Powers That Be

An all-time favorite.

In the future the interstellar megacorp Intergal does what megacorps do: whatever turns a profit. This frequently involves seizing land for resources and resettling the populations into barely terraformed “new homes” and using these colonies as sources of unskilled labour or troops. Our main character Yana Maddock was a Major in the Intergal Company Corps, but was caught up in poisoned gas on a dust-world when the starving locals raided the base for basic supplies. Now with only a year to live she is retired to the arctic world of Petaybee in the hopes that the clean air will help. On arrival she is informed that if she wishes to continue to receive medical supplies she will serve as a spy in the village of Kilcoole as numerous mineral-research teams have been going missing.

This sounds dark, and it is, yet it is told in such an amazingly skilled style that you are sucked in to the world, care for and believe in the characters, fear for them and yet somehow - even when the story describes very dark moments, it is never oppressive and the novel balances the cold and the dark with the warm and the optimistic so that we can read of the horrors of Bremport yet still want to come back to this book as if to an old friend because of the joys of characters such as Bunny, Sean and Clodagh.