Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Who are you?” I say.

This was joint winner of the Tiptree Award in 2015, along with My Real Children by Jo Walton. It’s set in near-future Asia and Africa, with two different timelines converging on Djibouti from the east (across the ocean) and the west (across the continent). I really liked the two timelines, and was kept guessing until quite near the end as to how they actually meshed together. I was not sure about the ending, where 1) both time lines end up with fatal love triangles and 2) the resolution of the earlier of the two timelines struck me as medically improbable, even with future technology. But I really loved the central images of the two roads, one across the ocean (though why ending in Djibouti rather than Bossasso?) and the other across the Sahel. You can get it here.

The Tiptree honor list also included three other books that I have read, Kaleidoscope, eds Alisa Krasnostein & Julia Rios, Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor and Memory of Water by Emmi Itärantal; three books that I have not read, Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi, The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley and Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett; and four shorter pieces, “In Her Eyes” by Seth Chambers, “The Lightness of the Movement” by Pat MacEwen, “Neither Witch nor Fairy” by Nghi Vo and “A Woman Out of Time”, Kim Curran.

On to Ancillary Sword.