A review by ergative
Driftwood by Marie Brennan

5.0

 What a beautiful surprise this book was. I knew nothing about it, beyond the fact that I loved Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent series, a lively, fun, fluffy adventure tale about a naturalist who wants to study dragons. But this was not that. It's a beautiful tale: Driftwood is the place where worlds end up after they have finished their apocalypse, dying remnants bumping up against each other, slowly shrinking and decaying and getting pulled into the 'crush' at the center. It's a series of loosely connected stories about the people who come to Driftwood with their worlds, living in the ever-shrinking fragments that can be the homes for generations, while still everyone knows that, eventually, the end will come, that their world has no future, that it has, in fact, already died. Each of the tales is a slice of how different worlds, or different people in those worlds, come to terms with that knowledge, all through the involvement in one way or another of Last, a man who has not died, even though his world disappeared into the crush so long ago that no one knows what the world is. The different stories all contain some sort of grace, some moment of, if not hope against the inevitability of destruction, at least some sense of comfort for now. But the overarching reality--that every world in Driftwood is already dead, and it's only a matter of time before they are gone forever--gives the whole book this aching grief. It's reallly, really good.