In The Songbird & the Heart of Stone, Carissa Broadbent marries a thoughtful look at religious and family trauma with epic adventure and romance.
Sweet-natured and therapeutic, Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes is cozy fantasy done right.
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door is a magical twist on dark academia that presents an entrancing vision of an alternate post-World War I England.
We Love the Nightlife is an engrossing, darkly funny, twisted story about a friendship breakup—between two vampires.
A dark supernatural adventure masquerading as a cozy mystery, The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is a genre-blending delight.
A sorcerer’s rival accidentally casts an obedience spell on him in Maiga Doocy’s witty and refreshing Sorcery and Small Magics.
Despite its ominous title, Voyage of the Damned, Frances White’s fantasy-mystery hybrid, is an utter joy.
Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man is a picaresque fantasy adventure following a hilariously unreliable narrator as he stumbles through a series of important political events.
Jeff VanderMeer’s experimental sci-fi Southern Reach trilogy was an immediate crossover success when it was released in 2014, and it’s since been enshrined in the pantheon of modern SFF classics. Much of our current wave of literary, ambitious and unabashedly weird speculative fiction can be traced back to the Southern Reach books and their heady blend of horror, cli-fi (climate fiction) and conspiracy thriller. VanderMeer will return to the series this fall with Absolution, which will tell the story of three separate expeditions into the terrifying yet beautiful Area X.
And lo, a second series in the Sapphic Trifecta comes to a close. If you’re not in the know (read: way too online and/or a Tumblr user), you may not have heard of this most holy of groupings, which consists of C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun and Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, all of which were released to instant acclaim in 2021 and all of which featured epic sapphic relationships at their heart. Parker-Chan’s duology ended last year, and now it’s Suri’s turn to land the ship with The Lotus Empire, the third and final installment in The Burning Kingdoms trilogy.
Buried Deep is a transportive story collection from Naomi Novik, who maps her narrative milieus with extraordinary precision.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea, the highly anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, is a triumphant rallying cry for freedom and joy.
The City in Glass, a beautifully written tale of a bereaved demon and a cursed angel, finds Nghi Vo at the peak of her craft.
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