyatin's work, two or three years before he completed 1984. It might have influenced Huxley as well.

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Confidence by Denise Mina
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have reviewed here 13 novels by Denise Mina. I liked or loved all of them and unhesitatingly recommended all 13, rating eight of them with at least four stars. Thus, I am at a total loss to explain why I do not like Confidence.

The opening of the novel is very promising. The narrator, Anna, a popular vlogger, watches a short movie made by another YouTube creator, Lisa Lee. Lisa is an "urban explorer," and the movie shows her visit to an abandoned chateau in France.

Soon, we learn that Lisa Lee vanished and that her disappearance may be connected with a very old artifact from the chateau—a casket that may have great religious significance. Ms. Mina describes the chase across Europe to locate the casket and explain Lisa's disappearance.

Despite Ms. Mina's usual accomplished writing, the story failed to interest me; finishing reading the novel turned out to be a chore. I am planning to re-read Confidence in summer, hoping to change my mind and write a more positive review.

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The Less Dead by Denise Mina
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Margo, a thirty-something physician, had been adopted as a newborn baby. She is searching for her birth mother. Through the adoption agency she meets her aunt, from whom she learns that her mother had been murdered soon after giving birth. The mother, although a drug user who needed to make money on the streets to feed her habit, managed to give up heroin for pregnancy to give her daughter a better chance in life.

Margo is being watched and has received threatening letters, but the danger only makes her more determined to uncover and explain the events of the past and to identify her mother's murderer. Many characters appear in the novel, and the mystery thread is quite complicated. To me, the most important aspect of the novel is the gloomy social commentary. Police had not invested any time in trying to solve the mother's murder. After all, she was one of the "less dead" - people, who apparently did not deserve any efforts to help from the institutions.

Margo's mother, although long dead and appearing only in memories of others, is one of the main characters in the novel. As usual, I like Mina's writing and the social commentary, and I recommend the novel. Yet, for me, it does not reach the stellar level of the author's better books.

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The Good Liar by Denise Mina
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Professor Claudia O'Sheil is about to make a life-changing decision. She is scheduled to deliver a lecture at the reception of the Royal College of Forensic Scientists in London, a lecture that would cement her leading position among forensic science experts. Claudia's most important achievement is developing the BSPS (Blood Spatter Probability Scale), which has become one of the fundamental tools in forensic science. Yet Claudia has found out that there is an error in BSPS and that many convictions secured based on using the tool may have been wrong. Will she decide to destroy her professional life by telling the truth?

The struggle with the ethic dilemma forms the narrative flow of the novel. Yes, there is a murder mystery involved, very skillfully presented, suspenseful, and full of plot twists. Yet, at least to me, that story constitutes the secondary flow. The two mysteries are masterfully connected and intertwined. The narration alternates between two timelines. One relates the current events just minutes before the lecture. The other describes the fateful events of the preceding year. The combination of these two dualities is an extraordinary successful literary device!

There is so much more in the novel! Biting critique of the class system in the UK, the system that offers unearned privileges to people who have the "right" parents as opposed to all others, who can get just a little closer to the world of privilege by having actual talent and working extremely hard. There is also a family thread in the plot: Claudia's husband has died and she is raising two young sons on her own. I am impressed by how skillfully Ms. Mina portrays the struggles of a single mother with the boys' onset of puberty.

An outstanding mystery and a very good novel. Highly recommended!

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Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In an interview with The Guardian, Elizabeth Strout said, "All ordinary people are extraordinary." I share that sentiment, which is why I like books about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Not for me are imaginary universes, wizards, and magic spells. I like Strout's Amy and Isabelle a lot.

The novel presents the dynamic and the evolution of a difficult mother-daughter relationship. Traumatic events in the daughter's life force the mother to face the secrets of her own past. Life in a small town is shown with depth and insights. The psychological portraits of the two women are well-drawn and convincing. The events feel realistic so that I believe I have learned something about human nature when I read the book.

So why only three stars? First, because three-and-a-half is not an option. Seriously, though, this is my sixth novel by Ms. Strout; I liked all other five a lot (three of them to the tune of four stars), and I am now familiar with the author's excellence in writing about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. She has raised the bar too high! Anyway, I highly recommend Amy and Isabelle!

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Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An entertaining read! The book belongs to the non-fiction genre as the story told in Agent Zigzag actually happened in real life. This story could not be told in a work of fiction: no one would publish something so incredible!

Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal tells the story of Eddie Chapman, a master con man and a criminal, who served time in prison, and who became one of the most successful agents of British intelligence. The story of a man, who was simultaneously a traitor and a hero, a German agent, a double British agent, and an unreformed thief. The only British person who had ever received the German Iron Cross for outstanding service to the Reich, but who was also highly regarded by the British intelligence community for his extraordinary service to the United Kingdom.

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The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like The Three-Body Problem. Some people whose judgment I usually trust recommended the book highly, so when I heard opinions that it is a serious novel about contact with another civilization, I immediately put it on my "To read" list. Alas, I ended up disappointed. For the most part, I found reading the novel to be a tedious task. If not for a few special features, my rating would barely reach two stars.

Trying to avoid spoilers I will list the few factors that save the novel from a "Do not recommend" rating. First of all, the very beginning of the novel describes dramatic events during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s, the purges, "struggle sessions," public humiliations, and political murders committed by ideologically crazed teenagers. It provides a sobering commentary on the dangers of ideology and human propensity for evil.

Then there is mathematics, which is, for me, the best thing about the novel. The three-body problem is an actual problem in mathematical physics of three masses revolving around each other, whose trajectories we want to compute/predict. Unfortunately, an explicit solution of such a model does not exist, and most initial conditions of the system lead to chaotic solutions. The author of the novel well explains the model (three suns orbiting each other) and presents the practical consequences of the chaotic solution.

To continue with mathematics, the author also writes about the unfolding of a higher-dimensional space into a lower-dimensional one. A nine-dimensional structure is unfolded into a two-dimensional one. The topic is close to my heart, as I supervised students' project on unfolding a four-dimensional cube into 3D and 2D.

Finally, and most importantly, there is Trisolaris, the system of three suns orbiting each other, with all its chaotic motion. Solaris is a wonderful, serious sci-fi novel by Stanisław Lem, the master of the genre, about the impossibility of contact with alien beings. Lem's His Master's Voice remains the best novel about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Coincidentally, The Three-Body Problem was published in 2006, the same year that Lem died. I would like to believe that Cixin Liu's novel about Trisolaris is a kind of homage to Stanisław Lem.

Other than the math bits and the grim stories of the Cultural Revolution, I don't find much to recommend in the novel. The plot, which in my view lacks coherence, is quite silly and bordering on laughable in some places. I found it hard not to giggle at passages like "The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers."

In the conclusion, I will repeat that for a serious, well-written, and interesting sci-fi novel about contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, I recommend His Master's Voice by Lem.

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