Sambuciña Ahurra, aka Buc, has few possessions: several knives, which she keeps hidden about her person; the dexterity of a 16-year-old former street urchin, sneak thief and pickpocket; an insatiable and compulsive appetite for books; and a mind so sharp she must dull it with depressant drugs to communicate with other people. Her partner, Eldritch Nelson Rawlings—he goes by Eld, understandably—rescued her from the streets and taught her to read two years ago, and has been following where she leads ever since. In all that time, Buc has never made a mistake. That is, until a miscalculation leads to their arrest by Imperial officers. Within a day, the pair of them have been blackmailed into sailing across an ocean to investigate disappearing sugar shipments, launching them into a hurricane of secretive sorcerers, mythical pirates, gods both dead and living, wild hogs and something called Archaeology, whatever that means.

For all its trappings of detective work and mystery, Ryan Van Loan’s The Sin in the Steel is more Locke Lamora (on the high seas) than Sherlock Holmes. Its frantic pace and continuous action capture the reader, but behind its frenzy lurks a truly fascinating world. The economy of Servenza, the archipelagic empire Buc and Eld call home, with its reliance on sugar, tea and the psychoactive herb kan recalls the colonial European powers of the 18th century. Magic is rare but hardly secret; it is very literally a gift from the gods, and its nature varies with the divine source. The resulting limitations, and the grisly details of its use, allow it to easily coexist with a fascinating mix of flintlock-era gunpowder and borderline-futuristic transportation.

But while such a backdrop is necessary to support the story, the plot might founder were it not for its ceaseless motion and the way the mysteries pile up faster than they can be answered. As a stand-alone story, The Sin in the Steel asks the reader to fill in a great many gaps, especially since it leaves almost every thread outside Buc and Eld’s search for the missing sugar itself untied. In some ways, it’s a novel that requires its readers to moonlight as writers. The frustration of questions left unanswered is, in truth, a playground for the creative, inquisitive reader. Van Loan asks his audience to channel their inner Sambuciña, and richly rewards those who follow through.

The Sin in the Steel is not for those who want to be presented with a prepackaged world; some assembly is required. But that assembly is part of the joy of books like this. The leftover mysteries are carefully crafted to capture the imagination, and the hectic unravelling of schemes and unearthing of secrets are well worth the effort needed to keep pace.

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?