Somewhere Beyond the Sea, the highly anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, is a triumphant rallying cry for freedom and joy.
Buried Deep is a transportive story collection from Naomi Novik, who maps her narrative milieus with extraordinary precision.
Readers seeking big ideas and colorful splashes of language will love exploring Alan Moore’s two parallel Londons in The Great When.
The City in Glass, a beautifully written tale of a bereaved demon and a cursed angel, finds Nghi Vo at the peak of her craft.
Jeff VanderMeer’s experimental sci-fi Southern Reach trilogy was an immediate crossover success when it was released in 2014, and it’s since been enshrined in the pantheon of modern SFF classics. Much of our current wave of literary, ambitious and unabashedly weird speculative fiction can be traced back to the Southern Reach books and their heady blend of horror, cli-fi (climate fiction) and conspiracy thriller. VanderMeer will return to the series this fall with Absolution, which will tell the story of three separate expeditions into the terrifying yet beautiful Area X.
And lo, a second series in the Sapphic Trifecta comes to a close. If you’re not in the know (read: way too online and/or a Tumblr user), you may not have heard of this most holy of groupings, which consists of C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun and Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne, all of which were released to instant acclaim in 2021 and all of which featured epic sapphic relationships at their heart. Parker-Chan’s duology ended last year, and now it’s Suri’s turn to land the ship with The Lotus Empire, the third and final installment in The Burning Kingdoms trilogy.
Space Opera, Catherynne M. Valente’s hilarious “Eurovision in space” novel, was one of the harbingers of the hopepunk ethos in SFF, and now another round of the Metagalactic Grand Prix (the high-stakes singing contest that has replaced warfare between alien worlds) is about to begin. Humanity eked out a win in Space Opera, which means they’re the race to beat in Space Oddity.
Got a serious bibliophile on your list? Tick that box with one of these titles.
Sweet-natured and therapeutic, Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes is cozy fantasy done right.
Andy Marino rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation in The Swarm, a tale of a cicada emergence of biblical proportions.
You will never look at a cicada or a wasp the same way again.