Alexandra Pierce

The Briar Book of the Dead, A.G. Slatter (Titan 978-1-80336-454-4, $16.99, 368pp, tp) Cover by Julia Lloyd. February 2024.

With The Briar Book of the Dead following up The Path of Thorns, A.G. Slatter shows that her genius for the magical gothic tale is not waning, with witches and ghosts and terrible deeds coming together to create a riveting story.

The Briar witches live in, and govern, the ...Read More

Red Side Story, Jasper Fforde (Hodder & Stough­ton 978-1444763669, £17.99, 384pp, hc) February 2024. (Soho Press 978-1-64129-628-1, $29.95, 456pp, hc) May 2024.

When Jasper Fforde did clever things in The Eyre Affair (2001), I was one of many people who fell in love with this funny, bizarre, slightly-askew-to-reality world. Fforde was writing humorous fantasy that com­mented on and skewered the real one. It sounded superficially like the Discworld novels ...Read More

Wicked Problems, Max Gladstone (Tordotcom 978-0-76539-593-1 $19.99, 464pp, tp) April 2024. Cover by Goñi Montes.

Max Gladstone’s new Craft Wars novel Wicked Problems feels like the sort of book that should have a relatively clear-cut binary of heroes and villains. Maybe the heroes would be tarnished, maybe the villains have some redeeming features; but the overall story – terrible things from beyond the void are coming and maybe the ...Read More

2022 Best of Utopian Speculative Fiction, Justine Norton-Kertson, ed. (Android Press 978-1-95812-166-5, $21.99, 240pp, tp) December 2023.

In their follow-up to Bioluminescent: A Lu­narpunk Anthology, Justine Norton-Kertson has assembled a range of stories that suggest different ways of thinking about “utopia.” Going into this anthology I had clear expectations of what “utopia” meant and what these stories would probably look like: societies would be shown as having figured ...Read More

The Parliament, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-25082-097-6, 320pp, $28.99, hc) Cover by Jaya Miceli. January 2024.

Aimee Pokwatka leans into the absurdist, and refuses explanations in her fiction. Her debut, Self-Portrait with Nothing (2022), has an artist with the ability to bring variants of her portrait subjects into this world; how this works is never explained. Rather, the focus is on relationships: between the artist’s own variants, between the artist and ...Read More

Chaos Terminal, Mur Lafferty (Ace 978-0-59309-813-4, 369pp, $17.00, tp) Cover by Will Staehle. November 2023.

I have watched a lot of episodes of the British TV show Midsomer Murders. They follow a predict­able format: There’s the murder (or three) and the investigation, and the final triumphant reveal of whodunit. In the course of the investigation far more problems than just the murder will turn up, some of which are ...Read More

The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fourth Annual Collection, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-261-9, $18.99, 286pp, tp) October 2023. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.

Discussions around the place of robots and ar­tificial intelligence have grown in relevance and urgency over the last couple of years; AI is gaining ever more presence in our “real” lives rather than just in fiction. Allan Kaster’s fourth collection of stories about robots and ...Read More

Bittersweet in the Hollow, Kate Pearsall (Putnam 978-0-59353-102-0, $18.99, 384pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Imogen Oh.

Linden James is the third of four sisters, and like all the James women, she and her sisters have some sort of magical ability. Linden can taste and recognize other people’s emotions; her second sister can tell when some­one is lying, while the fourth sister can contact the spirits of the dead. ...Read More

The Death I Gave Him, Em X. Liu (Solaris 978-1-78618-998-1, $26.99, 351, hc) September 2023. Cover by James Macey.

With a tagline like ‘‘Something is rotten in El­sinore Labs,’’ a reader with a background knowl­edge of Shakespeare knows exactly what they’re getting with The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu: Hamlet, but make it science.

The book’s foreword explains that the follow­ing events all occurred over ...Read More

After the Forest, Kell Woods (Tor 978-1-25085-248-9, $28.99, 384pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Andrew Davis.

Kell Woods’s debut novel is in the ‘‘but then what?’’ genre: but then what happened, after the fairy tale ended? What happened to the children when they got home from their ‘‘ad­venture?’’ A.C. Wise’s Wendy, Darling and Kirstyn McDermott’s Never Afters series are recent examples of taking recognizable stories and extending them; Seanan ...Read More

A Season of Monstrous Conceptions, Lina Rath­er (Tordotcom 978-1-25088-401-5, $20.99, 160pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Andrew Davis.

In A Season of Monstrous Conceptions, Lina Rather presents London in 1675. It’s London after the Restoration of the monarchy and a bout of the Black Death. It’s also after the Great Fire has ripped through the city, which means there’s lots of rebuilding, particularly directed by Christo­pher Wren. All ...Read More

Immortal Longings, Chloe Gong (Saga 978-1-66800-022-9, $28.99, 384pp, hc) June 2023.

Chloe Gong had me at ‘‘inspired by Ant­ony and Cleopatra.’’ Specifically, Shake­speare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Then she set it in a city inspired by the Kowloon Walled City, and added people who can jump between bodies. It’s a lot and it’s amazing.

The novel opens with August Shenzhi, adopted son of King Kasa, looking out over San-Er ...Read More

Ink Blood Sister Scribe, Emma Törzs (William Morrow 978-0-06325-346-9, $30.00, 416pp, hc) Cover by Elina Cohen.

Sometimes I wonder whether creatives are reaching a point where all the possible ways that magic and its uses can be explored have already been explored. And then I read books like Emma Törzs’s debut novel Ink Blood Sister Scribe, and I realise that nope, there is definitely still scope for new ...Read More

Psyche and Eros, Luna McNamara (William Morrow 978-0-06329-507-0, $30.00, 352pp, hc) June 2023.

In her debut novel Psyche and Eros, Luna McNamara plays with a mythological story to create something quite delightful. In the usual telling of the myth, Psyche is the beautiful youngest daughter of an unnamed king. McNa­mara chooses to connect her to some of the big names of mythology, fitting her story into the events ...Read More

Atalanta, Jennifer Saint (Wildfire 978-1-4722-9215-5, £16.99, 369pp, hc) April 2023. (Flatiron Books 978-1-25085-557-2, 304pp, $28.99, hc) May 2023.

Atalanta is the third of Jennifer Saint’s stories from Greek mythology, following Ariadne (2021) and Elektra (2022), and Atalanta is a very dif­ferent character from those two: Elektra’s story revolves around being a daughter and a sister, while Ariadne is a daughter and a lover. At the heart of Atalanta’s story ...Read More

House of Odysseus, Claire North (Redhook 978-0-31644-400-2, $29.00, 464pp, hc) August 2023. Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio.

Claire North’s sequel to Ithaca (2022) continues the story of Penelope, Queen of Ithaca: her husband Odysseus absent for two decades, she is trying to manage both the kingdom and a house full of suitors who believe she should stop pretending that Odysseus could still be alive. In Ithaca, Clytemnestra and ...Read More

Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh (Tordotcom 978-1-25083-498-0, $26.09, 448pp, hc) April 2023. Cover by Christine Foltzer.

Getting through the first few chapters of this debut novel required trust. I haven’t read Emily Tesh’s Greenhollow duology (2019 and 2020), so I had no sense of what her work is like. I have read a lot of Tordotcom’s publications, though, so I had to hope that there was more to the ...Read More

Scale, Greg Egan (Self-published 978-1-92224-044-6, $23.00, 272pp, hc) January 2023.

I’m not afraid to admit that I felt trepidation before embarking on this novel. A world where the most significant difference between people isn’t color or creed, but instead their scale – that is, their relative heights – and that comes with a website explaining how the science of that scaling works? The very idea – people on seven ...Read More

Nightwatch Over Windscar, K. Eason (DAW 978-0-75641-859-5, $28.00, 480pp, hc) No­vember 2022. Cover by Tim Green.

First things first: you definitely don’t want to read this without reading the first in the series, Nightwatch on the Hinterlands (2021). This second book in the series opens just months after the events in the first, and while there is a little backstory as a reminder of the stakes, it’s definitely not ...Read More

The Measure, Nikki Erlick (William Morrow and Co 978-0-06320-420-1, $28.99, 368pp, hc) June 2022. Cover by Elsie Lyons.

By the middle of 2020 I was wondering what novels could possibly look like in the future. Would they all be set in 2019? Would they all be alternate history? What sort of themes would be prevalent? John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) was probably the first novel written entirely ...Read More

Twice in a Lifetime, Melissa Baron (Alcove Press 978-1-63910-136-8, $17.99, 336pp, tp) December 2022. Cover by David Drummond.

The blurb suggests that this debut novel is ‘‘The Time Traveller’s Wife meets Oona Out of Order’’, but the premise is unlike either of those: there is no genetic condition and no hopping around in time. Rather, Melissa Baron is using an idea familiar from the 2006 film The ...Read More

Small Angels, Lauren Owen (Random House 978-0-59324-220-0, $28.99, 400 pp, hc) August 2022. Cover by Sarah Whittaker.

The Mockbeggar Woods like stories. If you go to the woods and tell it a story, you may well feel the trees responding. And sometimes a particularly resonant story might be one that the trees decide to keep, and keep alive. This might be a comfort if you think the woods will ...Read More

Twelve, Joan Marie Verba (FTL Publications 978-1-93688-172-7, $19.95, 146pp, hc) July 2022. Cover by GetCovers.

In Twelve, Joan Marie Verba’s first novel since 2020’s Defying the Ghosts, the fairy tale of the 12 dancing princesses is retold from the male protagonist’s perspective. I love a good fairytale retelling, although this one – written down by the Grimms for their 1812 collection – isn’t one I’ve seen reimagined ...Read More

The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older (Tordotcom 978-1-25086-050-7, $19.99, 176pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by Christine Foltzer.

Imagine a future where the Earth has gone so completely belly-up that people have moved to Jupiter. But humans being humans, they’re not prepared to accept that as the end of the old world. So they set up a university and encourage research in Classics, which focusses on under­standing Earth, its ...Read More