YA icon Cassandra Clare’s first series for adults picks up right where the first book, Sword Catcher, left off. After a massacre at the palace, Kel Saren, body double to the city-state of Castellane’s crown prince, is trying to hunt down those responsible. Meanwhile, physician Lin Caster is pretending to be the Goddess Reborn, her Ashkari people’s prophesied savior.
If you’ve read T. Kingfisher’s Thornhedge, a novella with a particularly inspired take on Sleeping Beauty, you know she does a great fairy-tale retelling. The acclaimed fantasy and horror author’s Hemlock & Silver will be a dark reimagining of Snow White, starring a late Renaissance healer tasked with figuring out which poison is slowly killing the king’s daughter.
Robert Jackson Bennett’s superb new mystery series is best described as Sherlock Holmes in a high-fantasy version of Pacific Rim, but even that comparison doesn’t quite capture the inventive, character-driven cleverness of The Tainted Cup. In the follow-up, eccentric, brilliant sleuth Ana Dolabra and her long-suffering assistant are faced with an even more puzzling case than their first: A treasury officer has disappeared from a heavily guarded government building, even though all the windows and doors were locked.
Before she became one of BookTok’s most beloved authors with The Priory of the Orange Tree and A Day of Fallen Night, Samantha Shannon was the wunderkind author of The Bone Season series, a futuristic fantasy set in a Europe where magic is illegal. It’s been four years since Shannon’s last Bone Season novel, and fan fervor for this fifth installment is at an all-time high.
V.E. Schwab has penned many, many bestselling novels, but The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was a blockbuster hit by even her high standards. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil seems to be a return to the dreamy, accessible historical fantasy of Addie LaRue, this time focusing on three women in different eras who are magically linked.
It’s become something of a universal bit to declare “we live in a computer simulation” when faced with the latest nonsense of our age, but trust Daryl Gregory (Revelator, Spoonbenders) to take that idea and spin it into something more profound than pithy. Best friends JP and Dulin are heading out on a road trip—to see all the weird anomalies that popped up in our world after a mysterious announcement that our reality is merely a digital construction.
After a quick little detour telling the publishing industry about itself (2023’s ferocious satire, Yellowface), R.F. Kuang is back to fantasy and working in the mode that she, as an accomplished scholar, absolutely dominates: dark academia. And this time, it’s a dark academia love story. Between two scholars who have to go to hell to save their adviser’s soul. We do not deserve her.
The adored author of YA classics The Raven Cycle, The Scorpio Races and the Shiver Trilogy will finally make her adult debut with The Listeners, which seems of a piece with the dreamy, fabulist fantasy of The Raven Cycle. The Listeners will follow a midcentury hotel owner who is the only person who can “manage” the possibly/probably magical hot springs that have made the West Virginia hotel a luxury destination. However, it’s also 1942, and when the hotel owners make a deal with the State Department to house captured Axis diplomats, the beautiful environs are soon crawling with Nazis.
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