Claire North seems to delight in taking common and much loved science fiction tropes and making them her own. She has done dystopia (84K), body jumping (Touch), multiple lives (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) and death (The End of the Day). So while there plenty of new post-environmental apocalyptic books around, North’s novel Notes from a Burning Age, partially succeeds in putting a new spin on this genre aswell.
Notes From a Burning Age opens with both a revelation and a tragedy. Narrator Ven, still a young boy at this time, is caught in a forest fire with his friend Vae and her older sister Yue. In the midst of the fire, Ven sees a mythical creature but he also loses Vae to the river in which they are sheltering. That creature, known as a kakuy, is one of the kaiju-style creatures that rose to put an end to humanity’s environmental collapse (the Burning Age of the title), killing millions in the process but putting the survivors on a road to living more harmoniously with their environment. But this is many years later, the kakuy have retreated into myth and a group called the Brotherhood, who style themselves as ‘humanists’ who once again want to take rapaciously, is rising.
The rest of the narrative is a kind of spy thriller crossed with a war story. Ven goes undercover to try and prevent the spread of contraband information. And that information is giving the Brotherhood the knowledge technology to build old weapons and commence their conquest of Europe. But there are spies on both sides of this conflict and plenty of betrayal and close scrapes. Ven first works for the power behind the Brotherhood, a man called Georg. And it is this relationship of conflicting philosophies and mutual respect that drives the heart of this book.
Notes From a Burning Age both suffers and benefits from North’s particular style. There are plenty of long speeches and discussions setting out arguments on both sides of the conflict, but in the end the narrative wears its heart on its sleeve. But the message is an important one, and the possible personification of the Earth’s response through the Kakuy is a nice touch. Ven himself is a typical Northian hero. Similar to Theo Miller in 84K or Charlie in The End of the Day. He is an odd cross of passive observer and action hero – Ven is a spy who spends most of his time quietly watching and reacting but can bust out a lengthy discursion on the state of the world or some serious action moves when cornered.
In the end though, it is likely that readers’ patience with Notes from a Burning Age will depend on how willing they are to spend time in another post-apocalyptic world. North does plenty to set her post-Burning Age world apart. It is a relief, for example, to find that North’s future is not dystopian. It is almost solar-punk in its use of renewable and recycled technologies. The existential threat comes from the resurgence of fossil fuels and the rise of human-exceptionalism and destructive consumption. That said, there is also something of a wry celebration of the banality of social media. That, and the spy-thriller style, helps the environmental message medicine go down.
But what Notes from a Burning Age shows again is that North can take any science fiction or fantasy trope and make it her own. That she can bring something new to the table and make well worn ideas and messages seem vital and new again. And that in itself is no mean feat.

All Claire North's novels have a great high concept, and The Burning Age is no exception, though I was initially confused as I thought it was going to be a contemporary novel (as most of her books are) and The Burning Age isn't. There's a huge amount to like here, particularly the world-building. The intrigue, this strange world that is both familiar and unfamiliar, modern and primitive, the promise of fantasy elements, even though many of the characters don't believe the fantasy, it's all highly engaging. Unfortunately I didn't find the main character, Ven, all that interesting, and I sussed the final act reveal in chapter 1, which meant I was in that annoying place where you are waiting for 100s of pages for the characters to catch up to the obvious. However, it was an interesting take on the apocalypse novel, and probably my third favourite Claire North novel overall (after Touch, and The Fifteen Lives Of Harry August). I also spent most of the book trying to figure out what Burning Age reminded me off, and eventually realised it has a similar vibe to A Canticle For Leibowitz, which is of course a good thing.

A post- apocalyptic novel that is a mix between a spy novel, fantasy and commentary on the distructive influence we are having on our planet. The themes include corruption, greed, climate change and destruction, painting a chilling future for our planet. I found the first half of the story quite entertaining but it tailed off in the second half and the pace slowed considerably. The story is told in the first person narrative of Venn but I never felt as though he was a character to whom I could relate. Whilst there are a number of the authors books that I have loved, this sadly isn't one of them.

NOTES FROM THE BURNING AGE is one of those books where the story and its premise, not to mention the world, are very interesting, but the narrative style was just not for me.

The world is clearly ours but after many environmental disasters caused by greed and recklessness (the burning age.) As such, the place names are mutilations of present-day names, the blurred alterations of fuzzy recollections passed down too many times. Isdanbul, Vien, Bukarest.

Before - or during - or because - of the disasters, these "nature spirit" like things (the kakuy) arrived. They might have caused some of the disasters as punishment, or tried to save those who remained from the disasters the humans had created. There was a real ambiguity to them, partly a lack of knowledge and partly deliberate on the part of the priests. There are a few wry moments where Ven mentions that it's in the priests' best interests to keep them vague, but mostly it was up to the reader to work them out. I found them an intriguing metaphor for human's relationship with nature - monster, mother, other, conquerable, untameable all in one.

The kakuy are also why I'd say this is fantasy-leaning dystopia, rather than the sci-fi leaning dystopia (which feels more common in the small pool of adult dystopia I am aware of.)

Fragments of our civilisation live in on "relics" with the words "made in China" stamped into plastic, or the decayed, corrupted text Ven translates for others to determine if they're heresy (aka, destructive) or fine. It was such an interesting set up, and getting into the mindset of someone who had religious training but whose job was not theological determination but the more mundane translation work was really interesting. The man who was just another cog, who handled all this important information but made no choices.

This matched his role in the book. He was an observer more than a participant, surviving because that's what you did. He was a prisoner or a seeming collaborator most of the time, doing as he was told. After the tense, frenetic start where he was a double agent under constant threat from being caught, he then spends a big chunk of the middle as a prisoner of war, not really biding his time to escape (as he fully expects to die) but just getting on with it, because what else is there to do? He's too calm and practical to let himself give in to despair.

It somehow manages to work in the book. Usually that sort of character would really drag a book down, killing the tension and pacing as they have no goals so there's nothing pushing the book onwards. However, through his confinement time, we see the world being destroyed (again) second hand. For me, that really spoke to the current predicament, too many people sitting back, either ignoring the problem or deciding it was worth it. There was a terrifyingly familiar horror in it, seeing it all be wilfully burnt for "progress" without the ability to change it because the people doing it were too powerful.

NOTES FROM THE BURNING AGE is what I would call literary fiction. Not borderline or literary leaning, but straight up literary fiction. So much of the emphasis is put on the story telling style, rather than the story itself, and the style could make it quite hard to read at times.

I probably should have guessed it was literary fiction from the cover. I mean, that cover doesn't scream SFF, does it? It's gorgeous, and the reason this book caught my eye in the first place, but it's a literary fiction cover in the colours and composition.

This is not the sort of literary fiction that feels smugly self-congratulatory about the prose (the "isn't the style so clever?" type.) If it was, I probably would have DNF'd. No, this is the sort of literary fiction where prose isn't particularly linear - which my very linear brain struggles to follow.

The main character is Ven, and the story is nominally told first person from his perspective. There are flashbacks - sometimes separate scenes, sometimes in scene. You can have two chronologically consequtive scenes back to back in different tenses. A scene might start with Ven's action, and then switch to a third person omniscient about someone else in the room or describing the city from a more detached perspective. Perhaps, (like the first chapter) the writing will be focused in third person on someone else and then switch halfway through to Ven.

It felt quite scattered, leaping all over the place. It was definitely a deliberate, stylistic choice, picked to match the "the world is falling to pieces and Ven is bobbing through it, trying to survive, trying to work out what his place is and his beliefs" tone of the book. And some people will love it for that. But it's not a style that works with my brain. I need things nice and focused and ordered and signposted if the time frame is switching.

So, ultimately, it's a good book, but it's just not one for me and the type of reader I am.

Claire North es una escritora muy irregular, capaz de lo mejor y lo peor, así que nunca sabes qué te puedes encontrar cuando abres un libro suyo. Es cierto que mi última experiencia fue muy buena, lo que quizá debería haberme preparado para llevarme una decepción con Notes from the Burning Age, pero lo que no me esperaba era aburrirme con una historia de espías, uno de los temas que más me entretiene.


Notes from the Burning Age está situada en un futuro donde la humanidad ha sobrevivido a duras penas a los desastres del cambio climático, volviendo a basar su existencia en un trato más respetuoso con el medio ambiente, buscando el equilibrio entre lo que se consume y lo que se devuelve a la naturaleza. En parte este forma de vida se sustenta en el miedo a los kakuy, unas «criaturas míticas» que fueron las que destruyeron la civilización, como representaciones físicas de los espíritus de la naturaleza y su ira contra quienes la destruyeron.

Es innegable la influencia de Cántico por Leibowitz tanto en la visión postapocalíptica como el tratamiento del saber antiguo, que se busca y se guarda para evitar que la herejía se vuelva a propagar. No obstante, se nota la diferencia que años de acumulación de material sin sentido en internet provoca en estos almacenes de conocimiento, siendo necesaria una labor de purga ingente para separar la paja del grano en los discos duros que todavía sobreviven.

Toda la novela está narrada desde el punto de vista de Ven, a quien acompañaremos en su labor como espía infiltrado en la Hermandad, una sociedad que busca volver a las antiguas costumbres para incrementar el bienestar de las personas, aún a costa de la supervivencia de los demás. Y es que se ve que la especia humana no consigue aprender de sus propios errores.

La forma de escribir de North en esta ocasión es muy alegórica, dejando al lector la interpretación de la mayoría de los hechos que acontecen a lo largo de las páginas. Por desgracia, esta labor no da el fruto deseado, sobre todo porque la historia de espionaje resulta repetitiva y aburrida. Es cierto que en la vida real la labor de un topo «dista» mucho de la imagen adulterada que las películas nos han hecho asociar a los espías, con James Bond a la cabeza, pero no es menos cierto que en esta novela la trama no es que avance lentamente, es que repta sobre un limo escurridizo que parece echar hacia atrás los acontecimientos en vez de conseguir que avancen.

Es cierto que hay momentos de tensión cuando parece que se está a punto de descubrir a alguno de los agentes encubiertos, pero es que ni siquiera en las escenas de persecución se puede decir que haya mucha tensión en la narración, quedando en la mente del lector una sensación de incompletitud, de oportunidad perdida. Una pena, porque es una historia que podría haber funcionado de haber escogido la autora otros derroteros para su devenir.

Some necessary context for my reading experience: This isn't the first journey I've been taken on by Claire North. I've loved, on more than one occasion, both The Sudden Appearance of Hope and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. I've read Touch too but merely liked it. All these stories have an element of the superhuman to them and that reading history set me up with expectations for Notes From The Burning Age that affected my enjoyment of this story.

<i>a story set in an age after the world has burned, which explores whether humankind can change the paths we seem fated to follow. </i>

The book description speaks of Notes From The Burning Age being a post apocalyptic story of humanity trying to find itself, but more than that this is a spy novel. It is first and foremost a spy novel worthy of comparison to the work of John Le Carré as opposed to any post apocalyptic novel I've read. But typical of North that doesn't summarise what the story is either.
We're introduced to the Kakuy, Gods of the Earth awakened by humanities hubris and disregard for nonhuman earthlings, in the very first sentence and I was eager to learn more about them. It was about 200 pages later that I accepted that they weren't the story. If my expectations weren't what they were I would likely have thoroughly enjoyed what became a grimly engaging spy story sooner. As it was, I merely enjoyed it. At least on my first read. I look forward to coming back to Notes From The Burning Age and its engaging cast of characters again.

There's enough in NFTBA to satisfy SFF fans but
I hope that when NFTBA is officially released that its also marketed to entice fans of spy thrillers as they'd be best pleased with this offering from Claire North.

My thanks to Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I am a huge fan of Claire North and so I was thrilled to get my eyeballs on her latest novel. This is an amazing, original post-apocalyptic story with a kind espionage edge, and also a bit of a morality tale. The world building is wonderful and the characters are unforgettable. A great read.

I had read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August a couple of years ago so when I saw a new Claire North book available on Netgalley, I had to give it a try. It did not disappoint and many of the feelings I had about Harry August, carried over here.

The premise was intriguing, with a post-apocalyptic setting, wher the world has burned and humanity has taken to looking after the world a little bit better than we do now, giving thanks to the spirits that brought the Earth back into balance. But there are some who believe in human superiority, the same 'superiority' that caused the world to burn. Ven is a holy man, tasked with sorting material from the burning age into what cam be consumed by the public and what is heretical, and locked away to prevent a second burning. When he is approached by The Brotherhood, pressuring him to translate heretical material for them, his world is turned upside down.

Now here is something I can say for Claire North, her premises always draw me in but then she manages to take me in a widly different and unexpected direction. I was not expecting this book to be a spy novel. But that is what it is. And it is remarkly inventive. I found Ven (who goes by a few different names throughout the story) to be an interesting protagonist, and much different to what is expected in your usual dystopian novel. Ven is very much a 'bide my time' kind of person and that could get frustrating when he was in situations where he could have easily acted, ultimately, his choices to remain calm and level-headed served him very well. The most interesting parts of the story were between Ven and Georg, their relationship ever changing. Sometimes I liked them as friends, but deep down you know that it can never last. Their raport and chemistry is fantastically written and these were the times while reading that I could not tear my attention away.

Georg and the Brotherhood were interesting antagonists of the story, as they represent us, now, in the present. A world ruled by fosill fules, capitalism, and consumerism. A world where one is always better than someone else. That's what the Brotherhood is fighting for and it was interesting to see our world portrayed as an outdated, dangerous idea. The socio-economic commentary did feel a bit forced at times but all the same, I did enjoy the deconstruction of present day ideals.

Often the writing did feel a bit dense therefore it did take a while for me to get through the whole thing. There is a lot of description that doesn't forward the plot but that does create a fantastic sense of space and atmosphere.

Overall, I would give Notes from the Burning Age four stars out of five. The conflict between the protaginist and antagonist is riviting however, I did struggle to keep my attention focussed and often found myself confused regarding seconday and tertiary characters.

Being a fan of 'The First Fifteen Lives...' I was looking forward to this novel and I certainly was not disappointed! I enjoy post-apocalyptic novels, the idea of where the world will go afte an even it always intriguing to me. 'Notes from...' does a great job in building this world and then places an intriguing spy story with elements of religion, intrigue, science and friendship - a mix that sounds out there in a synopsis but works well in this setting. If you're a Clare North fan then I recommend this novel.

This is an interesting dystopian book with a protagonist who dabbles in being a spy and and translator. The writing style is amazing and flows perfectly through the book. My main qualm about this book is that it mixed elements of sci-fi and fantasy, while also attempting some kind of socio-political commentary. In some instances, the book reads like a nonfiction about science and technology, wherein it feels like the author is giving their personal opinion on contemporary culture. I didn't care for the protagonist or the side characters at all, and was slightly bored throughout the book. Lastly, the spacing and sentence gap in the ebook ARC was messed up which hindered the reading experience.

This was an interesting book.
I had a hard time getting into it, but once I got dragged into the story I didn't want to turn back.
Not a book I would have picked up usually, so I am so glad I got thus chance to read it!

4/5⭐⭐⭐⭐

A gorgeous novel about how we carry on when everything’s gone. A great mix of distopian elements, beautifully poetic language, and some really great characters.

I have been trying for a few weeks to gather my thoughts about this novel. I read it over the span of a three days, absorbed by the world-building and the plot. This is the first novel I’ve ever read by Claire North and I can tell that it certainly won’t be the last.

Although the world is deep and expansive, the premise of Notes from the Burning Age can be summarised quite simply: in a post-apocalyptic world mankind has risen from the ashes and learnt to coexist with nature, but unrest is slowly starting to rise and a political group called The Brotherhood wish to return to the old ways of mankind’s domination.

The Brotherhood demand access to ‘heretic’ knowledge stored on old ‘burning-age’ servers, which are managed by a religious and ethical group (the Medj) who judge what can and cannot be released into public knowledge. The servers of the burning-age are vast and may contain a wide variety of information from the past - old text messages between lovers, photographs from social media accounts, or potentially military schematics or the secret to nuclear fission.

Ven, our protagonist, works for the Medj, translating servers and categorising information, but becomes entangled in the political agenda of The Brotherhood when he is employed as the personal assistant for one of their key players - Georg Mestri.

Georg has a mole within the Medj, passing him stolen documents from the servers, and the novel slowly progresses into an espionage drama between the two sides. A war starts to brew and the world falls apart as large scale manufacturing and mining make a reappearance.

The pacing is urgent and exciting, yet simultaneously slow and thoughtful. There are long periods of quiet reflection and thoughtful debate; mostly about the existence of ‘kakuy’ gods, who are worshipped, feared, and said to be responsible for the Burning Age. Are they rising again? Can mankind overcome them this time? Or are we doomed to always repeat our mistakes, striving for what’s always out of reach?

For me, Notes from the Burning Age was captivating. Each character felt incredibly fleshed out in an extremely subtle way, which is evidence of North’s literary talent, and I would not be joking to say that this book read almost like a religious experience.

I would highly recommend it and believe it will be a favourite for many years to come.

I had a hard time getting into it. I adore North's books; I've read all of them and Touch, Gameshouse, and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August are among my all-time favorites. I wanted to love this book. But I didn't. There's lots and lots of exposition and self-indulging introduction to the world that was simply boring.

Things get better and there are moments of pure brilliance here. Overall, though, I had to force myself to finish it.

I enjoyed this novel and to my mind there was something reminiscent of anime or manga in the kakuy. I liked the premise and the intrigue but felt that the only thing that let it down was that now and again the author strayed into a lecturing tone. With a post-apocalyptic style novel, so much can be said in the subtext that to explicitly outline how we ruined the planet seems to belittle the reader. Although there were snippets of this all the way through, an example of the style on p283 is 'As science became more impenetrable, people turned to simple, comforting things. They said they were getting back to nature; that it was not mankind's place to inoculate against disease or edit DNA, that it upset the order of things.' If this exposition had been left out then I would have given it four stars but others may find the discourse far more enjoyable.

I’m a MASSIVE Claire North fan, Have been since The first 15 lives of Harry August and since then have pre ordered every one of her books and have yet to be disappointed... and that still FIRMLY stands!!
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This book is part post apocalyptic novel and part set novel but all brilliance. Claire North has an uncanny way of setting up worlds that feel so wonderfully real that you are fully submerged in the characters lives and forget sometimes that they are not set in our actual world. A wonderful novel of twists and turns that often surprises you with the route it goes down. I’m careful of saying too much as I don’t want to give anything away but I truly do implore many to read this book and not hesitate! Claire North is always a go to author for me, and I’m sure after stepping into one of the worlds Claire creates, she will be one for you too!!
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Thank you so much to Netgalley and Orbit Books UK for this wonderful ARC!!

Honesty an amazing read. One of the best books o have read in a while. The detail to character to. A must read for lovers of fantasy.

Yet another barnstormer from Claire North. This is a first-rate post-apocalyptic novel. It’s obviously Margaret-Atwood-inspired, and wears that proudly on its sleeve.

In part, it is a long and involved spy thriller. But it expertly weaves in a mixture of spiritual fantasy and eco-shock-horror. If you could reboot society – what knowledge would be too dangerous to let into the wild? Can man have mastery over nature without dramatic consequences?

Thankfully, it is less idiosyncratically written than some of her previous books. It occasionally lapses into first-person-present tense which helps keep things interesting.

I found it a little grim and bloody occasionally, but that’s my squeamishness. There’s a slightly unweildly cast of characters – some with multiple names. It isn’t quite Lord of the Rings territory – but you might need to flip back a few pages occasionally to remember who is who.

Overall, it’s a great novel. An expert blend of sci-fi and spycraft.

Before I start this review I should probably declare a bias - I adore Claire North's books and I've been loving her novels exploring individuals with weird abilities, or curses. Notes from the Burning Age is a little different, featuring ordinary people albeit in a weird future, but I still came to it expecting brilliance and I wasn't disappointed.

Fiction reflecting and commenting on the environmental catastrophe being visited right now on the planet has never been more important... or harder to do. Given the scale of what is happening, there is a sense in which all future, or near future, set fiction must be climate/ environmental fiction. But authors face challenges. Make it unremittingly gloomy, and readers might stay away. But implying it's a trivial problem, easily solved, would be reckless and unrealistic.

In Notes from the Burning Age, North finds an ingenious solution. The book is set some way in the future - hundreds of years - in an era when people can look back to our "burning age" and judge it. From that perspective, they can report the catastrophe, but without living it. We can also see that, despite losses, humankind has found ways to mitigate its impact on the planet, limitations to prevent a repeat of the disaster. The book is full of fascinating detail about these, from dependence on bicycles and electric vehicles and use of solar, wind and tidal power, to building techniques using reasons instead of cement to a system of religion and ethics intended to stress interdependence with nature. This is propagated by the Medj priesthood, who 'bowed to each tree in turn and made libations to the kakuy whose gift they were receiving'.

This elusive concept of the kakuy is key to the civilization depicted here. Perhaps gods, perhaps demons, perhaps innate spirits of the forests, the mountains, the seas, the kakuy may be a pious myth, a real and ferocious force that rose in anger when humans defaced the earth, or a personification of the chaos and harm that came from that defacement. The Medj teaching is focussed on not rousing them again - if gods, they are gods who have no regard for Mankind, regarding us an irritant at best. Ancient religions flourish alongside this cult - at one point a character is rescued and sheltered by a Jewish community, and the domes on ancient mosques and churches still stand over the city of Isdanbul - but they are peripheral.

Ven, the main character in Notes from the Burning Age, is a disgraced former member of the Medj, but hedges his bets about the kakuy. Others, ambitious men (mostly) who chafe under the limitations imposed following the Burning, do not believe, or actively despise the idea. Humanity is paramount, they insist, and only harm can come from denying that essential fact. The book, then, looks both back - at our burning age - and forward - at a potential future one, as humanity, like a dog returning to its vomit, forgets lessons learned and plots harm again. We see this as environmental destruction, seemingly undertaken to demonstrate human mastery, gathers pace. The story, from one perspective, is therefore a set of notes from the "future" burning age, to ours.

Located in Central Europe, the story depicts a loose federation of seven provinces supposedly united under a Council to ensure that "heresies" (the use of destructive, historic technologies) stay suppressed. It isn't clear whether similar conditions obtain elsewhere - there are brief mentions of the 'Anglaes islands' and their 'purity laws' and of an 'Amerika' with 'militia forts'. The the province of Maze is however flexing its strength, overturning the laws adopted for safety and to prevent the kakuy rising. Ven is close to that process, having fetched up as personal assistant to Georg Mestri, the power behind the Brotherhood, a social and political force dedicated to human potential (and to founding an empire with Maze at its head).

Despite his background in the Medj, Ven comes to admire Georg, for whom he translates ancient documents, stolen by the Brotherhood, describing banned technologies (and including a lot of other rubbish scoured from ancient hard drives - Ven's background has given him some skill in recognising what might be useful). More "notes", this time from our "burning age" to the future one. From this position Ven's able to describe the rapid slide of Maze into militaristic dictatorship and then war, and the progress of espionage between the two sides, espionage that may make the difference in an otherwise uneven war. The book has plenty of excitement, with a mole hunt going on, conflicted loyalties, and a lot at risk on either side. That makes it a pacey and exciting read, even as North refuses to skimp detail of the environmental damage done in our time, and which is starting up again. Her descriptions of shrines made from ancient, sea-washed plastics, of part-ancient, part reconstructed buildings or of simply Medj shrines, and always arresting and often beautiful.

Hovering over everything in Notes from the Burning Age are moral choices, the foremost of which is perhaps, how much damage must one accept to preserve peace? In this book the environmentally sensitive way of life of the other provinces is threatened by Maze's revanchism. Will the other provinces receive enough warning? If they do, will they be willing too act? Indeed, how can they act when they believe that warfare will wake the kakuy and bring ruin again? Again, placing the action in the future makes the story more palatable since it isn't finger-pointing at us, here, now - even if in reality we face similar dilemmas.

Notes from the Burning Age shows how these choices are inescapable, and perhaps, that there are no good options. It's chock full of ideas, and North is able to paint even her villains as sympathetic (in a certain light) and her heroes as distinctly tarnished, ambiguous types. The dialogue is often brilliant (it always is in this author's books, but even so, here it's superb) with several layers of subtext to the conversations, and the action-y parts of the book (of which there are many) have the urgency and pace of a thriller.

In short, I think Notes from the Burning Age is a joy to read, and shows North evolving as an author to address difficult themes as well as serving up a rollicking good story. I would strongly recommend it.

I usually like Caire North's books but this just did not appeal and I struggled to finish it. The main character did not appeal to me, there was too much waffle and descriptions of landscape etc which did not further the plot and in general I felt I was being preached at, which I did not like.