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The Magic Circle

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The Magic Circle

By: Barry Ryerson
Narrated by: L Spooner
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About this listen

Forty years ago, nuclear war devastated vast swathes of the world. Since then, the remaining countries strived to rebuild and grow stronger. Continents formed The Peace Accords, an agreement that cut all contact with each other to prevent such a war from ever happening again.

Three strangers—an art student in Paris, a Russian spy, and a South African programmer—find their lives intertwine as magic returns to Earth. Guided by the mysterious Celestials, they must choose how they use this force in a fight that will determine the fate of every single living thing on the planet.

©2022 Barry Ryerson (P)2024 Barry Ryerson Adventure Military Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Fiction War
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I have just finished The Magic Circle by Barry Ryerson. What a fantastic tale of magic, politics and relationships. Set in a post apocalyptic world after a nuclear war devastated swathes of the world, the story follows the stories of Bethany Roberts a young woman just starting out at university and Yevgeny Arafyev a young Russian spy.
Ryerson skillfully weaves a love story and political/religious thriller together with a liberal sprinkling of magic to masterfully take his tale to ‘the next level.’
I’m seriously hoping there’s a book 2!

A book that I desperately want a book 2 of!

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Listener received this title free

I love a good genre mashup, and this book is delightful a mix of dystopian, military thriller and espionage, urban fantasy and romance. I've tagged this as YA due to two of the main characters being about that age and dealing with themes of identity and all that, though this is definitely on the older side, perhaps even closer to NA. There's swearing, and enough of it, just in case that's relevant to others' reading tastes. (I liked it, it made the characters' voices feel natural!)

Anyway, this was very enjoyable! The narration was done by L Spooner (who also did Barry's Middle Grade novel, fantasy adventure The Child of Fire and Earth) and I was really impressed by the variety of accents and voices employed. I'm not great at figuring out accuracy of accents though, but I liked being able to differentiate the characters as I listened to the story unfold — even if I had to take some time to get used to them.

The world is rich and unique. I don't think I've read anything quite like it. I enjoyed the blend of fantasy and sci-fi, and it was also very interesting to see a different set of countries dominate the world as well as the differences in their technologies. And there were many, many surprises!

The only bit that bothered me was how fast the main romance developed, though I could understand that it was to give time for the other important development later on. I was a bit bummed by the ending though, because it too felt like it happened a little too fast. But the LGBTQ+ rep is really good, or at least to me it was as I don't remember reading something similar before.

I highly recommend this for those who are looking for YA/NA books that aren't just your formulaic romantasy, and those who'd like a little bit of everything in their stories. (Yeah, we even get a villain POV. How's that?)

Very enjoyable!

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