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The Apple-Tree Throne by [Premee Mohamed]

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Premee Mohamed

The Apple-Tree Throne Kindle Edition

by Premee Mohamed (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

128 ratings

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It is the turn of the century in an England that never was. Bright new aqua-plants are generating electricity for the streetlights; news can be easily had on the radio-viz; and in Gundisalvus' Land, the war is over and the soldiers are beginning to trickle home. Amongst these is Lt. Benjamin Braddock, survivor of the massacre that ended the war, and begrudgingly ready to return to a world that, well, doesn't seem to need him any more than it did in peacetime. His friends have homes and families to return to, while he's got nothing but his discharge papers and a couple of unwanted medals. Oh, and one new thing: the furious ghost of his commanding officer.

Fortunately, since the officer's family is so vehemently adamant that Braddock join their rich and carefree fold, he doesn't have much time to fret about being haunted. But the secrets of the war are about to catch up to them all.

"A steaming heap of self-indulgent drivel" - the author

Print length

72 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

August 14, 2018
File size

247 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Premee Mohamed is a spec-fic writer working out of Canada. Many of her stories rely on her years of work making franken-canola, climbing fences whilst balancing incredibly expensive equipment on her back, traumatizing fruit flies, running away from bears, stepping into sulphuric acid, squelching into mine tailings, blowing up her distillation apparatus, and being attacked by birds. Her short fiction has been published in a wide variety of venues.

--This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07GCFY44D
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 14, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 247 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 72 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #737,657 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,089 in Two-Hour Science Fiction & Fantasy Short Reads
- #6,558 in Two-Hour Literature & Fiction Short Reads
- #51,500 in Fantasy (Kindle Store)

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128 ratings

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Premee Mohamed

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Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She is an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod and the author of the 'Beneath the Rising' series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

128 global ratings

5 star		77%
4 star		17%
3 star		5%
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V

Gorgeous, witty, elegant, and moving

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 10, 2019

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In an alternate (roughly Edwardian era?) England, a young solder returns from war wounded and haunted. Literally haunted, by the ghost of his military commander. Lieutenant Benjamin Braddock is one of the few survivors of his regiment, who were nearly all massacred due to a fatal error by his commander, Theodore Wickersley. Wickersley’s memory is now disgraced, while Braddock grieves and recuperates. Without family in the world, Braddock gives in when Wickersley’s family takes him in as a kind of substitute son. But their real son, although dead, is not pleased, and nightly comes to Braddock’s window. . .

This a strange, rich, gorgeously written story. It’s not quite a horror story and it’s not quite steam-punk, despite intriguing glimpses of an alternate steampunk technology. It’s a quiet story that slips between genres. It is, most of all, a story of grief and trauma, of trying to live in a world which no longer fits. The haunted Braddock is an immediately winning character, a narrator with a wonderfully wry, intelligent, and compelling voice. Here is an example of his wry thoughts upon meeting Wickersley’s former fiancé:

“I am impressed by her hair, and spend an injudicious amount of time staring at it, for ‘chestnut tresses’ are referenced often and carelessly in pulp novels, but I have handled my fair share of conkers and the precise colours of sepia and vermillion that must be mixed to produce a true chestnut hair outside of a literary setting is surpassingly rare.”

And here’s an example of Braddock’s pain, heartbreakingly rendered in the same elegant diction. A friend has just asked the soldier how his wounded leg is.

“I want to tell him how when it is rainy or foreboding I wake in the middle of the night muffling screams into my pillows, how the pain comes in low like a wave and then washes over me, as if my entire body is lifted by it. . . I want to tell him I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, and that the X-pictures show a leg as perfectly repaired and sturdy as this legendary roast that Victoria will cook for us. . . I want to tell him there is no rhyme or reason for this pain, and yet it is always with me, sometimes asleep, sometimes awake, like a large dangerous animal I have been forced to host in my rooms.

Instead, I say, “Oh, still settling. Some days are better than others.”

There’s so much in the passage above--Ben Braddock’s quiet suffering, his stoicism, his desire not to impose upon other people. He’s an incredibly easy character to love—witty, smart, self-effacing and thoroughly decent. But he also has friends that I fell in love with because they loved him, too. The Apple-Tree Throne is suffused with generosity and compassion; there are portrays of arrogance, entitlement, and foolishness, but even those characters are treated by the author with compassion. Every character is seen as human. Amidst pain, there is the glow of love and support. And the ending contains a twist which is deeply moving and beautiful, and which rings utterly true. This is a wonderfully immersive read, elegant and witty as well as moving.

16 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

A slow burn for an aching ghost story

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 2, 2019

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I almost don't know how to begin writing about this book, because it is so very different from many modern stories.

Indeed, in some ways, it's a story out of time, that owes a debt to the cautious mannered intrigue of Wilde or MR James, even of Austen, and the classic ghost stories of old.

In an Unreal Britain, Benjamin Braddock is a survivor of war. His commanding officer died in battle, perhaps at the hand of the enemy, perhaps at the hand of his men. Braddock returns home to a country that doesn't need a soldier any more, and has little room to accommodate the trauma that he suffered on its behalf.

And yet... the family of the commanding officer who got so many soldiers killed extend a hand of friendship to him. They offer him company. They offer him his officer's old home. Perhaps even there is the promise of romance with a woman who might once have chased his commander's hand.

There's one problem, however: The ghost of the commander might not be done with everything yet.

Very slowly, very carefully, very deliberately, the author creates a sense of creeping dread - and we do not know whether we fear for the presence of the ghost pawing at the window in the dark or for the fragile and broken man that Braddock has become. It's a story that aches, in the spaces between heartbeats.

By the end, I felt I was still trying to get to grips with the story, trying to fit pieces in their place - and lingering on it in my mind more than I expected in the early examination of a quasi-Victorian steampunk world had promised. It's a very personal tale of a man and his journey through grief and despair, an exquisitely crafted clockwork timepiece for our age of digital phones.

I heartily recommend it - but don't expect to rush, savour the slow build.

5 people found this helpful

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Book Squirrel

Beautifully written.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 30, 2019

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When an image on the first page is so beautifully written that it forces the reader to stop and ponder it, one knows they are in for a literary treat. The Apple Tree Throne is one such story: wonderfully evocative and beautifully written, making use of rich images that linger in the mind and invite one’s thoughts back in quiet moments. The Gothic elements of the story - storms, dreams and apparitions - add another layer of complexity and imagery that provides darker contrast to the often whimsical and sentimental tone of the writing.

This is an often wistful story that immerses the reader into the experiences of Lieutenant Benjamin Braddock, a returned soldier who has a new life thrust upon him while still trying to deal with the remnants of the old one. Therein lies his challenge: he must reconcile himself with the ghosts of the past in order to move ahead.

The fruit of war wounds and indelible memories, Braddock’s emotional and mental state is portrayed with gentleness and empathy, so that the reader gains as much understanding of his complex character and his desire for integrity as they do of his struggle to accept things as they are.

The setting is very English, in an era that, while it feels like the end of the 19th century because electricity is relatively new and wars are still being fought with muskets and swords, is entirely fictional: the monarchy has long been done away with and England has become a republic, although social classes and wealthy people with large estates still exist.

This is a most enjoyable book. Light and dark are very well balanced, and the overall tone is positive. It would suit readers of Clasic literature and poetry, and any who enjoy a thought-provoking story that is both well-crafted and entertaining.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

El H

4 stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 6, 2020

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I picked this up from a twitter rec because I needed a book with a food in the title for my #armedwithabingo card. I ended up reading it in a single sitting, and loving it.

The Apple-Tree Throne felt to me like a very gothic-historical-fantasy kind of novella. Lt. Benjamin Braddock survived the war, and more than that the massacre that ended the war. His friends went home to their families, their loved ones, but he has nothing. Nobody. He's got discharge papers and nowhere to go. And he's got the ghost of his commanding officer too, though he doesn't much want him. When the officer's family drag Benjamin into his life, his family, his house and even entangle him with his fiancee, how is Ben supposed to find his own place?

The Apple-Tree Throne is a quick read and really enjoyable. The world was a little different from ours, but parts of it were much the same. It felt like a parallel, and it was interesting to discover where it parted. And, considering that there was a lot of loss and grief in the story, and a huge focus on how hard it can be to find where you fit when you don't feel like you belong anywhere, the story was damn funny. I highlighted a dozen quotes when I was reading it because it gave me genuine moments of laughing out loud amongst the thoughtful moments.

This is definitely worth a pick up.

tamaranth

Melancholy, subtle, warm

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 18, 2019

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Lieutenant Benjamin Braddock has come home to the Greater Republic of Britannia, home from the war with a bad case of survivors' guilt and a leg that doesn't work properly. He is a haunted man: figuratively, by dreams and memories of the war and the camaraderie of soldiers; and literally, by the ghost of his dishonoured commander, Major-General Theodore Wickersley. Wickersley's family seem to want Ben to take the place of their dead son: Clark and his wife Victoria (Vic), Ben's only friends, worry about Ben's state of mind.

Ben does not tell anybody about the ghost.

There is enough alternate-history backstory here for a whole series of novels. Though Ben's world is reminiscent of Britain in the Edwardian era, there are technologies that didn't exist in our world: 'radio-viz', which broadcast (in crystal-clear black and white) the execution of Wickersley by Captain Eleutherios; aqua-ponds, which provide energy; ornithopters, which might have made a difference to the war except that the enemy used glass-stringed kites to bring them down. The British monarchy has been abolished, and the nations are referenced by unfamiliar names -- Neo-Gall, Prushya, Gundisalvus’ Land. The class structure, however, is (for the most part) blithely intact. Wickersley's family are aristocrats, basking in their privilege and assuming that Ben is theirs to control: Ben, who grew up more or less on the streets, is not prepared to play their games.

And Ben has no Latin, so can't decipher the inscription in Wickersley's pocket-watch: Cotidie damnatur qui semper timet. The reader, though, knows or can Google it: The man who is constantly in fear is every day condemned. An interesting epigram for a man rumoured to have died a coward's death: an interesting insight into Wickersley, that might comfort Ben if he understood it.

The Apple-Tree Throne is a poetic, melancholy tale. Ben's first-person, present-tense narrative conceals as much as it reveals, but never with the sense that something is deliberately omitted to maintain the story. I can't discuss the ending without spoiling it -- and this is definitely a story that needs to be read 'cold' -- but my reaction was "Oh! Yes, of course." Which is to say: there's a twist, but it is so carefully foreshadowed that it is wholly satisfying.

Interestingly, this world also has an alternative rhyme for counting magpies (or crows, I suppose): "One for trouble, two for tears... Three for courage, four for fears. Five for a journey, six for a home, seven for a ha’nt doomed ever to roam." [loc. 462] I wonder if this is reflected in the structure of The Apple-Tree Throne...

Amazon Customer

Short and cosy, but deep

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 24, 2018

Verified Purchase

Ben Braddock comes back from a senseless war, wounded and nearly killed along with nearly 1000 other men in a massacre caused by the arrogant error of his commanding officer now dead. Now dead, and literally haunting him as he tries to acclimatise to civilian life. The family of the dead officer have drawn him into their cloying, superficial corner of high society too, which is endlessly uncomfortable.

This is a vivid and warm novella, with dark moments handled deftly and gently. Well worth reading.

CLEMOWBOOKS

Sad

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

The man who survived the war tries to make peace with the family of the officer who killed his regiment. A family that is trying to believe that their son was the golden boy they thought and not the pretty idiot he proved himself to be.

Frank Rudiger Lopes

Masterpiece

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on November 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

A truly majestic and beautiful, if short and “simple” story. One of war, of loss and betrayal, of survival and trauma. It is a painful story to the very soul, in the most cleansing and moving way possible. It is beautiful, in prose, in story, in theme, a must read

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