Lambda: A Sunday Times Book of the Year

An unsettling and absorbing book. Lambda's dark plot is leavened with dry wit and more than a few belly laughs. A meditation on how we treat the lowliest in society, be they vulnerable aquatic humans or lab-grown killers.

Oh, I enjoyed this very much—an inconclusive but fascinating peek into an alternative present where lambdas, a subspecies of human adapted for life in the oceans, begin to make landfall on the English and Icelandic coasts, with little memory of their journey or life cycle apart from a vague notion of a common set of progenitors known as the Four Fertile Pairs. There’s a terrorist incident, and a police investigation, and increasing racist attacks on lambdas, but none of those are the point of the book. LAMBDA is more of a window on this world, not a plot-driven commentary on it (though the choices Musgrave makes about narrative voice and structure constitute commentary, in a way). I generally struggle with lack of resolution at the end of a book, but here that felt exactly right, and actually provided more closure than I had expected. I must say, though, I’m not going to be an early adopter if sentient household objects become a thing. It pays to be polite to ChatGPT, but if the future is a toothbrush that your boyfriend can hack to clandestinely monitor your hormone levels in the hopes of manipulating your fertility, count me out. (Not a spoiler—nothing comes of it except a low-key but entirely deserved breakup!) More specfic like this, please.

Maybe I'm just not bright enough for this type of work, but it just went nowhere. The story threads were interesting enough to keep me going, then it just ends.IA real let down after a promising start. Definitely not for me.

The description sounded great, always up for a weird sci-fi novel. After the first chapter I just thought it was written as a robot speaking, then the same style continues and I makes it unreadable. I struggled through thinking it might change but it doesn’t, the story just fumbles along with it’s annoying trend of writing the measurements and scores of everything. I rarely give anything a 1 star review, however I haven’t read anything this bad in a long time, just avoid its awful.

Musgrave manages to use innovative narrative techniques without any trace of pretension or pomposity and the storyline had me constantly engaged. A must read in contemporary fiction!

I have no idea what this book was supposed to be about. There seemed to be about 4 threads, none of which were meaningfully connected with each other. None of them seem to lead anywhere, and then the book just stopped. Like a previous reviewer said, maybe I'm too dim to get it. Avoid.

This is probably going to be fully appreciated in the decades to come - this book is very ambitious in style and concept, and quite hard to define in today's commercial (and meaningless) jargon. A gem and it's not for everyone. I am not giving 5 stars only because a bit more simplicity and readability wouldn't hurt and would probably make Musgrave's writing approachable for a wider audience, and wouldn't compromise its originality. Overall a great read.

Title.

To me, this book offers a "Brave New World/1984 narrative that Is just as terrifying, ironic and prescient as those two books ever were in their time. In Lambda, Musgrave has created a fictional world that is beautiful at exposing the humanity in non-human things. Can't wait to see what the author comes up with next!