Fantasy has always been inspired by history, but in recent years what was once an accepted undercurrent has become a full-blown trend—from Susanna Clarke’s magical retelling of the Napoleonic Wars in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to George R.R. Martin’s War of the Roses-inspired A Song of Ice and Fire series. In their new fantasy novels, W.M. Akers and Guy Gavriel Kay offer two compelling and well-crafted takes on the historical record.

A Brightness Long Ago is classic Kay. A beautifully rendered depiction of Renaissance Italy, the fantasy icon’s latest work is filled with compelling characters and a multifaceted tragedy that is as emotionally resonant as it is inevitable. The longstanding feud between Teobaldo Monticola and Folco Cino, mercenary lords of Remigio and Acorsi, dominates their lives and the lives of all close to them, from the brilliant, driven Adria Ripoli to the observant Danio Cerra, a scholar and diplomat who travelled with both Monticola and Cino for a time. Kay once again immerses his readers in a kaleidoscopic world of ambition, politics and romance. By the end, there are no clear antagonists, and the plot is recast as just one episode in the long, slow decline of the Rhodian Empire and the decadent and fragmented Church that sustained it. For devoted fans of Kay’s work, there are myriad connections to other novels, especially Children of Earth and Sky and The Sarantine Mosaic. But A Brightness Long Ago easily stands on its own as a masterful addition to Kay’s historical fantasy oevre.

In contrast to Kay’s elegiac style, Akers’s Westside revels in stripping its characters of their carefully constructed mythologies and revealing their seedy, petty true selves. Few of Akers’ characters are fully redeemable, and those who do possess better natures are relatively feckless. In Akers’ Prohibition-era New York City, street gangs and moonshine smugglers rule over a city slowly being devoured by a mysterious darkness. Gilda Carr is a private detective specializing in “little mysteries” whose search for a missing glove sends her down a rabbit hole of secret documents, all-consuming greed and personal rivalries that threatens the lives and souls of her friends and her home. While Kay’s characters play their parts in a world that turns beneath them, Akers’ protagonists have all the agency in their stories and must decide whether to use that power to repair their city or repair their pasts.

There is a minimalist elegance to the magic in both worlds. And neither book uses its fantastical elements to alter the historical timeline, as Clarke’s titular magicians do with abandon. But fantasy is essential to both stories nevertheless, and both A Brightness Long Ago and Westside are welcome additions to the burgeoning genre of historical fantasy.

Some people love to celebrate the lazy days of summer with relaxing books set on the misty moors of Scotland or far-off beaches in the South Pacific. But for those of us who would prefer a jolt of adrenaline, The Girl in Red and Salvation Day offer enough frantic sci-fi adventure to chase the summer blues away.

Christina Henry is well known for her often dark and always enthralling takes on classic fairy tales. Her latest endeavor, The Girl in Red, follows in this tradition. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where a dangerous plague has driven survivors to quarantine camps and lawlessness, Henry’s new novel is a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood—if Red were a biracial 20-something with a prosthetic foot, anxiety issues and the woodsman’s axe. Refusing to go to a quarantine camp, Red is instead determined to hike the hundreds of miles to the safety of her grandmother’s home. But with the world gone mad, there are darker things lurking in the woods than mere wolves.

The Girl in Red is equal parts psychological horror and post-apocalyptic survivor story, and it manages to harness the best qualities of both. Remarkably slow-paced for such a stressful novel, Henry’s story allows us to see and feel what Red sees and feels, nothing more. The narrowness in scope feels like having blinders on, forcing us to question whether the bumps in the night that terrify Red are monsters or misunderstandings. That same narrowness also grounds the story. By focusing on the pain—both physical and mental—that comes from Red’s long journey, Henry avoids making her remarkable characters feel small and unimportant in the face of the end of the world.

While The Girl in Red is singularly focused on the struggles of one woman, Kali Wallace’s Salvation Day is far grander in scope. The plot centers on what should have been a flawless heist. Zahra and the members of her “family” knew every inch of the plan to commandeer the House of Wisdom, a research vessel abandoned a decade earlier after a deadly plague swept through its hulls. What they could not plan for was what they learned once they got on board—that the virus that wiped out House of Wisdom was far worse and far different from what the government reported. And that they may have woken it up.

Salvation Day isn’t terrifying because of its premise—plenty of virus and zombie films should be scary and are instead just laughable or sad. It is terrifying instead because of Wallace’s sense of timing. She builds the story of the theft of the ship more like a story about war: long periods of tension punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Zahra and her compatriots spend a lot of their time on the ship exploring and learning about its fate rather than dealing with the still-present biological threat. Those lulls of relative calm make the action more intense and startling when it does occur, forcing readers to wonder with bated breath just what lurks beyond that next corner.

While different in scale, The Girl in Red and Salvation Day are similar in one very important way: Once you pick them up, it’s unlikely that you’ll put them down any time soon.

★ Ninth House
In Leigh Bardugo’s instantly gripping new fantasy, Ninth House, Alex Stern can see ghosts. This ability makes her perfectly suited to monitor Yale’s underground societies, which perform occult rituals under cover of darkness. When a ritual goes wrong and Alex senses the ghosts of Yale becoming restless, she must race to find out the sinister reasons why. The world of this book is so consistent and enveloping that pages seem to rush by. Bardugo, a veteran of the fantasy space with her Grishaverse series, never lets the narrative become overtaken by the lore, and she includes plenty of winking callouts to the horrors of modern collegiate experiences. Creepy and thrilling, this one deserves a place on your fall reading list.

Steel Crow Saga
Expansive yet personal, Paul Krueger’s Steel Crow Saga starts with a bang and never slows down. A soldier seeking vengeance, a prince looking for home, a detective with a secret and a thief wanting redemption unite to face an abominable evil. Saga’s magic system centers on animal familiars that can be summoned to fight alongside characters—think Pokémon meets The Golden Compass, with plenty of original and frightening twists along the way. While the influence of colonial Asian history is clear, it adds to the world building rather than taking the reader out of the action. Krueger deftly gives each character their own point of view without losing sight of the novel’s central theme: We’re stronger together than we are alone.

How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse
Sometimes a book just flat-out charms you—How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse by K. Eason is one such book. Rory is a singular woman, anointed with blessings from 13 fairies and destined to rule the interplanetary government. In a clever twist, one of the blessings gives Rory the ability to hear the truth when someone is lying. These lies and truths offer funny contrasts on the page, and lead to some wonderfully surprising moments. When Rory discovers a sinister conspiracy at the same time she is engaged to a prince from another planet, she must rely on all of her blessings to save the day. Eason’s heroine is a whirlwind, a one-woman battering ram whose tenacity is exciting and funny. This is the first in a series, and I anticipate many more pages of Rory confounding expectations (and anyone she meets).

From orcs to elves to dragons, non-human beings in fantasy books often fall into two camps. Some are presented as basically human, if often exoticized. The rest are generally presented as bestial: They may or may not be able to speak, but at their core they’re not too different from beasts of burden. Regardless of the archetype, their thoughts, feelings and cultures (when they have any at all) are described in relation to a human or human-like surrogate. Both Unnatural Magic by C.M. Waggoner and The Deep by Rivers Solomon (with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes) buck this tradition, creating non-human characters that are defined not by their relationship to humans but in the context of their own societies.

In her debut novel Unnatural Magic, C.M. Waggoner spins a coming-of-age tale of love, friendship and murder that is both universal and completely new. Unnatural Magic’s first strand of story is that of Tsira, a half-troll whose heritage has made it difficult to fit in among her home clan. When confronted with first a half-dead solider and then with an attempt on her own life, Tsira is forced from her solitary existence. The book’s second strand is that of Onna, a girl with a prodigious gift for magic and the guts to blaze her own academic path when she’s denied a higher magical education due to her sex. But as she embarks on her new scholarly adventure, Onna quickly becomes pulled into a hunt for a troll murderer—and unknowingly sets out on a crash course towards Tsira. Equal parts romance, bildungsroman and murder mystery, Unnatural Magic can’t decide on a genre archetype, and that’s a good thing. The resulting amalgamation is delightfully unpredictable.

Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, in contrast, is a story of pain and new beginnings. Holding the collective memories of an entire race of people isn’t easy. It is even less easy if your underwater-dwelling people are descended from the children of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by their captors and left to drown. Yetu’s duty is to remember the pain of her ancestors so that the rest of her people can live in the moment, free from the trauma of the past. She is freed from the memories only during an annual ceremony in which Yetu shares the history with her people. Overwhelmed at the prospect of taking back the memories of her ancestors, Yetu flees to the surface in the middle of one of these Tellings. On the surface, she will learn not just of the world her people left behind, but also of her people’s future. Philosophical and atmospheric, The Deep is not just a story of trauma. It is a story that looks carefully at the individual’s place in society and explores what it means to collectively heal and to move forward by accepting, but not forgetting, the past.

Unnatural Magic and The Deep are as different in tone, writing style and subject matter as two fantasy books can be. But what the two share is a deep sense of empathy. As readers, we are not meant to identify with either Yetu or Tsira as though they were human. Instead, both Solomon and Waggoner ask us to imagine beings different from ourselves and then to meet them without trying to force them into human-shaped boxes in our minds. The results are as challenging as they are enjoyable, and any reader willing to try something different will be rewarded handsomely for the effort.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Go Behind the Book with C.M. Waggoner.