Nick Harkaway has a strange way of making us feel at home as readers even when we are in a decidedly strange place, of immersing us in something new and somehow making it feel familiar at the same time. With Tigerman, he again spellbinds with witty prose and inviting characters while taking us into a world that needs an unexpected hero.

After a hard tour of duty in Afghanistan, Sergeant Lester Ferris is sent off on a supposedly leisurely assignment in a fictional British territory called Mancreu. He’s meant to simply keep an eye on things, despite the island’s growing criminal reputation. In the quirky, chaotic and often unexpected grind of daily life there, he meets a young boy obsessed with comic books and quickly grows fond of him. They forge a somewhat unlikely friendship as the boy influences Lester’s worldview. Then, an outbreak of violence shakes Mancreu, and when faced with a new path, Lester must contemplate being a hero again, not just for the island, but for the boy he’s come to love.

British writer Harkaway (The Gone-Away World) is known for sweeping us off to alien worlds that are somehow strikingly and humanly familiar. With Tigerman, he pulls that off again. Mancreu is a fascinating place, smeared over with a particular kind of fantasy, one where the reinvention of self seems to hang in the air. The characters who populate it are equally compelling.

If you look closely, though, you’ll see that Harkaway’s gift lies not just in his knack for imagining environments teeming with a kind of transportive magic, but in the prose itself. Lester’s dreams of a new life, and the boy’s musings about and fixations on the heroes he worships, are just as filled with depth and charisma as the novel’s completely inventive plot.

Harkaway shows his brilliance on a micro and macro level, and the result is a funny, touching and meditative page-turner that will leave you thinking about what it really means to be a hero for days after you’ve finished it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Nick Harkaway for Tigerman.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the summer of 1976, 19-year-old David Barwise takes a job at a holiday resort in the seaside town of Skegness, England, hoping to avoid spending the summer with his mother and stepfather. But there is something more sinister underlying David’s reasoning: The beach resort is where his biological father died 15 years earlier, and David feels strangely drawn to the area, despite the tension it causes within his family.

The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit is a startlingly clear tale of a blistering English holiday season, the hottest in English history. The seasonal staff, made up of eccentrics and show people, accepts David into the fold—even hulking, ill-tempered resort employee Colin, with whom David develops an interesting relationship. His days are filled with organizing treasure hunts, setting up talent shows and judging sandcastle contests, and his nights are spent restlessly attempting sleep as he grapples with the odd feelings that being at Skegness brings. As David attempts to navigate the social structure of the resort staff, he becomes entangled in political movements and love triangles, both forbidden and dangerous. Meanwhile, swarms of ladybugs plague the town, and his attempts at building a life in Skegness are haunted by sinister and troubling visions of a man in a blue suit who wanders the beach, grasping a rope and an unidentifiable young child.

Graham Joyce’s fiction has earned him the O. Henry Award, the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award, and praise from horror and fantasy-genre greats like Peter Straub and Stephen King. In The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit, Joyce weaves a bizarre, colorful story, full of nostalgia, indecision, emotion and tension, and this genre-spanning novel is sure to be a favorite of fantasy, suspense and thriller fans.

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One can forgive publishing execs if all they saw was franchise potential in The Bone Season (the first in a projected seven-book series). After all, recent Oxford graduate Samantha Shannon’s debut features a young, resourceful female protagonist—19-year-old Paige Mahoney—who lives in a dystopian future rife with supernatural elements. And for much of the book, Paige is enslaved to an imposing non-human male, yielding a relationship that is both conflict-laden and conflicted. Evaluated just for its echoes of other successful book and movie franchises, The Bone Season looks like a melting pot of moneymaking ingredients.

But it wouldn’t be fair to judge The Bone Season just because it’s pitch-friendly. Shannon’s novel is an impressive feat of world-building, which rests on her inventive supernatural beings. These creatures’ complexity is more reminiscent of Sheri S. Tepper’s classic True Game series than of any contemporary teen-focused fantasy.

The Bone Season is set in a dystopian future that itself is the result of an alternate history that diverged dramatically from our own with an explosion of clairvoyant abilities in the Victorian era. The subsequent reaction against those exhibiting such “unnatural” traits has resulted in London (and several other cities) being controlled by a security force called Scion. As a result, life in 2059 London is a pretty dark place for most clairvoyants, though Paige Mahoney counts herself as an exception. A dreamwalker who works for one of the bosses of Scion London’s criminal underworld, Paige rejoices in her relative freedom and flouting of the authorities, who deem her tainted by her ability. Then she gets caught.

The rest of the book deals with Paige’s efforts to escape her captors, the powerful Rephaim. To do so, she must learn more about them, in particular her keeper, Warden. For readers, the challenge lies in ingesting a complex, multi-sourced flow of information—navigating the details of taxonomy, setting and plot with enough attention left over to bond with the characters and simply enjoy the story.

The most exciting thing about Shannon’s ambitious debut lies not in how closely it aligns with the works—and thus earning potential—of Collins, Meyer, Clare, et al., but in the near certainty that the author’s command over her world will only improve. And with that mastery, the series has the potential to become one that inspires others. The Bone Season is a delicious appetizer. Now we wait for the main course.

The bouncy title of this epic first novel sets up expectations of a certain type of book—maybe one with a pink stiletto or a sparkly diamond ring on the cover. Think again. The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic is a medieval fairy tale with a deliciously dark twist: The heroine is a modern-day woman trapped in an alternate, magical world.

Nora Fischer’s dissertation is going nowhere fast—and her love life is in even worse shape—when she stumbles onto a portal to Semr, an archaic kingdom where magic is in the air and ideas about women’s roles are very different. Nora is enchanted (literally) by a woman named Ilissa, who quickly marries Nora off to her son to produce an heir. But her new family is not what it seems, and Nora flees to the protection of Aruendiel, a reclusive magician whose rough exterior hides a mysterious and painful past. Soon Nora has become Aruendiel’s apprentice, learning basic spells that come in handy when she and Ilissa meet again. Eventually, Nora will have to decide whether to make her way back home, or stay in a world she’s amazed to realize she has come to love.

Emily Croy Barker is the executive editor of The American Lawyer magazine, where she oversees coverage of things like antitrust mass actions in Europe and the population of minority lawyers at big law firms. One can only imagine the fun she had writing this soapy, snappy tale. I’d be a sucker for any book in which Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice played a prominent role (Nora translates that classic novel chapter by chapter for Aruendiel), but The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic stands on its own merits as a thoroughly enchanting read. While Nora and Aruendiel may be more Heathcliff and Catherine than Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Barker has spun a clever, lush yarn that is uniquely its own.

It’s easy to underestimate the challenges of crafting contemporary fantasy, especially when one compares the task with that of writing its older cousin, the traditional swords-and-sorcery fantasy. But just because the author of a contemporary fantasy can skip some expository steps in character development and setting if the protagonist is an ex-Navy SEAL named Josh living in Boston instead of, say, a 12th-degree death-o-mancer named Magyar Trothan who lives in the land of Whimsicalia, that doesn’t mean taking the less fantastical road is easy. After all, anything that happens in the mostly real, present-day world is subject to the immediate scrutiny of countless experts—plenty of readers will be familiar with Boston or have a family member in the military, whereas no one other than the author will possess any firsthand knowledge on death-o-mancer training. (Granted, the Whimsicalian Wiki will be up a few days after the book is published.)

Nonetheless, most crafters of fantasy, traditional or contemporary, have one big hurdle in common: devising a system of “magic” that’s fresh, compelling and coherent.

With his latest book, Australian author Max Barry (Jennifer Government, Company) easily clears this often fatal hurdle with a premise (and system) guaranteed to appeal to readers: Words have power, and some words have a lot of power. In Lexicon, a global organization whose members refer to themselves as “the poets” employs psycho-linguistic tactics to control, well, pretty much anything or anyone. But like any other multinational concern, even super-secret groups have staffing needs. In the orphaned Emily Ruff, they find someone who may or may not be a powerful addition to their organization. Barry alternates the chapters covering her recruitment and training with tense action sequences involving a man named Wil and his mysterious captors (or protectors?). These are maddeningly opaque at first, though the blistering pace—more reminiscent of a Ludlum spy thriller than anything else—makes the difficulty in gaining one’s bearings tolerable.

By book’s end, Lexicon has revealed itself as a contemporary fantasy that’s three parts thriller and one part romance (somewhat diluted). In the process, Barry’s tale provides its reader with an intriguing, satisfying ride through a world where the phrase “has a way with words” refers to the author’s own world-building as much as to the characters who inhabit it.