Juice, Tim Winton (Picador 978-1-76134-489-3, AUD$45.00, 528pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Adam Laszczuk.
Here’s an admission that would elicit a gasp from the Australian literary elite: I have never read a Tim Winton novel. Worse, I read the opening of one of his most famous novels and I hated it. But then I read Juice. And if all his novels hit like that for people who like realism… ...Read More
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Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids, Leyna Krow (Penguin 9780593299654, $19.00, 304pp, tp) January 2025. Cover design by Nerylsa Dijol.
Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids is a dazzling, vivid collection. Throughout its 16 stories, Krow expertly threads together a handful of elements: magical or absurd developments, incisive snapshots of familial loves and fears, and haunting reflections on climate change disasters. Shared thematic concerns and a handful of connected ...Read More
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One Level Down, Mary G. Thompson (Tachyon 978-1-61696-430-6, $16.95, 176pp, tp) April 2025.
Mary G. Thompson is another middle-grade and young-adult author now venturing into adult SF with One Level Down, an efficient VR thriller with some fairly familiar elements skillfully handled and given additional punch by a memorable narrator, a megalomaniacal villain who echoes the ‘‘mad scientists’’ of yore, and a persistent undertone of psychological horror. While ...Read More
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Coup de Grâce, Sofia Ajram (Titan Books 978-1-80336-962-4, $19.99, 144pp, hc) October 2024.
Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grâce is a relentlessly dark and visceral novel about a man on his way to commit suicide who somehow becomes trapped in the endless liminal space of an empty subway station. Beautifully written and claustrophobic in the way only empty liminal spaces can be, this short novel delivers breathtaking lines along with ...Read More
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The Tomb of Dragons, Katherine Addison (Tor 978-1-250-81619-1, $28.99, 352pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Chris Gibbs.
It is impossible for me to overstate how much I enjoy the novels of Katherine Addison set in the world of The Goblin Emperor. Their only real competition, for me, is the ‘‘World of the Five Gods’’ continuity of Lois McMaster Bujold: the sense of being in the hands of a ...Read More
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The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34108-2, $24.99, 144pp, hc) March 2025.
Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is an absolutely lovely take on classic murder ballads, with distinct echoes of the Tam Lin story and a soundtrack that might as well be wall-to-wall Steeleye Span. It might come as a bit of a surprise to readers who know El-Mohtar’s work only from the popular and multiple award-winning ...Read More
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Mechanize My Hands to War, Erin K. Wagner (DAW 978-0-7564-1934-9, $28.99, 309pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Faceout Studio, Tim Green.
From a novel in which voice overmasters genre we move to one in which genre more or less overmasters voice. Erin K. Wagner’s debut novel, Mechanize My Hands to War, isn’t badly told or badly imagined per se, but most of what is imagined is familiar and, ...Read More
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The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34108-2, $24.99, 144pp, hc) March 2025.
Amal El-Mohtar is perhaps most famous as the co-author (with Max Gladstone) of the justly lauded bestselling novella This Is How You Lose the Time War. Her independent talents, however, are numerous, and in her new solo novella The River Has Roots, several of them are on display.
The River Has Roots is intertwined ...Read More
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The Orb of Cairado, Katherine Addison (Subterranean 978-1-64524-213-0, 120pp, $45.00, hc) January 2025. Cover by Tom Canty.
A similar question arises for the protagonist of the standalone novella The Orb of Cairado. Like the Cemeteries of Amalo books, it is an offshoot of Addison’s Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-nominated novel The Goblin Emperor (2014) – more directly, perhaps, as their actions kick off from the same event, ...Read More
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Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press 978-1-56689-709-9, $19.00, 229pp, hc) September 2024. Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love.
When it comes to inhabiting and traversing the interstitial spaces between genres, no one does it better than Brian Evenson. Science fiction, horror, and literary fiction are the main three genres Evenson writes, but the bridges he builds between those genres – and the brilliant way in which he ...Read More
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Asimov’s 11-12/24
The November/December issue of Asimov’s opens with “Death Benefits”, a novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A series of vignettes highlight various casualties of war, interspersed with the story of Davidson Turo, a private investigator who is approached by a client who has seen footage of her lover’s death, but is convinced it’s fake and that he’s still alive. Rusch does a lovely job of exploring ...Read More
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Fusion Fragment 11/24 GigaNotoSaurus 11/24 Diabolical Plots 11/24
November’s Fusion Fragment starts strong with Emry Jordal’s novelette “The Little Black Wand for Every Occasion”, in which a technology known as Serendipity is growing in popularity, though not without some controversy. It allows people a redo, erasing six minutes or so of time so that people can undo any “mistakes” they just made. In practice, it allows people ...Read More
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The Way Up Is Death, Dan Hanks (Angry Robot 978-1915202949, trade paperback, 368pp, $18.99) January 2025
Dan Hanks’s third novel (I remain sheepishly ignorant of his first two: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire [2020] and Swashbucklers [2021]) is built around a very familiar concept: the physical, mental, and moral testing, by unknown agents, of a pack of aspirants or seekers or, as in this case, kidnapped ...Read More
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Hot Singles in Your Area, Jordan Shiveley (Unbound 978-1-80018-341-4, $18.00, 208pp, tp) February 2025. Cover by Jack Smyth.
Some books are hard to categorize. Jordan Shiveley’s Hot Singles in Your Area is one of those books. Strangely funny and dancing to the strange sound of its own drum, this novel has one foot in body horror and one foot in something akin to bizarro fiction (think authors like Carlton ...Read More
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Hammajang Luck, Makana Yamamoto (Gollancz 978-1-39961-679-9, £20.00, 336pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Jordan Wolfe. (Harper Voyager 978-0-06343-082-2, $19.99, 368pp, tp). January 2025. Cover by Janelle Barone.
I love a heist story. Getting the conspirators together, finding out the plan, overcoming obstacles, finding out the real plan, watching it all unravel and then neatly come back together… I know the beats of the story, and that’s part of what ...Read More
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Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids, Leyna Krow (Penguin 978-0-59329-965-4, $19.00, 304pp, tp) January 2025.
Leyna Krow’s terrific second collection, Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids, assembles 16 stories that take an askew, sometimes surreal, frequently funny attitude to the physical and emotional bonds that bind us (and octopuses) together.
“Sinkhole” is the collection’s title piece and has been optioned for a Hollywood adaptation, care of Jordan Peele and Issa ...Read More
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Private Rites, Julia Armfield (Fourth Estate 978-0-00-860803-3, £16.99, 208pp, hc) June 2024. (Flatiron 978-1-250-59376-611-5, $27.99, 304pp, hc) December 2024.
I don’t know what the weather has been like this year where you live, but in the UK it has been wet. As I write in October, I think we are just about to exceed the 1991-2020 average for annual rainfall; in September, Southern England saw 233% of that average. ...Read More
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Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34224-9, $21.99, 112pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Feifei Ruan.
Olivia Waite is deservedly well-known, at least among my circles, for her queer historical romances featuring women from a wide range of social classes who overcome obstacles while falling in love with other women. In addition to her skills as a novelist, she is also a talented reviewer with a particular focus on ...Read More
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Picks and Shovels, Cory Doctorow (Ad Astra UK 978-1-8045-4783-0, £20.00, 400pp, hc) January 2025. (Tor 978-1-250-86590-8, $28.99, 400pp, hc) February 2025.
Cory Doctorow’s novels about forensic accountant Martin Hench are playing out as a trilogy-in-reverse: We first met Hench as a wealthy 67-year-old freelance investigator in Red Team Blues (2023), then as he recalled a case from 2006 in The Bezzle, when he was probably approaching 50. Now, ...Read More
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How to Steal a Galaxy, Beth Revis (DAW 978-0-756-41948-6, $23.00, 192pp, hc) December 2024.
Beth Revis follows up her decidedly enjoyable Full Speed to a Crash Landing with the second in the Chaotic Orbits trilogy, How to Steal a Galaxy. This time, the action surrounding protagonist Ada Lamarr is more compressed, with the bulk of the novella taking place over a single evening at the Museum of Intergalactic ...Read More
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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/14/24, 11/28/24 Small Wonders 11/24 Lightspeed 11/24
Beneath Ceaseless Skies opened November with an issue focused on revolution, including “Another Tide” by Will Greatwich, which finds the narrator leaving their home in a long-conquered area of a vast empire to visit and study its fringes, where resistance still lives embodied in a man named Goruna. The two meet, and the narrator joins Goruna’s cause ...Read More
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Hammajang Luck, Makana Yamamoto (Harper Voyager 978-0063430822, trade paperback, 368pp, $15.99) January 2025
My partner Deborah Newton proclaims that her favorite type of movie is the heist film. I suspect that there are many who share her affection for this genre. From Rififi to The Italian Job, from A Fish Called Wanda to Ocean’s 11, such highly entertaining and suspenseful stories span a huge range and ...Read More
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The Sentence, Gautam Bhatia (Westland IF 978-9-36045-152-3, ₹599, 396pp, tp) October 2024.
A hundred years ago, the city-state of Peruma emerged from a bloody civil war between its landowning elites and its working classes with a legal compromise. A charter that divided the city into High Town, ruled by the corporate-controlled Council, and Low Town, ruled by the anarchistic Commune. In between are the Guardians, an order of lawyers ...Read More
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The Garden, Nick Newman (Doubleday UK 978-0-85752-999-2, £16.99, 288pp, hc) January 2025. (Putnam 978-0-59371-773-8, $29.00, 320pp, hc) February 2025.
Depending on your frame of reference, any tale of two sisters living in ritualized isolation until some guy shows up to disrupt everything can evoke anything from Tennessee Williams to Shirley Jackson, especially We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The latter seems especially apt with Nick Newman’s The ...Read More
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Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, Yaroslav Barsukov (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy 978-1647101367, trade paperback, 300pp, $19.99) November 2024
Simply put, this is the most impressive debut novel I have encountered since Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds. It actually has a lot of similarities to that previous exemplar. Not in subject matter—Birds was a postmodern space opera, while Memory is an almost New Weird science fantasy—but in ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 11/24
Resa Nelson’s “LuvHome™” in Clarkesworld’s November issue adopts a light tone to tell the story of a woman locked out by her smart house, which claims to be doing it for her own good, refusing to let her back in until she meets new people, changes her habits, and gets out of her current rut. “Luminous Glass, Vibrant Seeds” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires ...Read More
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Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix (Berkley 978-0-59354-898-1, $30.00, 496pp, hc) January 2025.
What better way to start the year than reading a novel by my favourite horror author, Grady Hendrix. If you’ve been following Hendrix’s work, you’ll know he’s been putting his unique spin on the tropes of horror fiction. He’s tackled exorcisms (My Best Friend’s Exorcism), demonic rock ’n’ roll (We Sold Our Souls ...Read More
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Sorcery and Small Magics, Maiga Doocy (Orbit 978-0-316-57675-8, $19.99, 400pp, tp) October 2024.
When I settled in to read Maiga Doocy’s debut, Sorcery and Small Miracles, I expected an ‘‘enemies to lovers’’ romance with magic between the unserious but sweet protagonist, Leovander ‘‘Leo’’ Loveage, and his classmate, the brooding, often surly, Sebastian Grimm. Both of them are students at the Fount, learning to be sorcerers for reasons that ...Read More
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Flash Fiction Online 10/24 Cast of Wonders 10/20/24, 11/11/24 Strange Horizons 10/21/24, 11/4/24
Flash Fiction Online released an extra-large issue in honor of the spookiest month, which is capped off by Christine Lucas’s haunting “Final Harvest”, in which the daughter of a rather abusive and manipulative mother returns to perform said mother’s final rites – the harvest of nekrophyta that grows on the body of the dead. ...Read More
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The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fifth Annual Collection, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-259-6, $18.99, 234pp, tp). October 2024.Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
In my review of The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fourth Annual Collection, I noted that AI was gaining more presence in our lives – something that has increased over the last year. I also noted that the stories in that anthology were overwhelmingly ...Read More
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Gliff, Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton 978-0-24166-557-2, £18.99, 288pp, hc) October 2024. (Pantheon 978-0-59370-156-0, $28.00, 288pp, hc) February 2025.
If one definition of literary voice is that it is the combination of what a writer’s sentences pay attention to and how they pay attention to it, then Ali Smith’s voice is one of the most distinctive of the twenty-first century. What her sentences pay attention to are the political and ...Read More
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She’s Always Hungry, Eliza Clark (Harper Perennial 978-0-06339-326-4, $17.99, 240pp, tp) November 2024.
Eliza Clark has been on my radar for several years since her debut novel, Boy Parts, was released by Influx Press in 2020, followed by her best-selling second novel, Penance. (You won’t be surprised to learn that I own both but have read neither.) Her eclectic first collection, She’s Always Hungry, which gathers ...Read More
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