Amal El-Mohtar

Set in a real Florida town with a real history of devastating fires, Cherie Priest's Brimstone is a deeply loving story about a witch and a grieving veteran with a strange connection to the fires.

Can Xue's book is hard to describe, much less explain — there's a town, and a mountain, and a poplar grove, and a host of people just trying to connect in a world of absent-minded strangeness.

Nnedi Okorafor's Binti: Home is the second installment in her series following a young woman with grand interstellar dreams, who now must reconcile her university experiences with her home culture.

Katherine Arden's new novel deftly weaves Russian fairy tales with tactile details to create a gorgeously wintry tale of magic, marred slightly by a clunky ending that's clearly setting up sequels.

This new anthology of science fiction and fantasy, edited by Hassan Blasim, imagines Iraq 100 years after the invasion of 2003. Harrowing, necessary, often beautiful, it resists comfort and catharsis.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia's new novel is set in a realistic, multidimensional Mexico City, where a young human boy meets a mysterious girl and gets caught up in a whirlwind of vampire-gang drug wars.

Connie Willis' near-future tale of oversharing gone wrong follows a woman whose fiance wants to get an empathy-inducing brain operation for couples. The book aims for frothy farce, but falls flat.

Ken Liu's even more epic followup to last year's epic fantasy The Grace of Kings picks up several years after the first book, with a completely new and fascinating set of characters and conflicts.

Nisi Shawl's new alternative history novel imagines a group of socialists and missionaries who found a new nation — Everfair — as a safe haven for those fleeing Belgian atrocities in the Congo.

Kij Johnson's new novella follows an unlikely adventurer (and a small black cat) through a world built of dreams. It's a wonder-quest that will hold you spellbound from start to finish.

N.K. Jemisin continues the story of the Stillness — a world constantly rocked by quakes, and the rare, gifted people who can control them — in a second volume even more engrossing than the first.

We first met diplomat Suyana Sapaki in Persona; she was a C-lister in a world where statecraft and celebrity are interchangeable. But now she's on the rise — and the stakes are getting higher, too.

Roshani Chokshi's smooth and assured debut draws on folk and fairy tales — Bluebeard, Persephone, Beauty and the Beast — for the story of a young girl whose ominous horoscope sends her on a journey.

Nick Bantock returns to his epistolary lovers in a new volume, The Pharos Gate. In an age of instantaneous digital communication, Griffin and Sabine celebrate the pleasures of paper and ink.

Ken Liu's new The Paper Menagerie collects 15 of his Hugo and Nebula Award-winning stories. Critic Amal El-Mohtar calls it "stupendously good work" that strikes chords profound enough to hurt.

Chances are, if you don't have firsthand acquaintance with neurodiversity, disability or mental illness, your ideas of what they can look like come from films or books that get made into films. This is certainly true of me: I first learned about autism and schizophrenia from films that grossly misrepresented ...

I picked up Daniel José Older's Midnight Taxi Tango without having read its preceding volumes — partly to see how well it stands alone, and partly on the strength of last year's Shadowshaper, which left me hungry for more of Older's voices, his families, and for a Brooklyn that was ...

I have read the conclusion to Edward Carey's Iremonger trilogy and am left a bit breathless, which on the whole is a good thing, as this is a sooty, choking, lung-blackening sort of book, and reading it with held breath is probably safest.

The Iremonger family is an odd lot, ...

In Night Vale, time is out of joint, memories are unreliable, and pink flamingo garden ornaments might do you serious harm. Cecil Palmer, the honey-voiced host of the community radio program, is as likely to begin narrating your every action as he is to inform you about the community calendar ...

In preparing for this review I found myself searching for the opposite of "meta" — something that would mean below as well as above. Because in Carry On, Rainbow Rowell has written the book inside her other book, which was inspired by books outside her book, and it would be ...