New Books, 30 April 2024
Adler, Sarah: Happy Medium
(Penguin Random House/Berkley 9780593547816, $18, 416pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 04/30/2024)
Paranormal romance novel. A con woman posing as a spirit medium is hired to investigate odd phenomena on a skeptical farmer’s goat farm, and finds a very real ghost.
Al-Essa, Bothayna & (Translator), Sawad Hussain: The Book Censor’s Library
(Restless Books 9781632063342, $17.99, 272pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 04/30/2024)
Satirical dystopian SF novel of banned books, secret archives, all-powerful government, and a censor who dreams of characters from literary classics, fills his house with forbidden reading, and finds himself caught up with an undercover resistance. Translated by Ranya Abdelrahman & Sawad Hussain.
Ellickson, Andrea: The Vanishing Station
(Abrams 9781419764226, $19.99, 368pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 04/30/2024)
Young-adult fantasy novel. Filipino American Ruby Santos, desperate to keep from losing the family home, takes over her father’s secret job as a delivery person for a magical underworld, but soon realizes she’s in over her head.
Evans, Erin M.: Relics of Ruin
(Orbit US 9780316441049, $19.99, 480pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 04/30/2024)
Fantasy novel, second in the Books of the Usurper trilogy. An unlikely team must find a way to work together and solve an empire-spanning mystery to defend the last place they call home.
Lansdale, Joe R.: The Unlikely Affair of the Crawling Razor
(Subterranean Press 9781645241898, $45, 112pp, formats: hardcover, 04/30/2024)
Horror novella featuring Edgar Allan Poe’s great private investigator, Auguste Dupin. A young woman comes to Dupin and his assistant for help concerning her brother who is obsessed with the dark world that sits alongside our own, where strange creatures dwell and even stranger events occur.
North, Emet: In Universes
(Harper 9780063314870, $26.99, 240pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, audio, 04/30/2024)
SF novel. A queer physicist searches for belonging across time and space — and parallel worlds. A first novel.
Olde Heuvelt, Thomas: Oracle
(Tor/Nightfire 9781250759580, $29.99, 384pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 04/30/2024)
Supernatural thriller novel. On a foggy winter morning, high school kids Luca and Emma discover the impossible: the wreck of an eighteenth-century ship stranded in a flower field. Emma enters the hatch on the deck and is never seen again. And she isn’t the last to disappear.
Seolyeon, Park: A Magical Girl Retires
(HarperVia 9780063373266, $21.99, 176pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 04/30/2024)
Fantasy novella. A 29-year-old woman’s suicide attempt is interrupted by a clairvoyant magical girl who thinks the woman could be the greatest magical girl of all time — but it’s not as easy as it seems. Illustrated by Kim Sanho. Translated by Anton Hur from the Korean Mabopssonyo euntwehamnida (Ghangbi 2022).
Wands, Susan: High Priestess and Empress
(SparkPoint Studio/SparkPress 9781684632343, $17.95, 344pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 05/01/2024)
Victorian fantasy novel, second in the tarot-inspired Arcana Oracle series begun in Magician and Fool. On her return to London, artist and seer Pamela Colman Smith discovers that her nemesis, Aleister Crowley, has returned—and his sights are set on her.
