Book Review: The Improbable We Can Do Today by Jon Dixon

The Improbable We Can Do Today by Jon Dixon is a warm, clever, and suprisingly radical debut: a collection of six cosy fantasy mystery stories that takes its genre seriously without ever losing sight of what makes it pleasurable. Set in the ancient, rain-drenched city of Draffe, where temple bells mark the hours and secrets hide behind every lacquered door, the book introduces Meriva Secaret: a disabled ex-thief now working as a freelance researcher, information-miner, and investigator. Together with her partner Custos, a retired mercenary, she makes her living finding what was lost, righting small injustices, and outwitting the powerful on behalf of the powerless.

What immediately distinguishes this collection from the crowded cosy-fantasy shelf is its complete absence of condescension toward its protagonist, its readers, or its genre. Dixon clearly loves the form and takes it seriously. The result is a book that is both deeply pleasurable to read and in its own modest way important.

The six stories are organized around cases proportioned to a human scale, what Dixon calls “small problems with big consequences.” The opening novella, The Morian Express, sets the tone with considerable confidence: a locked-coach mystery featuring a sharply observed cast of passengers, a stolen scientific case, and a solution that turns entirely on the ability to see people as they truly are. Spicecakes and Sabotage follows, a local case involving a beloved bakery and a ruthless competitor that delivers the book’s central themes of restorative community justice with both warmth and precision. The Magewrought Lock and Scissors and Secrets offer variety of tone and emotional register: the former a locked-room puzzle with a magical dimension, the latter the most intimate and psychologically delicate of the six. Disappearing Ink plays beautifully to Meriva’s love of books and recovered history, while the closing novella, Writing Wrongs, takes its characters into the most emotionally demanding territory of the collection, closing with a journal-entry epilogue of genuine and earned tenderness.

Draffe itself earns a place alongside the great invented cities of genre fiction, not through sprawling exposition, but through sensory accumulation. It is conjured in frost-sharp coach yards before dawn, in bakeries warm with cinnamon and honey, in candlelit rooms full of books and fog-shrouded streets. It is unmistakably a city built for people to live in, full of regulars, grudges, neighbourhood gossip, and the kind of community fabric that larger epic fantasies tend to overlook.

Meriva is one of the best new characters in independent fantasy this year. An ex-thief living with a significant limb difference who now runs a small investigative agency, she navigates a world that routinely underestimates her with a combination of fierce intelligence, dry wit, and radical self-possession. Crucially, Dixon never reduces her to her disability. Her mobility is part of how she moves through the world, sometimes a practical consideration, sometimes a site of emotional complexity, always a lived reality, but it does not define her motivations, diminish her agency, or serve as a source of inspiration for other characters to feel good about themselves. This sounds simple; in practice, in published fiction, it is vanishingly rare. The sensitivity readers credited in the acknowledgements clearly had a significant and positive role to play, and the result is a character who feels genuinely authentic rather than carefully managed.

At the heart of the collection is the relationship between Meriva and Custos, which is one of the most satisfying partnerships in recent genre fiction. Their dynamic, affectionate, teasing, deeply trusting, built on years of genuine mutual knowledge, is never saccharine and never played for comedy at the expense of sincerity. Dixon writes their exchanges with evident delight. A scene in which Custos prepares Meriva’s bittersyrup on a freezing pre-dawn morning, sweetened with honey and cream with a drinking straw already placed in the mug, establishes the nature of their love more economically than pages of exposition could. This is what long and tender partnership looks like.

Three related themes run through all six stories without ever becoming didactic. The first is agency: the idea that autonomy is exercised on one’s own terms and never granted by others. In every story, Meriva is doing something the world assumes she cannot or should not do, and the drama lies not in whether she succeeds but in her insistence on how. The second is the vulnerability of mutual care, what it means to love someone, to be needed, to be occasionally a burden, and to find in that reciprocal anxiety not weakness but richness. The third is justice as repair rather than punishment: institutional power in Draffe tends to be distant, disinterested, or even corrupt, and what restores the community’s fabric are small, personal, communal acts of conscience, usually engineered by Meriva.

Dixon’s prose is supple, assured, and a great deal of fun. He has an exceptionally good ear for dialogue and an unusually precise sense of how to render observation. The descriptive writing, particularly of Draffe in different weathers and moods, has real texture and atmosphere without ever slowing into the kind of purple passage that can stall cosy fantasy. The mysteries are fair, with clues present for the attentive reader, while remaining genuinely surprising in their resolution. And there is real wit throughout: not nervous pun-based humour, but the richer comedy of character and situation.

Not every element lands with equal force. The middle stories, particularly The Magewrought Lock and Scissors and Secrets, occasionally struggle to match the confidence and momentum of the collection’s bookends. The Magewrought Lock introduces magical mechanics that feel underdeveloped relative to the sophistication of the surrounding world-building, and Scissors and Secrets, for all its emotional ambition, resolves its central conflict somewhat more quickly than the weight of its setup seems to warrant. Readers who come to the book through The Morian Express may find the shorter, quieter middle entries a slight adjustment in expectation. These are the growing pains of a first collection rather than fundamental weaknesses, and they do nothing to diminish the overall achievement, but they are worth noting for readers who prefer a more even pace throughout.

A fair review should also note that the collection is precisely what it sets out to be and does not attempt to be anything else. Readers seeking high-stakes plotting, large-scale world conflict, or magic systems that demand careful attention will need to look elsewhere. The stakes here are deliberately personal rather than world-ending, and the magic is woven into the fabric of everyday life rather than placed at its dramatic centre. These are features of the form rather than limitations of this particular book, but they are worth naming for readers whose tastes run to more epic registers.

Rating: ★★★★½

Verdict: The Improbable We Can Do Today is a sincere, beautifully constructed, and genuinely joyful debut for anyone drawn to character-driven mysteries, immersive secondary worlds, or fiction that takes the daily experience of disability seriously without making it the point of the exercise. Its greatest strength is Meriva herself, clever, capable, complex, and occasionally just a little too self-satisfied, and the world Dixon has built around her feels rich enough for many more stories. A second volume, The Impossible May Take Slightly Longer, is forthcoming, and this reviewer will be among the first in line. Highly recommended.