Alexandra Pierce

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

Self-Portrait with Nothing, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-25082-084-6, $26.99, 304pp, hc) October 2022. Cover by Jaya Miceli.

The idea of a multiverse has spawned count­less explorations of what-if: what are the conse­quences of this choice over that? Is my alternative version living a better life? Can I access those alternate worlds, and what happens if I do? Until now, my favorite treatment of this trope was Jo Walton’s My Real ...Read More

Thistlefoot, GennaRose Nethercott (Anchor 978-0-59346-883-8, $28.00, 448pp, hc) Sep­tember 2022.

Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed house has been delivered to her descendants, estranged siblings living in the United States some three generations removed from their maternal ancestor. The sib­lings have no idea who their progenitrix was, why this house has come to them, or even really what to do with it; and they definitely don’t know that with the house they ...Read More

Ithaca, Claire North (Orbit 978-0-31642-296-3, $28.00, 400pp, tp) September 2022. Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio.

People have been doing rewrites of Greek myths since they were first shared in the agora: the different births of Aphrodite, the many fates of Iphigenia, and so on. The last few decades have seen feminist reworkings of these epic stories, bringing women to the forefront, with (it must be said) varying levels of ...Read More

The Best of World SF: Volume 2, Lavie Tidhar, ed. (Head of Zeus 978-1-80328-031-8, £25.00, 656pp, hc) October 2022.

Lavie Tidhar is prolific. His first volume of The Best of World SF came out in 2021 – the same year as his novels The Hood and The Escape­ment and collection The Lunacy Commission– and now this second volume arrives just a year later (along with two other novels). ...Read More

Unraveller, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan Chil­dren’s 978-1-50983-697-0, £14.99, 496pp, hc) September 2022. (Amulet 9-781-41985-931-4, $19.99, 432pp, hc). Cover by Vincent Chong. January 2023.

If you live in Raddith, and you hate someone deeply enough and long enough, you might develop what the people there call a curse egg. When you’ve really, really had enough of that per­son, you can let the curse go and the object of your hatred will ...Read More

Station Eternity, Mur Lafferty (Ace 978-0-59309-811-0, $17.00, 336pp, tp) October 2022. Cover by Will Staehle.

In Station Eternity, her first novel since Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award nominee Six Wakes, Mur Lafferty turns two old tropes of the PI-murder-mystery genre on their head. Firstly, the misanthropic investigator. It’s an old one, and maybe not seen as much these days, but the loner PI who’s grown ...Read More

The Genesis of Misery, Neon Yang (Tor 978-1-25078-897-9, $27.99, 432pp, hc) September 2022. Cover by Angela Wang.

There’s a certain magic in using history in science fiction. Perhaps the most common option is alternative history. Another is what I think of as transposing history: taking what makes a sequence of historical events remarkable and moving them to a completely different setting, simultaneously keeping them recognizable and yet also creating ...Read More

Enclave, Claire G. Coleman (Hachette Australia 978-0-73364-086-5, AU$29.99, 307pp, tp) June 2022. Cover by Grace West.

Claire G. Coleman’s third novel Enclave seems, at first, deceptively simple. Coleman is an Indig­enous Australian; Enclave follows Terra Nullius (published by Hachette in Australia, and Small Beer in the US) and The Old Lie (also Hachette). In this novel, the language is direct and seems to be telling the perhaps ordinary story ...Read More