Review: TOUCH by Claire North

My review of Claire North’s utterly brilliant Touch is up at NPR Books.

[T]his book…is about entities who can inhabit and move through human bodies with only the faintest of skin-to-skin contact, and whose hosts have no memory of the time they were being “worn”…They call themselves ghosts, these possessing entities, and they were born into bodies the same as anyone else. But violent trauma can catalyze a switch: The impulse to cling to life is so powerful that in dying, they reach out – leaving their original bodies and jumping into whoever’s near enough to touch.

I love that Claire North is, herself, pseudonymous at least twice over; I feel that gives Touch a particularly coy dimension. At any rate, I devoured this book, and while it’s early in the year for it I’m marking it up as something to consider for next year’s awards. It seriously blew me away.

#SFWApro