Wickhills by Premee Mohamed, Jonathan Strahan
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
Published on: 8th September 2026
ISBN: 1250378427
Goodreads

In the dangerous magical city of Wickhills, a streetwise secret agent is tasked with protecting a foreign defector from his pursuers... even at the threat of war.

Looking after a defecting scientist should have been Ferec's easiest mission. But now he's on the run from the intelligence agency she works for, dodging a handler who might have gone rogue, and relying on a secret patchwork of illicit resources and dodgy contacts. Turns out his defector might be carrying an apocalypse-level magical weapon ― and protecting it requires Ferec and his team to go underground, literally. Down here, the rules are very different... and the tense peace between every city in the world will shatter unless Ferec can drag their darkest secrets into the light.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~ware the walls
~are good guys even a thing
~a manticore in a suit
~heists! hostages! kidnapping!
~bratty inventors
~an eyebrow-raising tablecloth
~I WOULD LIKE A STREETLIGHT FOR A PET, PLEASE.

I read this in two days, and resented every moment that tore me away from it!

I haven’t exactly clicked with Mohamed’s works before. I’ve always been able to tell they’re objectively good – And What Can We Offer You Tonight, Beneath the Rising, etc – but I never actually had fun with them.

Well, I can happily announce that if you don’t enjoy Mohamed’s books, this is the one that will convince you otherwise!

An enormous part of that is the setting. Wickhills, the city, utterly enchanted me. It’s baroque and – honestly, quite eldritch. This is a place where new trainlines spring up overnight without human intervention, where glass spires might start growing out of your garden without warning, where you must not look into the puddles because if you make eye-contact with the things in the water, you’re done for. A good chunk of the population isn’t human; one of the important characters in the book is a manticore. !!! (He wears suits. It’s amazing.)

The Market Street Wyrn slackened its sable coils around the dome of the old mall, somnolescent but not quite asleep, its great pre-hibernation yawns occasionally flooding the neighbourhood with amber light. At street level lay the dragon’s shine, begging it to rest, to dream, the wooden box crowded with cheap tin amulets and wizened crabapples.

It’s not just the physical city itself: there are so many little details of cultural worldbuilding that make this setting feel incredibly real, incredibly quickly: clothing, pastry fillings, superstitions about finding pennies – even myths about boat colours!

A sizeable, old-fashioned galleon, triple-masted, red sails, black timbers. The black was conspicuous but not unheard of; there was a persistent belief that sea monsters and suchlike responded to colour, and black would prevent attacks on ships at night or during heavy weather. But it was rare, for most owners accounted a black-painted ship bad luck for other, vaguer reasons, and refused to paint their ships.

HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT??? And Wickhills is full of things like this, so that by the end of the first chapter, you BELIEVE in this setting in a way most authors don’t manage after entire trilogies. And that belief, that sense of reality, is necessary, I think, because as I’ve said Wickhills is so freaking weird that it would be easy not to believe. Often it’s hard to get immersed in a really weird setting! But MY GODS, not this time!

And I love, so much, the way Mohamed writes about Wickhills – we learn about the city’s strangeness not all at once, but in pieces, and when we do the narrative claims there is nothing at all odd about it. It’s head-spinning: the blithe insouciance of Feyric and the other characters as they take for granted things readers will gape at! Which manifests as completely opposing ideas of what is important; details that to us are a very big deal are constantly given to us late, in passing, casually. One character has four arms, and we do not learn that for several chapters after meeting him – because in Wickhills this is nothing unusual, so why would Feyric comment on it in his internal narration? I don’t know what the technical term is, for narration that reflects the values/perspectives of the characters, writing that is shaped by the fictional worldbuilding – but it is one of my favourite things and Mohamed ROCKS at it!

The dissonance of this approach – the blitheness, combined with the utterly weird – it was a constant joy to me. And it feels very tongue-in-cheek, as if Mohamed is winking at us, inviting us to come play in this strange but wonderful world she’s made.

(Yet another tongue-in-cheek thing is the fact that Mohamed presents us with a major character who is, himself, new to Wickhills: thereby almost giving the reader a voice within the story. We understand EXACTLY what this character is going through, his surprise, his shock, his wails that this is NOT FREAKING NORMAL! It’s like Mohamed is giving us an outlet for our feelings within the story, which just strengthens the immersion, honestly, and is so meta and funny! Every time this characters threatens to freak out at yet another Wickhills^TM thing, I could not have been more sympathetic, right there with him in wanting to flail about it!)(Though I would like to emphasise that my flailing was DELIGHT and his is HORROR so, you know. Different ends of the spectrum!)

Which is in itself another dissonance, because the story is not especially playful. It’s quite grim – this is a spy novel, with the highest possible stakes, various factions prepared to do horrific things to get their hands on a mysterious super-weapon. It threatens to kick off a genuine World War, though Feyric, our protagonist, initially has no idea why – no one but the weapon’s inventor knows what it does, and he refuses to explain until they get it back. (I am still surprised no one took him somewhere private for a kicking to make him stop acting like a spoiled brat.) So the tension is intense, moreso because Bardanes, Feyric’s handler, is acting very strange, reminiscing about Wickhills’ civil war for no obvious reason; and because, in the process of trying to get the weapon back, Feyric has to take himself and his team into parts of the city no one is supposed to know about. It gradually becomes clear that whatever has been invented is tied to fundamental truths about what Wickhills even is, because ‘a city’ is apparently not even close to the whole truth.

It would be hugely misleading, though, if I left you with the impression that this is a very Grim And Serious book. It is, and it isn’t. Like that authorial wink, Wickhills is wound through with veins of humour, moments of surprising and wonderful whimsy. Some of this is the worldbuilding (THE STREETLIGHTS, I LOVE THEM), and some of it is the characters (the tablecloth!). One of the moments that stands out for me, even after finishing the whole novel, is a glittery giggle-moment in the very first pages, when Feyric is so bored at his post he investigates whether a beetle that keeps going past might be an enemy agent spying on him.

That yewl-beetle, for instance, burrowing through the snow looking for crumbs–a little suspicious, no? It was virtually invisible with its hairy white coating, so it was clearly undercover like him, and its route was slightly too consistent. It had passed in front of him at least three times. And what was the agency’s surveillance detection rule? Multiple sightings, varying times, varying distances.

He marked it down as a potential hostile.

I cannot express how much I adore the fact that even now, having finished the book, I am genuinely unsure whether or not Feyric was kidding about that.

That leads us pretty nicely to Feyric, who is such a FUN main character! He is satisfyingly complex; at times he appears extremely amoral, but he’s also very proud of his job, confident in the certainty that everything he does is for the good of the city – even if he gets orders to plant false evidence, or disappear someone, it’s all for the greater good! Given his past (which, like Wickhills itself, is revealed to us bit by bit over the course of the novel) his naïveté is kind of baffling – but in an extremely believable way? I’m not sure how to explain it, except to say I was completely convinced. Feyric isn’t the Perfect Spy, though – he has an entire web of informants outside of the agency, and that is absolutely not how things are supposed to work, but he does it anyway, because it gets him better information, it makes him better at his job. It’s an odd but fascinating contrast, how loyal he is to Bardanes, his handler, and to the nebulous idea of the city as a whole – and how thoroughly and unrepentantly he breaks the agency’s rules. He’s a very…fluid character? Like mercury, all silvery and constantly-morphing. Every time I thought I had a handle on him, he’d surprise me, with things he knew or did or wanted, and every surprise was so very him that it felt ridiculous to be surprised. If that makes sense? Like I should’ve been able to see it coming, because of course he would know or do or want this.

I will be very surprised if most readers aren’t fond of him. He’s not likeable in the typical sense, he’s not all that good and he’s really not nice – but he has so much charisma, and he’s so interesting, kind of roguish, that when you put it all together he’s sort of…charming? I don’t know, I’m really struggling here. He’s a masterclass in character-work, is what he is!

I was so hooked. I loved every minute of it. Including the epilogue, although the gap between the last chapter and the epilogue frustrates me ENORMOUSLY. But I can forgive it on the basis of the whole rest of the novel.

And this is all without touching on the things I am not smart enough to talk about, the tangled skein of patriotism and isolation and lost history, and revisionist history, and xenophobia, and secret police as a weapon of the state. I know I didn’t catch everything Mohamed was doing there, and I don’t have the knowledge to explain the things I did catch. It was good. Anti-fascist. We approve.

There’s so much I want to talk about that I could wax rhapsodic on, and can’t, because total spoilers. I can only say – the worldbuilding is so great, you guys. IT’S SO GREAT. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Because the big secret is buried in the worldbuilding, is fundamental to the worldbuilding, and it is so cool and I would like ten more novels set in this world, please and thank you! GIMME!

Related Posts