Amal El-Mohtar

Becky Chambers comes down to earth for her new series, about a world where humans and robots diverged so long ago that now each group is just a myth to the other, and robots propagate themselves.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out a year ago and quickly became the game of the pandemic era, offering a candy-colored fantasy world where the occasional bug bite is the worst that can happen.

Darcie Little Badger's warm, spooky debut novel is set in a world just slightly off our own, where ghosts and fairies are real, and an Apache girl can pal around with the spirit of her childhood dog.

Nino Cipri's magical multiworld adventure is set in a Swedish big box furniture store — no, not that one — where the showroom floor is prone to interdimensional wormholes that swallow shoppers.

A.R. Moxon's surreal, inexplicable novel is a literary puzzle box that takes place across at least four levels of reality, in at least five typefaces — and yet, it's compulsively readable.

Erin Morgenstern's long-awaited followup to The Night Circus imagines a world of magical doors leading to a literal underground sea — surrounded by layers of pleasurable mystery and mythography.

A new anthology invites Palestinian writers to imagine their homeland in 2048 — 100 years after the creation of Israel. The stories are inventive, dextrous, painful, and even sometimes playful.

Jo Walton's new novel imagines the Florentine friar Girolamo Savonarola, living life over and over again in an attempt to change his course, save his city, his friends — and himself from damnation.

G. Willow Wilson's luminous new novel is set during the last days of Muslim Granada, and follows a royal concubine and her mapmaker friend as they flee the Inquisition for a place that may not exist.

P. Djèlí Clark's novella about about two supernatural investigators on the trail of a malign spirit in a magical alternate Cairo packs wonderful characters into a thoughtfully-built world.

Our critic likens reading Marlon James' new epic fantasy to being slowly eaten by a bear that occasionally cracks jokes — painful and strange, but upsettingly beautiful for all that.

N.K. Jemisin's new story collection is a story in itself, a chronicle of her career that has the seeds of her award-winning novels, but also lovely and thought-provoking stand-alone work.

Edward Carey's new novel is about the life of wax museum pioneer Madame Tussaud — but it's also about the French Revolution, about humans, bodies, art and loneliness, and it's deeply, painfully sad.

Naomi Novik's new reimagining of "Rumpelstiltskin" digs deep into the anti-Semitism of the original story and drags out a warm, solid story about the nature of debt, friendship and hospitality.

Daryl Gregory's new novel spans decades in the life of the Amazing Telemachus Family — a con-man, card-sharping patriarch and his troublesome psychic children, whose powers haven't helped them any.

Victor LaValle's story of a rare book dealer whose life is torn apart after his wife commits an act of violence and vanishes is by turns enchanting, horrifying, infuriating and heartbreaking.

Kit Reed's would-be Southern Gothic chiller starts strong, with an amnesiac man stumbling into a house haunted by family secrets — but is ultimately undone by issues of plot, pacing and voice work.

Sarah Gailey's alternate-history romp takes place in a United States that went ahead with a wild plan to farm hippos for meat. It's a delightful read that suffers only from being too short.

Frances Hardinge's new novel is set in a wondrous underground city where crafts can be magic and the people are born with faces like blank canvas; they must purchase each new expression at great cost.

In this prequel to Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein creates a charming, compelling heroine who, along with a diverse supporting cast, must solve the mystery of a disappearance on her parents' estate.