Imagine this: You’re born into a powerful magical family, part of a storied lineage of mage-rulers. Everyone around you can control life itself. Giant trees grow when they are told to grow, animals rise to defend you and every living thing in your realm is connected, sensed innately no matter where they are. Then imagine that a childhood illness leaves you different, unable to control this life magic. In fact, it leaves you with something worse: a magic that, when you touch something alive, kills it. What kind of person could overcome such loneliness? A new heroine named Ryxander, who stands at the center of Melissa Caruso’s mysterious and wonderful The Obsidian Tower.

In the kingdom of Morgrain, there is a castle. In that castle is a great black tower. And inside the tower, behind innumerable and impenetrable enchantments is a door that should never be opened. As children, the mages of Morgrain recite a poem thousands of years old, a warning that ends with the line “Nothing must unseal the door.” No one knows what is contained in the tower, and Ryxander is the Warden charged with keeping it safe. When a visiting mage ventures too close to the magic of the tower, Ryx finds herself at the center of an international crisis and the only one who knows what’s beyond the door. To avert disaster, she must use all of her wits and talent to keep Morgrain, and the world, safe from unspeakable ruin.

Even from the very first page, I was hooked for one reason: the initial premise here is simple, full of tension and immediately engaging. Even as the central goal of not opening the door plays out, Caruso builds a vivid universe around it, filling the pages with personality and depth. Like a good mystery, Tower slowly feeds the reader with more and more clues, never fully revealing everything at once. Caruso builds and releases tension deftly on both large and small scales. Even short conversations Ryx has with scheming foreign nobles expand and contract as political and personal issues are explored.

Ryx, of course, serves as the host for these explorations. This book has moments of real pain and longing that have nothing to do with magic or towers. Not being able to have physical contact with anyone has changed her, and the choices she has to make to subvert or embrace this fact are beautiful and terrible. It is, therefore, instantly believable that she is made of stronger stuff, making her eventual confrontations with some very nasty magic all the more satisfying.

At the time of this writing, I’m restricted to my house as a global sickness isolates nearly everyone from each other. I can’t help but think that, on a smaller scale, Ryx’s isolation is something many readers can imagine first hand.

Sarah Beth Durst’s latest novel is a direct spiritual successor to the work of Tamora Pierce, whose novels gave many readers their first experience with fantasy and adventure and planted the seed that—if you were determined enough—you could do anything.

Race the Sands introduces us to the arid land of Becar, a land which is ruled by questions of the soul. Reincarnation is real and religious priests, known as augurs, can see your future incarnation by examining your aura. The lucky and kind are reborn as humans, herons and other noble creatures; the less lucky return as lower animals. But for the truly monstrous, only one fate awaits: eternal life as a deadly monster known as a kehok. Redemption is only possible for kehoks fierce and fast enough to win the Races.

But for Tamra and Raia, winning the Races has nothing to do with spiritual redemption. It is kehok trainer Tamra’s only chance to prevent financial ruin and to prevent the augurs from taking her daughter away. And Raia, a runaway desperate to escape an arranged marriage to a known abuser, has a chance to buy her own freedom should she win the Races as a rider. Even if that means taking a chance on a strange kehok that could just as easily kill its rider as win.

Race the Sands gives us some expected archetypes: the grizzled, injured veteran, the emperor-to-be who is not quite ready for the job, the plucky young heroine who must overcome the odds and win the day. What it also gives us, however, is a story that takes these worn tropes and turns them into something unique. Our grizzled veteran is also a caring mother, and our plucky heroine sometimes shrinks in the face of danger. Durst’s prose gives readers a window into the inner lives of her characters and the difficult decisions they must make, turning what could be worn tropes into lively, well-developed characters.

It would be easy for a story set in a world where many are obsessed with the purity of their souls to veer towards facile interpretations of morality and human behavior. But like all great world builders, Durst thinks through how people would interact with her world carefully and does not create characters who are pure saints or who are irredeemable. While Tamra, Raia and their associates do occasionally worry about the state of their own souls, they are still people. They tell white lies about jam being good when it actually isn’t and worry about their families. Some are downright foul, for even the threat of a monstrous afterlife can’t always change human nature.

For readers who long for one more story of Tortall or the Winding Circle, consider Race the Sands as a new, grown-up alternative. Durst’s latest novel, full of daring races and twisting halls of intrigue, will surprise and delight even as it feels comforting and familiar.

What makes a city feel the way it does? Is it the art and the music? The people and how they view themselves? What about the infinite, minuscule details of the place, whether they are recognized or ignored completely? Three-time Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin shows us her version of the answers, and they add up to something bigger than the sum of its parts. In The City We Became, a magical novel of breadth and precision, Jemisin builds a version of New York City that is more than the borders of its boroughs. This New York is alive.

Cities, we learn, are like any other living organism. They are born, they develop, they get sick, they can die. Like a hive communicating through a shared consciousness, a city is sustained by everyone and everything in it. At a certain stage of life, cities awaken avatars, people who are attuned to this consciousness, able to understand it and, from time to time, channel its power.

Cities also have enemies. When a primordial evil arrives through space and time, hellbent on corrupting and destroying New York, the avatars of all five boroughs awaken to do battle—and fight off what could be the death of the city.

I’ve not read another book like this in years. Jemisin takes a concept that can be abstracted to the simplest of questions (What if cities were alive?) and wraps an adventure around it. That adventure takes center stage in the many scenes that read more like a superhero movie than a fantasy novel, such as when a towering Lovecraftian tentacle bursts from the river to destroy the Williamsburg Bridge. However, Jemisin’s most beautiful passages deliver attentive descriptions of New York’s melting pot of people. Her characters’ life experiences—racial, sexual, financial—bring perspectives that are deeply important to and often missing from contemporary literature, particularly in the fantasy genre.

Jemisin lives in Brooklyn, and it’s clear that New York has impacted her life in innumerable ways. I confess, I don’t know New York well myself, but reading this book left me thinking about my own city, how I’m connected to it and how far I would go to save it. To what parts of the whole have I contributed? If it were alive, what would it say?

The land of Jin-Sayeng has been torn apart by civil war, its longtime rulers, the Ikessar Dragonlords, deposed by the Oren-Yaro clan after they lost their vaunted dragons. The planned marriage between Talyien, the new queen of Jin-Sayeng and daughter of the late Oren-Yaro warlord, and Rayyel, last scion of the Ikessars, has disintegrated. So when Talyien receives a message from her estranged husband, offering her a chance at reconciliation, she leaves her fractured country in secret for a meeting in the neighboring empire of Zirinar-Orxiaro. There she finds herself ensnared in a web of plots and deceits, forced to survive assassination attempts, forbidden magics, slavers and lecherous mob bosses while struggling to discover who is responsible for the chaos and what they have planned for her and the country she wants to save.

K.S. Villoso’s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro is a fascinating read, driven by a well-drawn cast of characters in a beautifully imagined world. None of the main characters is lacking in complexity, and Villoso gives each of them rational motivations. There are no truly evil figures in this novel, only people who are willing to justify varying amounts of immorality and harm to achieve their purposes. Those who come closest to a traditional antagonist’s role are merely those whose goals are selfish or banal, whose regard for other people is low. Although both Jin-Sayeng and Zirinar-Orxiaro are built on a magical bedrock, the realistic characters within them lend The Wolf of Oren-Yaro a bite that even the darkest of grimdark fantasy often lacks.

Villoso palpably renders the moral grime and corruption that pervades almost every scenario Talyien encounters. And she distinguishes Talyien’s few safe havens with a remarkable subtlety. At no point does Villoso’s own voice disappear; rather, she merely wields it differently to imply different atmospheres. The superb world building combined with the well-built dramatic structure of the novel draws the reader on in a way that solely ramping up the tension would not. The Wolf of Oren-Yaro tops it all off with a battery of cliffhangers involving Talyien’s past and the nature of magic itself that bodes well for the rest of the series.

In Marian Womack’s shadowy novel, ingenious women confront turn-of-the-century uncertainties.

In the 1880s, three children disappeared from their estate in the Norfolk Fens. Since then, other children have also disappeared, with some connection to a green light, white fungus, fog, a marsh and the appearance of a man named Samuel Moncrieff. Twenty years later, in the wake of Queen Victoria’s death, detective Helena Walton-Cisneros and her new friend, Eliza Waltraud, search for answers to this mystery.

Strong characters with murky pasts lend urgency to the quest for answers. The book begins in mourning, as Samuel has lost his lover, while England has lost its queen. Despite Samuel’s bleak, directionless mood, the new century promises to be one of light and of new opportunities. Samuel’s storyline is shrouded in mystery, but Helena’s drive for clarity about what happened in the Fens brings a crucial sense of order to the novel. She enlists help from Eliza, who plans to right the wrongs done to an academic writer, Eunice Foote, whose work was credited to her male colleagues. Together, these women’s minds and hearts open to possibilities they never expected. 

Women are the story’s primary actors, finding clever ways—including the occult—to skirt discrimination and advance their cause during a turbulent time. The action swirls in a maelstrom of spiritualism, revived after Victoria’s passing, and the subsequent rational backlash. 

Steeped in a slew of influences, The Golden Key bends genres. It’s part Shirley Jackson’s stories of inner demons, part Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (referenced throughout the book), part Astrid Lindgren’s faith in children’s resilience and part ghost story. A lush, unsettled atmosphere echoes in lugubrious descriptions of the Fens.

Enter a mysterious world in the hands of capable women. Getting drawn into this story is easy; getting out again is trickier.

When Sigourney Rose grows up, she wants to be Queen—not because it is her life’s dream, but because she feels she must take over the islands of Hans Lollik in order to avenge her family’s brutal murders. Born into a society where the indigenous islanders are repressed and suppressed by their colonizers, the Fjerns, Sigourney walks a strange line between the two groups being pitted against each other. She is a kongelig, a member of island royalty, but she is the only one descended from the indigenous islanders. When the childless king, Konge Valdemar, announces that he is seeking a successor to the throne, and Sigourney receives an unexpected invitation to spend the storm season on the royal island of Hans Lollik Helle, she believes it is her fate to participate in the kongelig meetings and convince Konge Valdemar that she is worthy of the throne.

But Sigourney has several strikes against her, the most blatant being the color of her skin and her birth parents. She’s been using an alias, Elskerinde Lunde, her entire adult life to hide the fact that she is the sole survivor of the bloodbath that was her parents’ last night on Hans Lollik—a political murder and hate crime that the other kongelig plotted. She also possesses kraft, psychic powers that the kongelig believe should be only in the hands of the elite themselves, or, in rare cases, sacred slaves they have absolute control over. Any other islander found with kraft is decreed to be killed. The kongelig, including Sigourney due to her role as Elskerinde, take on this duty willingly. Sigourney desires the crown more than anything, but even she isn’t sure who or what she is doing it for—her slaves resent her, the kongelig are disgusted by her and she doesn’t quite belong anywhere or with anyone. When it becomes clear that something is very off about the puppet-like Konge Valdemar, Sigourney must face the truth that everything about her existence has been a lie, and come to terms with what the right and just course of action will be going forward.

Sigourney constantly questions where her loyalties lie, all the while trying to manage her kraft, which allows her to manipulate others’ emotions but often results in transfer of those emotions to her own mind. Callender’s other characters are equally multilayered and full of complexity: A strange newcomer to the Jannik villa during storm season, Løren, possesses both kraft and family secrets that deeply unsettle Sigourney, as well as the other kongelig. The storm season is known to be a period of untimely death, and when the kongelig in line for the throne begin to drop like flies in grisly killings, Sigourney must decide to stay and choose to save the islanders and kongelig from the abnormally evil power that has risen this season, or flee Hans Lollik with her life before it’s too late.

In Queen of the Conquered, Callender deftly handles the subjects of rank and racism, cruelty and privilege, while also providing an exciting whodunit in the fashion of Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None or the more recent Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Readers will experience the same surprising waves of emotions that Sigourney is forced to endure from her foes, victims and potential allies as she navigates the islands that now seem so wrong to her, whose seeming paradise is actually a thinly veiled hell. Callender weaves an unforgettable fantasy plot that reads as fluidly as historical fiction, replete with a vivid, unique setting reminiscent of the Caribbean. Despite the genocide, racism and misogyny that Sigourney has witnessed and ultimately participated in, she faces the conquerors of her people with fortitude and pride in the face of indubitable hatred, and more determination than ever to make them pay for what they did.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Kacen Callender about Queen of the Conquered.