Hardback

Amal El-Mohtar has taken a very old ballad and remade it so once again it has a new and splendid shine. The River Has Roots is about the borders that we cross and recross by accident or with purpose and how these passages remake us in the process. It’s about love, and language, and how language is always a kind of sorcery, and El-Mohtar’s writing is a demonstration, too, of this sorcery in action. It left me intoxicated.

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Hardback

While, thankfully, there is no such thing as The Great American Novel (singular), there is a body of work by various novelists which reckon with our past — its mythologies, its myriad histories, its tragedies, its secret archives and its future possibilities. The Antidote is a remarkable addition to this communal, never-ending project. Karen Russell’s novel is generous, profound, and will stay with me for a long time.

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Hardback

The world in Lalami’s novel feels one step away from ours, which makes it astonishingly easy to slip inside. The women in The Dream Hotel grapple with the ways in which capitalism and technology sell off the pieces of ourselves most personal, most vulnerable, most private. A thrilling, urgent, and large-hearted novel that I can’t wait to press upon other readers.

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Hardback

Buehlman has a real gift for writing complicated, endearing characters trying to do their best in a complicated, fully lived-in world. I can’t wait for his next book.

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Hardback

A marvelously unsettling collection where the everyday strangeness of life and the uncanny rub up against each other

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A fabulously sly and slippery tale of a honeymoon that goes from bad to worse to even worse yet. Vivid, scalpel-sharp, and impossible to put down.

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Paperback

A bracing, tough minded, farsighted novel about bravery and endurance, motherhood and the way life goes on even after the world ends. Every sentence pierces.

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My only problem with this book is the title, and that’s because I love it so much. Ananda Lima didn’t write these stories for the Devil, she wrote them for me! An absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic, conjuring up not only the devil, but real emotion, real surprise, real strangeness.

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A gorgeous invocation of the magic-haunted spaces between lived experience and folkloric traditions, between the living and the dead, between memory and story. I loved The Night Parade.

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Pay As You Go is an exuberant, maximalist delight.

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If you love the novels of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Tana French, here’s your next obsession.

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A sumptuous feast of a novel, rich and strange and heady. Julia Fine is an extraordinary writer.

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Paperback

If Iain M. Banks and Gerard Manley Hopkins had ever been able to collaborate on a science fiction project, well, it wouldn’t be half as much fun as this novella. There is all the pleasure of a long series, and all the details of a much larger world, presented in miniature here.

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Hardback

Exquisite, unsettling, richly felt stories, in which both tenderness and the possibility of estrangement open up doors to the fantastic and the surreal.

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A twisty and thrilling fantasy in which both the magic and the characters have real complexity, real shadows. If, like me, you’re a fan of Holly Black and Leigh Bardugo, pick up this book at once.

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Hardback

Inventive, entertaining, and guaranteed to trouble your sleep. I savored this collection – and I’m still thinking about the show-stopping tour-de-force novella in verse, ‘The Beast You Are.’ I’ve never read anything like it, but now I want more, more, more.

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Hardback

The Curator feels a little like Owen King somehow brought a curiosity cabinet to life. There are terrors here, but also marvels and delights, and a set of the most interesting characters I’ve met in some time. Put The Curator on the same shelf as other classics of the uncanny and uncategorizable, like Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. I loved it.

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A collection as assured, as generous, and as wide-ranging as Drinking from Graveyard Wells will always feel like the most profound and surprising gift. I loved these stories.

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Absolutely gorgeous, beautifully observed, autobiographical fiction.

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Paperback

A novel stuffed to bursting with marvels and fairy-tale delights. Khadija Abdalla Bajaber casts a mighty spell.

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Paperback

The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern is a bittersweet and achingly tender coming of age novel. Like V. E. Schwab and Audrey Niffenegger, Rita Zoey Chin is an expert guide to that territory in which magic, loss, and possibility change not only the characters but the reader, too.

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Hardback

Irresistible, exuberant, and—appropriately—surefooted, GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot brims over with earthy magic, picaresque adventures, and eccentric and formidable characters. It’s a fabulous, weird, gorgeous book.

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Paperback

I fell hard for this book. The dynamic, powerful mixture of secrets, stories, and longing that bind families together is Zoraida Córdova’s narrative engine, but her ability to evoke landscape and the numinous make The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina feel like an invitation into an enchanted garden.

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These are marvelously unpredictable stories, anchored by Fernando A. Flores’s deadpan prose and his surefooted navigation of those overlapping territories, the real and the fantastic, where so much of the best contemporary fiction now lives.

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