I’ve been hearing a whole lot about Premee Mohamed for a few years now, and while I’ve tried a handful of her short stories—including one that finished among my favorites of the year in 2022—I had yet to read any of her longer work. The release of The Siege of the Burning Grass gave me an opportunity to change that. 

The Siege of the Burning Grass takes place on a world in which a society struggling to leverage bioengineering for technological breakthroughs is locked in a seemingly endless war with a technologically superior foe. The lead is an avowed pacifist, imprisoned for his refusal to lift a finger for the war effort. But when the military offers him freedom in exchange for a mission to join a pacifist movement in the enemy capital and agitate for surrender, his desire for freedom and the chance to spread his ideals war in his mind against his distrust of the military and commitment to stand apart from them. 

It’s a fascinating premise, and it’s supported by a descriptive prose style that doesn’t push the pace but rewards the reader with some gorgeous turns of phrase. Those two things alone are enough to make The Siege of the Burning Grass an interesting and rewarding read. But as the story develops, it becomes clear that very little time will be spent on the main phase of the mission—the actual coordination with pacifists across enemy lines. Instead, the core of the book is the relationship between the pacifist lead and his reflexively violent military handler. Nearly half the book is travel, and even when they reach their destination, the constant conflict between the two is just as much the focus as any external plot progression. 

And that relationship offers as much conflict as anybody could want, though it tends to fall along a few well-worn paths. There’s interpersonal conflict, as both figures detest the principles around which the other organizes his life. There’s internal conflict, as the lead constantly wonders whether he’s betraying his own cause by undergoing a mission that will surely be hijacked to some violent end. And there’s external conflict, with plenty of obstacles to overcome to even reach the enemy capital. 

But for all that’s happening, both inside and outside the lead’s mind, the plot tends to feel stagnant for long stretches, simply because both characters stubbornly cling to their preferred philosophies, and their bickering accomplishes little. For readers who enjoy that oil and water dynamic, The Siege of the Burning Grass is bound to be a winner. But for other readers, it’s just as likely to cause frustration, as the same conversations recur over and over, leading nowhere. Realistic? Absolutely. Fun? Perhaps not. 

And this philosophical clash is the true emotional core of the book. There are hints about a technological secret that keeps the enemy ahead, and the infiltration plot similarly promises big events to come. And those seeds come good as the story reaches its climax—make no mistake, things happen. But they happen quickly, just as the story comes to a close, and they never fully feel like they take center stage. There’s a plot here, but it takes a backseat to the interpersonal conflict. 

And while I wasn’t as compelled by that interpersonal conflict as I might’ve hoped, there were plenty of little flourishes that I especially enjoyed here. I already highlighted the prose, but the lyricism at times flows well into the dreamlike, which works beautifully to highlight a main character who isn’t always entirely lucid following a debilitating injury. And while the contrast between the two sides can make one feel like the obvious villain, the shocked responses to the lead’s appearance in the foreign capital indicate a pretty thorough eugenics program hiding beneath their technological superiority. Details like these add a strong note of realism and helps the novel resist simplistic interpretation. 

Overall, this is a book that is only going to wow a reader willing to buckle up for a slow-burn ideological conflict that goes around quite a few circles before finding any modicum of resolution. But even if the main plot takes a backseat to the interpersonal conflict, the lush prose and little details of worldbuilding and characterization gives Siege of the Burning Grass more than a few selling points. 

Recommended if you like: lyrical prose, slow-burn ideological conflict. 

Overall rating: 14 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.

I have to say that reading a book about war - even imaginary war - in this day and age hits different, and the tone of the book, realistic as it is, doesn’t help. At the very beginning Alefret, the main character, sounded entirely hopeless, later transitioning into resigned and trapped and occasionally angry to the point of violence (testing his pacifist beliefs time and time again), and sad and doubtful and determined, with a little bit of hope and human connection at the end.
It was all a little hard to get into at first, but then it was hard to put down.

It was the end that brought the overall score down for me. I did not expect a neat or happy ending, but the plot twist about the two nations seemed obvious and failed to come across as an earth-shattering revelation, while the overall political implications for the future remained unclear. Which, I suppose, tracks in a way: a single individual has no way of knowing how and why things will turn out for something as big as the nation. There are some deeply philosophical and thought-provoking issues raised throughout the story, about the value of human life and the role and possible benefits of violence, big ideas and what they mean through the prism of mundanities (if anything), and these I don’t mind being left unanswered.

3,5 rounded up to 4 stars, with many thanks to Solaris/Rebellion and Netgalley for proof.

A sort philosophical fantasy comte that I enjoyed but it's also thought provoking. Well plotted and the right read in this time.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I was given an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review

The Siege of Burning Glass by Premee Mohamed is a grounded secondary world critique of war and propaganda. When Alefret’s home country is at war, he helps create the Pact, a group of pacifists who oppose the war. But when he’s captured and loses his leg, he’s forced to join zealot Qhudur in heading to the floating cities and, hopefully, find a way to end the war without compromising everything he stands for.

From the first page, the anger and frustration of war and conflict are clear as day on the page. Mohamed doesn’t hold any punches and explores the nuances of choosing non-violence and the power of propaganda, particularly in how two sides of a conflict utilize it. It applies to a lot of how modern warfare operates and you’re seeing things from the POV of someone who is forced into a conflict they vehemently oppose.

What I liked the most was the Voice, as I do with everything I’ve read by Premee Mohamed. I’m probably a broken record at this point, but I find her writing to be so engaging and a big part of that is how she utilizes Voice to create characters you want to stay with but are also flawed and make mistakes.

I would recommend this to readers looking for grounded secondary worlds that are low on the fantastical elements, fans of grounded military sci-fi and fantasy, and readers looking for novels exploring war, conflict, and propaganda that isn’t historical or contemporary fiction.

During the recent Coode Street podcast interview with Premee Mohamed, she came up with an interesting phrase that seemed to capture what happens in her latest novel, The Siege of Burning Grass. She said that while juggling all the demands on her time, she often felt like one of her characters being “seduced into usefulness.” That’s exactly what happens to Alefret, the protagonist of the novel, when he, a giant of a man who is also a leader of a rigorously pacifist group and imprisoned during wartime, agrees to a strange assignment. He is to go behind enemy lines and find a way to end the war, and he is to be accompanied by his cut-throat torturer, Corporal Qhudur, who sees him as a monster.

The Siege of Burning Grass is a secondary world fantasy about the war between the Varkal and the Meddon. It’s a war fought mostly with bombs, pteranodons trained as bomber planes, guns and knives, and the Meddon have managed to turn their capitol city into a flying fortress. It’s a type of anti-war near-fable that kept reminding me of Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, but it has its own mesmerizing and disquieting beauty.

In Alefret, Mohamed has created an amazing figure, a man who, we find out eventually, is over seven feet tall with a massive build that could enable him to kill his captor with his bare hands. Yet he is also a key signer of a document called the Pact, which commits him and its many followers to absolute non-violence. He is “seduced” into accepting this plan of infiltrating Meddon in the company of his torturer, even though he has little idea what it might entail or require him to do. He is focused entirely on the remote chance that it could bring an end to the war and save millions of lives, though quite likely, he thinks, at the cost of his own.

The story has a straightforward structure in five parts. There is a brilliant first section at the prison where Alefret is kept and tortured. Then there are sections on the painful march across open country by Alefret and Qhudur to get to the main military camp of Varkal; their arrival at that camp and preparation for carrying out the plan; their landing in the flying Meddon city and meeting the Meddon resistance; and the exciting implementation of the plan to end the war. The writing is precise and evocative throughout, as each setting and character Alefret meets comes to life.
......
The Siege of Burning Grass is a penetrating look at war, its victims and perpetrators, and the moral complexity of a physically powerful man whose principles compel him to contain the force he could so readily use to destroy his tormentors. This is not an easy book to read but one that is beautifully written and impossible to forget.

DNF @ 16%

Sadly I think this book just wasn't for me. I struggled to connect with the main character and the writing style. There was some inconsistency early on too. Alefret says he won't assist the war in any way. Then he does. He says he won't refer to his 'minder' by his name, even in his head. Then he does. Neither of these really get a satisfying explanation either. It seemed like he was just changing his mind out of convenience to the author rather than for any story reason.

All of that said, I think the themes are very relevant and the style will appeal to lots of people. Especially people who enjoy literary fiction. This was simply a case of this book just not being what I was looking for.

A dedicated pacifist imprisoned and tortured, a sadistic single-minded guard, going on a journey and mission to try and turn the tide of a seemingly lost war... A quite brutal first phase where we learn of the characters, the peoples and mentality, and the doomed war and all that goes with it gradually turns to something else as the story unfolds. A very good and worthwhile read, though I hesitate to give five stars as there were elements of the latter part of the story which felt a little disjointed compared to what had gone before. Difficult to say why without spoilers!

Worth a read - I got this having read and been impressed by some short stories and have more to read.

This book kept me on edge and had really interesting worldbuilding. I think fans of John Scalzi and Jeff VanderMeer would enjoy this story!

DNF @ 11%. This is beautifully written, with gorgeous prose that has some very sharp questions that will really make you think. The characters and the background are interesting. I think people who want something heavily philosophical, that really makes them think, will appreciate this book. I certainly appreciate this book, and hope to return to it at some point. But because of the world right now, this book is just making me feel anxious and sick, and that's not an experience that I'm seeking at the moment. From the bit of this book that I read, I think it will work for so many people - but I'm not one of them at this moment.

The Siege of Burning Grass is an exemplary literary work that is perfectly placed in and relevant in respect of current events. It is reflective, deep and in the blossoming genre of speculative fiction, this work is a powerful representation of the strength of the works in this burgeoning category in contemporary literature

Alefret is everything a stereotypical hero is not, but is a powerful protagonist with a huge heart and tenacious soul, a pacifist in his being to the point of writing a manifesto for peace, for which he is violently imprisoned. Thus we are introduced to our heroic antihero. In exchange for his freedom from the warmongers who maimed him, Alefret is commissioned to infiltrate the anti-war faction and force them into an uprising, essentially making them either successful, or cannon fodder.

In a sense, it reminds me of the Milgram experiments in the exploration of ethics and conditioning and takes the exploration further, examining through the tale, the strength of national pride,self-ppreservation and morals

This book is absolutely mindblowing. An absolute must if you enjoy Orwell and certainly destined to be a literary great

Thank you to Netgalley, Rebellion, Solaris and the author Premee Mohamed for this incredible ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

I received a copy of this ebook from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

The best thing about this book was the worldbuilding. From the very start I found myself intrigued about the science in this. The medicinal wasps were both original and really cool. They had healing ability, and right at the beginning, we learn that they are literally regrowing the main characters leg.

I really enjoyed reading about the world and the characters within it, but I do wish that more time was spent on each location. Instead, there seemed to be flitting action sequences between rather drawn out sections. This may be due to the organization of this book. Rather than the usual chapters, there were five different parts. It made the reading experience feel a bit tedious because there was nothing to break up parts within each section.

Overall the book did tackle very relevant topics, but due to the way it was written, I have to say my enjoyment wasn't as high as I would have liked.

I hadn't read that type of pacifist novel in an extremely long time. It manages to feel, and express, the same sentiments as works infused with war horror from WWI and WWII, I mean those autobiographies where people swore "never again". And yet this is fantasy, and yet this comes out from the modern tech-heavy world where we are supposed to know better...
With Kurt Vonnegut forever reminding us of the madness of war, we would think we should have learned.
But obviously leaders can't help repeat the same patterns over and over, and scratch arbitrary lines in the dirt and dividing the world between "Us" and "them". Propaganda and fear mongering is still very much rampant, and people still lap it up, forgetting that there is no real "Us" and "them" only one earth, one people.
The Siege of Burning Grass is an extremely powerful fantasy novel that talks about the ugliness of war by following the journey of a pacifist and a militant extremist. It is bitter, gritty, and hard, and painful and utterly necessary in the current atmosphere. This novel offers no respite, no wiggle room and faces head on the tragedies of humanity with extreme focus. Brilliant fantasy.

This book reads like the best of the Cold War spy thrillers meets a breath-stopping fantasy adventure. I loved the dark humour, the intense dialogue, and the gorgeous world-building. And the anti-war message is timely, to say the least. Brilliant read.

Two warring countries, one pacifist turned into reluctant collaborator and one natural born killer trying to stop the war before it consumes everything.

This book is amazing. It's also challenging, and uncomfortable, and doesn't pull its punches, which makes it even better because of all that. For me as Eastern European some details in the book hit really close to home, and the books mentioned in acknowledgements explained so much about why some things mentioned seemed eerily familiar. It's not a happy story by all means, but it's the one we might all need more than happy ones.

This timely meditation on war, violence, and identity is a shimmering oasis, spied from a distance through unrelenting heat. There is beauty in the vision alone, but there is doubt about if it is real or if your desperate mind has combed with the landscape to project what you hope to see. My previous experience with Premee Mohamed’s work is with her Beneath the Rising trilogy, and while the competence and expanse of the writing there is similarly on display here, those novels did not prepare me for this. That trilogy was fast-paced, ranging in scope from techno-thriller to cosmic, eldritch horror come to life. This story, in contrast, is slow and contemplative. We are constantly learning new details about our protagonist even up to the final part of the book, a slow unfurling, or revealing. This gentle exploration is perfectly aligned with the interiority of the protagonist, and it serves this story quite well. There are a handful of secondary characters that are distinct, and even though we don’t have a lot of depth into their personal stories they always feel like more than archetypes or place holders. The world-building is deliberate and slow, similar enough to our world that we don’t need our hands held, but different enough that as more small details emerge, slowly, organically, it is a treat.

The story itself is slippery. This is why I liken it to a shimmering oasis; it seems straight forward if you were to summarize it but feels like it is constructed only with curved lines when you experience it. There is not a lot of action, especially in the first 3/5 of the story. Events happen and there are bursts of excitement, but the real journey here is internal. This, again, is paralleled in the structure, being divided into 5 sections only, not a few dozen chapters, and while there are section breaks within each division they are not the hard and clear delineations that often pull readers forward in a story. I did struggle a little with this novel in the beginning, it felt like it was holding back in a way that didn’t always invite me in. I don’t think it needed to move faster or be more revealing, but even accepting this as a meditative journey it was hard to find a lot to hook me in, early, to really compel me along. That isn’t to say the story is rambling, it is remarkably well-focused, but it doesn’t have a narrative urgency. This contrasts with the constant urgency and sense of internal despair felt by the characters, which is an engaging stylistic technique, and definitely felt more effective the longer I spent with the characters. I felt implicated the whole time, constantly searching my mind for how I would respond to these situations, which all felt painfully realistic. The novel has an ending, but it doesn’t have answers. Beautifully written and tragically timely, this is a wonderful story that sits with you far beyond the last page.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Solaris, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I wanted to like this, but I just didn't.

I wasn't a fan of the writing style. It was too...erratic? I'm not sure. There wasn't enough depth to it, and it jumped around too much. I never felt like the pieces really fit together well enough to understand exactly what was going on. Because of this, it made it difficult to get into. I finished it, but I found it a real slog and reading it felt like a chore.

Alefret is a pacifist who doesn't want to compromise his morals and beliefs. He's living through a time of war where it seems that the nations are going to kill until there is no one left. He has a chance to do something to help -- maybe -- and goes on a mission with a murderous soldier to try to put an end to the war.
This world was dark but I'm going to miss it. Rarely do I read something that draws me in so completely.
This is another world with different technology, and it feels both old-fashioned and modern in different ways. There were so many different groups and languages, too.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

In the face of the unrelenting death and misery of war, what recourse do everyday people have to try to stop it? If we believe war and violence are abhorrent, would it be better to lose the war than prolong it? Is specific, targeted violence okay if it appears likely to forstall more violence?

The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed tackles these questions and more. Set in a war-torn corner of a nameless world, famous pacifist leader Alefret languishes in a prison of his own nation, a nameless scientist experimenting on him to see if his blown-off leg can regrow, using biologically altered wasps to sting the medicine into him. Alefret is used to suffering, having been born with a genetic condition that makes him enormous, with an obviously distinct face and hunchback; he refuses to reveal anything about his fellow members of the pacifist movement called the Pact. But soon a general coerces him into action with a very specific plan: if he and a fierce diehard soldier named Qhudur can sneak their way into the enemy’s floating city, he can ally with the enemy nation’s own pacifist movement, and using their trust, allow Qhudur to sneak in and kill the nation’s leaders. It is an act of deceit and broken trust, but if it works, it would mean the end of the war and the end of all this killing.

Alefret and Qhudur hate each other, but must rely on each other to succeed in their harrowing journey. They spend much of the book clashing ideologically as they make their way across the desolate grasslands between their city and the floating city of their enemy; Alefret denouncing the war as pointless and evil while Qhudur critiques his presumed naivety and cowardice. It’s here in these war-torn fields, living off the land and grappling with difficult questions, where the book is the strongest, evoking other resonant anti-war narratives outside of the world of speculative fiction. Mohamed strikes a difficult balance many lesser writers fail to achieve; she asks difficult moral questions without clear answers, yet never lets us believe that Qhudur’s nihilist and infantile violent worldview is anything but abhorrent.

The secondary fantasy world of the novel is only ever sketched in around the edges of Alefret’s vision, but it’s a fascinating one. Technology appears to be roughly around the war years of the early 20th century, with guns, radios, and planes; yet there are other stranger devices. Alefret’s nation utilizes creatures, perhaps biomedically altered or perhaps native, as technology, from the aforementioned vaccine-hornets to the pteridons that serve as flying vehicles or the lizards that produce bullets.

The Siege of Burning Grass deserves to stand among other great SFF fiction about war; unlike many other books that are granted this comparison, it actually evokes Ursula K. Le Guin, with a magical world filled with wonder and yet burdened by the same horrors as our own, a story told beautifully, and ideas that counter much of the simplistic good vs. evil schemas of classic fantasy. Unfortunately, I found that the book’s rather muddled and sudden ending undercut some of its themes, which wasn’t enough to ruin the book at all but maybe keeps it from true masterpiece status. Regardless, this is a really special novel, once with a profound empathy and righteous anger, that feels especially relevant in our current era.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts expressed are my own.

3,75⭐️

"The Siege of Burning Grass" is an exceptional tale of a war, much less focused on the battles, and yet somehow much more cruel, bloody and deathly than if it did happen amongst soldiers. I've enjoyed Mohamed's writing, peculiar and slightly reserved, as she guides us through her story not like an all-knowing deity, but a mentor. Supporting. not explaining. Distant, yet closer than ever before. While she draws a tale like none other, it gives it a feeling of realism, like looking in the mirror – not a perfect, one to one picture, but something closer. More chilling. Stranger.

Thanks again to Solaris for passing this along! This is a hell of a novella that I devoured in the space of Christmas Eve and Day this year, accompanied for a not insiginificant portion of time by a glass of wine and some cheese and sausage. The core of the novel would already be a hell of a setup - the leader of a pacifist movement being tortured by his own governement and sent as a spy to the enemy, but who is also on his own mission (which I think you can probably guess giving Mohamed's previous books, but I'll not spoil it for you). The message of community and care at the heart of this while also balancing survival in a greater hostile environment is great, and you're going to want to pick this up when it comes out, trust me and just preorder it now.