Like with <i>The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday</i>, so many different adjectives can apply here. Weird. Unique. Irreverent.

Kundo is a former painter living in a micro-society, a city controlled by an AI in a world destroyed by climate disaster. His life is depressed and empty, meaningless after his wife left him.

And then... shenanigans.

I'm really not even sure how to explain it, but he gets roped in with a poverty-stricken single mom, a drug addict hacker, and a former crime boss to uncover a mystery behind a secret computer game. The game unlocks a djinn secret, if you win. A secret that might explain Kundo's wife's disappearance.

More than anything, this story is one of atmosphere and human feeling. It encapsulates isolation, emptiness, and the spirit and hope of the lost and marginalized.

When I found out about Kundo Wakes Up, sometime last year, I hit the pre-order button like it said “please collect a free million pounds”. I had utterly fallen in love with Saad Z Hossain’s The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, so finding out about a sequel made my day. I waited and waited with something in the neighbourhood of patience for it to drop.

Now’s it here. What’s there to say?

Kundo is an artist living in Chittagong. He used to have it all – fame, a burgeoning Karma point account, a wife. But the wife’s gone and the urge to paint has dried up. The points are still there but with the sea coming to swallow the city, what good does that do?

Then one day he finds a note from the private eye he hired to find his wife and it all get’s a bit mental. Which is very much what I hoped would happen as a reader, after all. That’s what I was here for. Something a bit weird, a bit disturbed, a bit wonderful in the not entirely positive meaning of the way. Something gone a bit J.G. fucking Ballard, to borrow from a great source of profanity.

I got that and it made me indecently happy.

I have to say, I wish I’d got it a little quicker. The beginning of Kundo Wakes Up feels very much like some long, drawn-out piece on the literary end of the scale, firmly fixed on the artist’s internal doubts and descent in the wake of his wife’s leaving (over a year before the book starts). It takes a few chapters for the chaotic digging into secrets and caustic dialogue to really get going. Kundo, bless him, is a very amiable seeming type, but he does also appear to be a wet rag of a man. The second coming of the Lord of Tuesday this ain’t.

Fortunately, he is soon enough surrounded by a crew of utter hooligans. Fara’s just your everyday, girl-next-door, impoverished single mum, a collection of hard edges and wistful yearnings held together by weary strained tolerance. Hafez is an old gangster and revolutionary, a stylish bad matherchod who rages against the dying of the light with the help of speed patches to stop the shakes. And Dead Gola is an old game coder and hacker who’s been rendered more or less irrelevant to the rest of the world by her addictions.

Together, they find a mystery that kept me turning pages, slowly but surely. Enjoying the journey and wondering what the actual fuck was going on took up too much time for it to be a compulsive page turner, but it was no less enjoyable for that. Hossain has a real gift for lining up the weirdnesses available to the future, particularly one with djinn in, to the very basic human needs and desires that don’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

Basically, everything in this book is how I think it should be bar two things. It’s got hugely entertaining characters, snappy writing, a vivid sense of time and place, and a deeply compelling plot. Unfortunately, the things I didn’t gel with are quite important. One, as mentioned, was the beginning. The other was the ending. It’s pretty difficult to describe one’s disagreements with an ending while keeping to a mild spoilers only policy, so I shall simply say I found it abrupt and deliberately undramatic. I almost liked it for that, in fact. But was mainly nonplussed.

More than that I can’t say, so I encourage you to simply read the damn book and come discuss it with me. Kundo Wakes Up lacks the blood and thunder of its companion, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, but it still a thoroughly entertaining and thought provoking piece of fiction. So start buying Hossain’s novellas. I’ll be astonished if you regret it.

A sibling book to The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday that stands on it's own, Kundo Wakes Up goes a different direction than I expected. It's a mystery to be sure (and sleep related to boot), but where Gurkha felt like a wide/systemic level adventure, Kundo feels like a much closer and intimate journey, while still looking at a grassroots retooling of a broken world. It isn't what I expected and is perhaps a bit too abrupt in places, but I certainly enjoyed reading it!

Kundo is a painter in a slowly dilapidating city. His wife left him a while ago and after some time of depression he wants to figure what happened to her. Teaming up with a few strangers he sets out to find out where his wife may have gone and if it's related to the increasing number of people leaving and disappearing.

This was a great novella. The author really has a fantastic way with world building. I'm super intrigued and just want to know more, but this story fits really nicely into novella size. Its a mix of science fiction post climate apocalypse and magic with Djinn. Its always nice to see the genre mix done well. This story is also about the people who are left behind for various reasons finding their own community in a way and about coming to terms with yourself. The ending is left a little bit ambiguous, which was surprisingly kind of nice.

Thank you to Tor Books and Netgalley for the ecopy!

A very cool concept with a fun band of unique characters. It was quite funny at times, the characters had some great dialogue and quirks that made them quite loveable in their own way. I really liked the dystopian cyberpunk setting and the integration of video gaming felt quite cool and realistic to where things may be going. I found the actual plot to be kind of confusing at times, things seemed to happen at random almost and so it was a bit hard to follow. But overall, it was quite fun and a quick read

I have very few rules for what I read: no WW2 fiction, and if a character's penis is described in the first chapter, I don't have to finish the book. Kundo doesn't even get to the end of the first paragraph before triggering rule 2. Kundo, a wealthy, unsatisfied man in a futuristic city, cares about nothing except his own ego. His wife went missing months before, and he only cares to the extent he pictures her cheating on him. Someone he recruited to find her has also disappeared, which Kundo also doesn't care about. Kundo cares that others have more money than he does, or more sex, but those with less are either invisible or exploitable. If you really want to spend time in the mind of a toxic misogynist, I can't stop you, but otherwise give this one a miss.

Not the ending or the climactic moment I was expecting, but it was exactly what I needed. And the author's acknowledgment was everything.

Firstly, for those who have read The Ghurka and the Lord of Tuesday, this is set in the same universe but is not a sequel; so there's no pistachio-cracking Gurung, no Melek Ahmar getting furious about the world. One blurb describes it as a "companion"; it is still a world in which the climate crisis has reached epic proportions; in which some cities are run by an AI called Karma (a different version in each city, it seems); and humans can basically only survive when they're in sufficient numbers that the nanites they create are at such density that they can make the climate liveable. In Karma cities, there is no money; there's just points for good deeds, which you can 'spend' to get what you want. And when there's points, there's always going to be people who have none - who are zeroes... Oh, and also there are djinn.

This time, the focus is Chittagong, Bangladesh. And things are not going particularly well - either for the city, or for Kundo, once a famous-enough artist, now a man whose wife has left and whose life is such a stretch of nothing that he easily loses track of days. The focus of the story is on Kundo looking for his wife; I have to admit that I was a bit worried about where the story would go - there are good reasons for wives to leave, and Kundo admits he was never a great husband - but I shouldn't have been concerned; Hossain dealt with that aspect of the story skilfully. In the course of trying to find his wife, Kundo gets a team together - a struggling mum, a has-been underworld figure, and a junky coder. Together they try and figure out the world, and get enough to eat, and maybe some basic human dignity as well.

It's another really great story from Hossain. He explores the variety of humanity: what they need - and what they want; frustrations and desires and ways of relating; what's good for one but not for another... all in the context of quite a frightening view of the future, actually, that still manages to have some redemption and goodness in it.

I'm hoping that we get more stories from this world.