Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. Sometimes he coaches kids' netball.
Barry's new novel is The 22 Murders of Madison May.
At CrimeReads he tagged five great books that are secretly science fiction.
The books ... offer reality with a twist: Something about the world is not quite normal. But you may not notice at first, because they’re all about people. At heart, they’re human dramas, which want to show you fully lived-in characters confronted with situations that challenge them in personal ways.One title on the list:
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret AtwoodRead about the other entries on the list.
It’s a ruthless, oppressive patriarchy, but not our ruthless, oppressive patriarchy; it’s worse than that. The general absence of technology from this story makes the setting feel far more historical than science-fiction, as the new society of Gilead seeks to return to a simpler, more straightforward time, when a family was a man, a woman, and children, in that order, living their lives for the glory of God. Plus, of course, a few necessary improvements, since infertility is rife, and children are hard to come by. Atwood is a writer of breathtaking talent, and she effortlessly creates a society that feels entirely plausible.
The Handmaid's Tale made Louisa Treger's top ten list of great boundary-breaking women of fiction, Claire McGlasson's top ten list of books about cults, Siobhan Adcock's list of five top books about motherhood and dystopia, a list of four books that changed Meg Keneally, A.J. Hartley's list of five favorite books about the making of a dystopia, Lidia Yuknavitch's 6 favorite books list, Elisa Albert's list of nine revelatory books about motherhood, Michael W. Clune's top five list of books about imaginary religions, Jeff Somers's top six list of often misunderstood SF/F novels, Jason Sizemore's top five list of books that will entertain and drop you into the depths of despair, S.J. Watson's list of four books that changed him, Shaun Byron Fitzpatrick's list of eight of the most badass ladies in all of banned literature, Guy Lodge's list of ten of the best dystopias in fiction, art, film, and television, Bethan Roberts's top ten list of novels about childbirth, Rachel Cantor's list of the ten worst jobs in books, Charlie Jane Anders and Kelly Faircloth's list of the best and worst childbirth scenes in science fiction and fantasy, Lisa Tuttle's critic's chart of the top Arthur C. Clarke Award winners, and PopCrunch's list of the sixteen best dystopian books of all time.
--Marshal Zeringue
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