When Joe Tournier steps off a train from Glasgow in 1898 Londres, he can remember his name but very little else, and he barely recognizes his surroundings. He learns that the former British capital has been a colony of the French Republic ever since France won the Napoleonic Wars 90 years ago. So begins Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms, a deliciously transgressive work of steampunk speculative fiction.

Joe is diagnosed with “silent epilepsy,” the official name given to the visions and amnesia that sometimes afflict people in this world. Otherwise in good health, Joe is returned to the French family to whom he is enslaved and to his wife, Alice, none of whom he recalls. After several years and the birth of his daughter, Joe receives a postcard of a lighthouse in the Scottish islands with a message signed by “M.” Most mysteriously, the note arrives almost a century after it was written.

Joe is determined to get answers about his identity as well as that of the card’s sender. He returns to Glasgow, now the site of a simmering British rebellion, and then travels farther north where he discovers a portal that acts as a pass-through from one era to another. Finally, at the lighthouse, he meets Missouri Kite, a Royal Navy officer from 1807, and is drawn into a complicated plan to use technology such as telegraphs and steam engines to aid in the British fight against the French.

Along with a cast of characters that includes the real-life Admiral Lord Nelson, Joe and Kite race from Scotland to Spain, trying to sway the forces that led to France’s victory. The butterfly theory, which posits that complex changes often originate from minuscule actions, plays out as Joe ricochets from century to century, trying to help his friends and ensure his own future existence and that of his family.

Pulley balances the topsy-turvy nature of time travel by grounding her story in tidbits of naval history and a gradually unfolding queer love story.

Readers of Helen Oyeyemi’s latest mind-teaser will know they’re in for an unusual experience when the novel’s narrator, a 38-year-old hypnotist, begins the story by describing a set of Czech days-of-the-week underwear, a gift from a former boyfriend. And that’s before the narrator boards a train for a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” with his current love and their pet mongoose. Such is the uncommonly inventive setup of Peaces.

Otto Shin is one half of “a starry-eyed young couple” and has happily adopted the surname of his partner, Xavier. As the novel begins, they and their mongoose have boarded a sleeper train called The Lucky Day at their local station “in deepest Kent.” The ride was a gift from Xavier’s aunt. But, in one of the novel’s many engagingly bizarre flourishes, Otto and Xavier don’t quite know where they’re going. Even more curious: When Xavier calls his aunt from the train to check in on her, she says she’s in the company of someone named Yuri. Yuri claims to be a friend of Xavier’s, but Xavier doesn’t know who he is.

That’s just the start of the book’s many complications. Soon Otto and Xavier meet the train’s owner, Ava Kapoor, a theremin player who lives full time on The Lucky Day and has her own pet mongoose. Ava is days away from collecting an inheritance, but a series of events threatens her bounty. Among the characters that deepen the plot are a composer named Karel, who wrote a piece Ava used to play; Karel’s mysterious son, Přem; and a doctor assigned to assess Ava’s state of mind.

The story’s second half is convoluted, and Oyeyemi tends to overwrite, as when she describes a photo of a “fainting couch upholstered in brocade the color of Darjeeling tea in the fourth minute of brewing.” But fans of the British writer’s previous work, such as the PEN award-winning What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, will enjoy this novel’s surreal twists and imaginative scenarios. Peaces is like the work of a hypnotist: Those open to its allure will inevitably fall under its thrall.

When a story is set in an invented universe, the line its author must walk is a bit more treacherous than when a tale is set in a recognizable “real” world. In The Ladies of the Secret Circus, Constance Sayers proves she can walk that line with grace and power.

Sayers’ second novel (after 2020’s A Witch in Time) unfolds through two narratives, eight decades apart. In the 1920s, a woman named Cecile is part of a wondrous family circus with a magical secret. A love affair might set her free but could also cost her everything. In the 2000s, Lara, a descendant of that same family, prepares for her wedding day and is shaken to her core when her fiancé goes missing. As she searches for answers, Lara is drawn into a web of secrets and magic that leads her to Cecile’s journals and beyond, as she uncovers a dark curse stretching back generations.

The novel’s massive network of connections—tactile and ethereal, physical and mystical—makes for a luxurious reading experience, like a rich tapestry. The Ladies of the Secret Circus is a book to get lost in, not just because of the fantasy elements that layer it with intrigue but also because of the emotional connections that tie it all together. Through beautifully orchestrated prose and careful, confident pacing, Sayers constructs a story that feels like sitting down with an older relative and slowly, over hours, getting all the family secrets in one juicy, enchanted package.

Perfect for fans of Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches series or Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, The Ladies of the Secret Circus is just as much about the secrets we keep in the name of family as it is about the spells we cast in the name of love.

In Creatures of Passage, 10-year-old Dash Kinwell is stuck, unsure how to proceed after witnessing the school’s merry janitor, Mercy, commit an act of molestation.

The novel’s setting of 1977 Anacostia, in the southeast quadrant of Washington, D.C., is magical and liquid, and so is author Morowa Yejidé’s storytelling style. Sequences flow between past, present and future, between concrete and fantastical, in a stream of vignettes. States are “kingdoms,” the Suitland Parkway is “the imaginable forest,” cars drive themselves and giant vegetables grow at night. Subtle clues hint at how the plot fuses together, emerging amid enjoyable sketches of characters such as Find Out, a man who can locate anything in his junkyard (and beyond). 

The adults around Dash wander “with burdens that [keep] them frozen even as they [move] from one place to the next.” His great-aunt Nephthys ferries passengers around in her 1967 Plymouth, a ghost thumping around in the trunk. Osiris, Nephthys’ deceased twin brother, journeys through death only to arrive back at the banks of the river where his body was recovered, and where he now visits with Dash. Dash’s reclusive mom, Amber, sees future catastrophes in her dreams, and they’re recorded in a section of the newspaper called “the Lottery.” Meanwhile, Mercy calculates his next attack.

So mesmerizing are Yejidé’s unhurried, lyrical chapters that it’s easy to forget the real conflicts, such as financial crises, racial tensions and substance abuse, looming in the background. This contemporary fairy tale’s grandeur and psychedelic wonderment undergird a serious warning, urging readers to make sense of the story’s message of family, justice, trauma and healing and to find a way toward a saner future.

Anyone who has read Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpieces knows that, in his works, little is as it first appears. Situations are not quite as his unreliable narrators believe. First-person protagonists speak in formal prose that sounds not quite right. And his later works are wonderfully unclassifiable—not quite detective fiction or dystopian sagas but borrowing from these forms while veering into original terrain.

He continues his genre-twisting ways with Klara and the Sun, a return to the dystopian tenor of Never Let Me Go that, like that work, explores whether science could—or should—manipulate the future.

Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend available for purchase. Like Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day, she speaks in quirky locutions such as “I was able to bring several speculations together.” She and other AFs are on display in a store, where the prime real estate is the front window. The advantages of that position include access to the Sun, from which AFs derive “nourishment.”

A teenager named Josie, suffering from an unspecified illness, insists that her Mother purchase Klara. What follows is the story of Josie’s home life and Klara’s role in the family’s affairs. Among them are the Mother’s trauma from the death of another daughter, a young man sweet on Josie and, most provocatively, the issue of whether science can correct injustices wrought by illness or one’s station in life.

Ishiguro is an expert at slowly doling out information to build tension. The wonder of this book is that he incorporates many elements, from environmental damage to genetic testing, without the story seeming heavy-handed.

But the predominant theme in Klara and the Sun is loneliness. “Humans, in their wish to escape loneliness,” Klara says, “made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom.” As Ishiguro notes in this brilliant book, each person has their own Sun, a source that gives them strength, and feels enervated when the source leaves them in shadow.

Argentinian novelist Betina González’s English-language debut is a wild romp of aggressive deer, abandoned children and a cultish back-to-nature group of adults who have taken to the wilderness.

The story is told by three residents of an unnamed American city that’s barely survived some kind of economic or environmental apocalypse. Both Vik and his elderly co-worker, Beryl, are employees of the local natural history museum, though Beryl’s roots in the community date back to the 1970s, when she joined a commune of young people experimenting with mind-altering drugs. Beryl now leads her fellow senior citizens in an all-out armed war against the deer that have begun attacking people. (Note: There is some graphic animal cruelty here, so if you are sensitive to that, this is not your book.) 

At the same time, Vik, a chronically ill taxidermist from the (fictional) Caribbean island of Colonna, realizes that an intruder has broken into his home and is living in his closet. Meanwhile, Berenice, the daughter of the town florist, uncovers ties to the old commune after her mother disappears.

The storylines gradually come together over the search for a plant that originated in Colonna called albaria. It’s so potent that one dose creates life-altering hallucinations and a lifelong addiction.

The lively pace and absurdity of American Delirium could easily go off the rails, but González keeps a tight control over each of her characters even as they navigate their ever-stranger adventures. The novel is well served by translator Heather Cleary’s light touch, which allows for a certain amount of zaniness without sacrificing the plot or the well-defined characters.

In the author’s afterword, González explains that she drew inspiration from an international array of news stories, and it’s clear that some of the strangest elements in the novel are taken directly from these real-life events. Perhaps one person’s magic is another person’s realism after all.