For the most part, Delhi turns its back on her, staining her swollen body with its ashes and garbage and sewage, choking her with the city’s waste, its discards, its corpses and diseases,” writes Nilanjana Roy in Black River. –The Print India This shockingly powerful literary thriller is set in […]
Read MoreMystery
The Rooftop Garden, Menaka Raman-Wilms
Click here to return to the series This month we head to Germany, for the first time in the world eco-fiction series, to explore The Rooftop Garden (Nightwood Editions, October 2022), a debut novel from Menaka Raman-Wilms’—author, journalist, and host of The Globe and Mail’s The Decibel. Thanks to Menaka […]
Read MoreThe Mountain in the Sea, Ray Naylor
Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future. A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into […]
Read MoreTrouble at Turtle Pond, Diana Renn
Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Trouble at Turtle Pond by Diana Renn Middle-grade fiction Miles Kaplan, animal lover, moves to a new town with a terrible secret: Last year, he accidentally let the class rabbit escape and it was never seen again. The fallout was bad enough that Miles and his […]
Read MoreVenomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman
The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday […]
Read MoreThe Moonday Letters, Emmi Itäranta
A gripping sci-fi mystery wrapped in an LGBTQIA love story that bends space, time, myth and science…An effortlessly rich and lyrical mystery wrapped in a love story that bends space, time, myth and science, perfect for fans of Octavia Butler and Emily St. John Mandel…Part space-age epistolary, part eco-thriller, and […]
Read MoreThe Devil’s Dictionary, Steven Kotler
Click here to return to the series About the Book I’m always excited to talk with authors living in and writing about different places around the world. Steven Kotler’s newest novel, The Devil’s Dictionary (St. Martin’s Press, November; hardcover in April), takes place in an abundance of locales, including London, […]
Read MoreMad Honey, Katie Welch
Katie Welch reminds us that we are a very small part of a massive and complex non-human world and that, where we heed the lessons of non-centrality, we can also truly love. Mad Honey is a beautiful novel. –Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Perfecting and All the Broken Things When Beck Wise vanished, his […]
Read MoreThe Doloriad, Missouri Williams
In the wake of a mysterious environmental cataclysm that has wiped out the rest of humankind, the Matriarch, her brother, and the family descended from their incest cling to existence on the edges of a deserted city. The Matriarch, ruling with fear and force, dreams of starting humanity over again, […]
Read MoreThe China Garden, Liz Berry
When Clare moves with her mother from London to Ravensmere, an historic English estate, she can’t shake the feeling that the residents already know her, especially Mark, a maddeningly attractive biker. Clare also feels compelled to take midnight walks in Ravensmere’s abandoned China Garden. Then her mother reveals that their […]
Read MoreFungi, Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia
A collection of fungal wonders…and terrors. In this new anthology, writers reach into the rich territory first explored by William Hope Hodgson a century ago: the land of the fungi. Stories range from noir to dark fantasy, from steampunk to body horror. Join authors such as Jeff VanderMeer, Laird Barron, […]
Read MoreAmbergris, Jeff VanderMeer
Ambergis is the hardcover volume including the three books in his cult series that includes City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch. The new volume came out in 2020, even though its books were published before the Southern Reach trilogy and Borne. “Ambergris is also the New […]
Read MoreCity of Orange, David Yoon
Coming in May 2022: A man who can not remember his own name wakes up in an apocalyptic landscape, injured and alone. He has vague memories of life before, but he can’t see it clearly and can’t grasp how his current situation came to be. He must learn to survive […]
Read MoreO Man of Clay, Eliza Mood (Review)
O Man of Clay by Eliza Mood ISBN: 978-1939269959 Publisher: Stairwell Books Publication date: December 2, 2019 Review by Mary Woodbury Ursula K. Le Guin once said that speculative fiction was more about the real world than we usually imagine, and that’s true when it comes to authors writing about […]
Read MoreNational Park Mystery Series, Scott Graham
When suspicious deaths befall a whitewater rafting expedition through Cataract Canyon in Canyonlands National Park, archaeologist Chuck Bender and his family recognize evil intent lies behind the tragedies. They must risk their lives and act before the murderer makes an already deadly journey on the Colorado River through Utah’s […]
Read More