2) Halo and Sprocket: Welcome to Humanity, by Kerry Callen

This had been hanging around on my Amazon wish-list for ages, and I’ve no idea why I put it there – extensive searches have failed to reveal who it was that recommended it to me and why, though I am inclined to suspect

slovobooks

. Whoever it was, you did me a huge favour; it’s not been the best of weeks, but this was just the ticket – a bunch of stories about a young woman whose flatmates are an angel and a robot. The contrast between their two totally different takes on the human race is both funny and lightly philosophical, a sort of double-act of Candide or Mork (or, I suppose, a variation on Third Rock from the Sun). Well recommended.