MOST ANTICIPATED SFF BOOKS 2026
Happy New Year!
It’s the first day of a new year, and at the Hive that means one thing – looking forward to all the new reads we can expect in the year ahead! So gird your TBRs and settle in, we’ve rounded up our contributors to bring you a huge list of titles to look out for in 2026.
(Note: The list was curated by our contributors, and is ordered by expected (UK) publication date. All blurbs and publication information have been gathered from Goodreads, Amazon, and publishers’ websites. We’ve included links to Goodreads and to sites where you can pre-order the books where available: adding not-yet released books to your “want to read” list massively helps authors, especially debuts, and pre-ordering them even more so – please go make someone’s new year extra happy!)
January
A God of Countless Guises
Bradley P. Beaulieu
The thrilling sequel to award-winning author Bradley P. Beaulieu’s epic fantasy series, The Book of the Holt.
Long ago, the elder gods devised a brutal contest — a game of ascension, where contestants gained power by killing their own. The prize? Godhood. Now, that game is stirring once again.
In the wake of the great battle at Ancris, the capital lies in ruins — and Faedryn, the trickster god, is closer than ever to escaping his prison.
While inquisitor Lorelei races to uncover the ancient truths that might stop him, Rylan is entangled in his own crisis. The artifact he stole, the key to Faedryn’s freedom, is no longer a secret. Every faction in the empire, from the imperial dragon legions to the ruthless Red Knives, are hunting him. But Rylan soon learns there is something worse than being caught — losing the shard altogether.
As Lorelei and Rylan struggle to undo the damage, they uncover a chilling truth: even if Faedryn remains imprisoned, the elder gods’ game may already be underway…
Expected release: 8th January (Head of Zeus)
The Swan’s Daughter
Roshani Chokshi
In this lush and romantic novel from New York Times bestselling author Roshani Chokshi, a prince is only as good as his beating heart and a maiden is only as good as her honest word. But when love and the truth become impossibly tangled, the two must figure out how to survive together, or fall completely apart.
To find love is a curse …
Prince Arris knows that marriage means murder. Thanks to a poorly worded wish to a sea witch, all one needs to rule the Isle of Malys is the heart and hand of the kingdom’s heir. Historically, this has been construed quite literally.
Thus, Arris expects that the day after his marriage and murder he will wake up as a sentient tree alongside the rest of his predecessors. His only chance at a long life is finding true and lasting love. When Arris’s parents announce a tournament of brides to compete for his hand and heart, a slew of eligible, lovely and (possibly murderous) bachelorettes make their way to Rathe Castle. Amidst glittering balls in ozorald caves, strolls through menageries of daydream trees and pearl crocodiles, tea time on glass boats and kisses that leave his head spinning, Arris cannot tell who is here out of love for him…or lust for power.
Until he meets Demelza.
As a veritas swan, Demelza’s song wrings out the truth. Forced into hiding, Demelza strikes a deal. Arris will provide her with safekeeping in exchange for her truth-telling song to sort through his potential brides.
While Arris is used to dodging death threats and Demelza is accustomed to fighting for her voice to be heard, to survive the tournament of brides requires a different kind of bravery. And perhaps the bravest thing one can do is not merely protect one’s life, but find the courage to chase a life worth living.
Expected release: 8th January (Hodderscape)
Nils’ Review | Goodreads | Bookshop.org
City of Others
Jared Poon
Rivers of London meets A Master of Djinn in this warm-hearted, action-packed urban fantasy debut full of workplace found family, queer romance and supernatural creatures straight out of Southeast Asian lore.
In the sunny city of Singapore, the government takes care of everything – even the weird stuff.
Benjamin Toh is an overworked and underpaid middle manager in a government department tasked with keeping the supernatural population of Singapore happy and out of sight.
But when an entire housing estate glitches out of existence on what was meant to be a routine check-in, Ben has to scramble to keep things under control and stop the rest of the city from following in its wake. He may not have the budget or the bandwidth, but he has the best – if highly irregular – team to help him. Together, they’ll traverse secret shadow markets, scale skyscrapers, and maybe even go to the stars, all so they can just do their goddamn job.
Expected release: 13th January (Orbit Books)
Dancing with the Dragon
Krista Luna
My misbehaving magic traps me in a spicy romance book with the grumpy dragon, and we have to act out the plot!
The growly dragon is stuck playing my lovestruck boyfriend until we finish the book and win its dance competition. And did I mention that it’s a spicy book? Hoo boy! I’ve gone from competent librarian to mistress of magical mayhem with my very first spell.
Luke keeps me in his castle, demanding I figure out how to break the spell using his magical library… with him hovering over me the entire time!
The fact that he’s so gorgeous makes it downright unbearable. Because every time the book’s plot takes over and Luke sweeps me into his strong arms for a dance, I crave the heat sizzling between us. Even worse? The romantic in me wants all his sweet words of love to be true, which has got to be my biggest mistake of all.
Dancing with the Dragon is a cozy spicy fantasy romance featuring a grumpy book-hoarding dragon, a sunshiny witch who’s a spicy romance fanatic, a sassy talking cat familiar, and a mutual obsession with books.
Welcome to Ferndale Falls, the magical small town full of mischievous imps and talking animal familiars, where heart-melting romance, toe-curling spice, humor, magic, and low-stakes adventure combine into stories you’ll devour.
Expected release: 15th January
Graceless Heart
Isabel Ibañez
In 15th-century Volterra, sculptress Ravenna Maffei enters a competition hosted by a secretive, immortal family who offer an invaluable boon to the victor. Desperate to win so she can save her brother, Ravenna reveals a rare magical talent-a dangerous act in a city where magic is forbidden. Her revelation makes her a target, and she is kidnapped by the Luni family and taken to Florence, a city of breathtaking beauty and cutthroat ambition.
There, Ravenna is forced into an impossible task where failure means certain death at the hands of Saturnino dei Luni, the family’s enigmatic and merciless heir. But under his cold reserve hides a vulnerability that draws her closer than she ever intended.
Meanwhile, Ravenna’s forbidden magic does not go unnoticed. The Pope, waging war against Florence, the Medici, and magic itself, has his own interest in her abilities, seeing her as a potential weapon in his ruthless campaign.
As alliances shift and war brews on the horizon, Ravenna must navigate the treacherous line between survival and betrayal, between love and duty. With time running out and her every move watched, the choices she makes will determine the fate of not just her own life, but the fragile balance of magic and power that could unravel Florence itself.
Expected release: 15th January (Hodderscape)
Sister Wake
Dave Ruddan
THE GODS WERE HERE. AND THEY WERE ANGRY.
For three hundred years the wild island of Croí has been subject to the Empire of the Answering. Clans have been subjugated, their language outlawed, their religion reduced to the whisper of fugitive priests.
Until Croí’s prayers are answered. The Gods return. Feral and majestic, they stride the land as colossi, throwing the Empire into chaos.
The dispossessed and the vengeful struggle for power. A ruthless priestess rallies the faithful, offering a simple choice – believe, or die – even as the empire’s Queen makes the first moves in a long and dangerous game.
But for all their machinations, one woman will decide the fate of them all . . . Sister Wake, unwilling saint of the Goddess of Death.
An action-packed, lush epic fantasy filled with rebellion, intrigue, horror, gigantic dangerous gods, and Celtic mythology, perfect for fans of James Islington, John Gwynne, and Joe Abercrombie.
Expected release: 15th January (Hodderscape)
Nine Goblins
T. Kingfisher
From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Nine Goblins, a novella of low fantasy and high mischief.
A funny cosy fantasy novella, perfect for fans of Legends & Lattes and Thornhedge.
No one knows exactly how the Goblin War began, but folks will tell you that goblins are stinking, slinking, filthy, sheep-stealing, henhouse-raiding, obnoxious, rude, and violent. Goblins would actually agree with all this, and might throw in “cowardly” and “lazy” too for good measure.
But goblins don’t go around killing people for fun, no matter what the propaganda posters say. And when a confrontation with an evil wizard lands a troop of nine goblins deep behind enemy lines, goblin sergeant Nessilka must figure out how to keep her hapless band together and get them home in one piece, despite a path filled with elves, trolls, monsters, and that most terrifying of creatures…a human being.
Expected release: 20th January (Titan Books)
Goodreads | Bookshop.org
The Poet Empress
Shen Tao
TO KILL A MONSTER, SHE MUST BECOME ONE . . .
As the emperor lays dying, the once-great Azalea Dynasty plunges towards civil war. While its princes plot for power, a more hidden war – to become the next empress – occupies the imperial court.
Wei Yin – peasant girl turned concubine to the cruel Prince Terren – has already endured unimaginable suffering. Ripped from her family, she has no title, no allies, and no escape. But she does have a secret . . .
In the shadows of the palace, surrounded by enemies, she is learning a skill forbidden to women. Because when words are weapons and poetry holds an ancient magic, the fate of a girl – and a nation – can both be rewritten. All she has to do is compose the perfect poem – a tale so powerful, it can kill any man, even the next emperor.
The epic political arena of The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang meets the intimate tragedy and luscious language of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller in this sensational debut novel by visionary new talent Shen Tao, unmissable for die-hard genre fans as well as readers of literary fiction looking to make their first foray into fantasy.
Expected release: 20th January (Gollancz)
Twelve Months
Jim Butcher
Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, has always managed to save the day – but, in this powerful entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling Dresden Files, can he save himself?
One year. 365 days. Twelve months.
Harry Dresden has been through a lot, and so has his city. After Harry and his allies narrowly managed to save Chicago from being razed to the ground, everything is different-and it’s not just the current lack of electricity.
In the battle, Harry lost people he cared about. And that’s the kind of loss that takes a toll. Harry being Harry, he’s doing his level best to help the city and his friends recover and rebuild. But it’s a heavy load, and he needs time.
But time is one thing Harry doesn’t have. Ghouls are prowling Chicago and taking out innocent civilians. Harry’s brother is dying, and Harry doesn’t know how to help him. And last but certainly not least, the Winter Queen of the Fae has allied with the White Court of vampires-and Harry’s been betrothed to the seductive, deadly vampire Lara Raith to seal the deal.
It’s been a tough year. More than ever, the city needs Harry Dresden the wizard-but after loss and grief, is there enough left of Harry Dresden the man to rise to the challenge?
Expected release: 20th January (Orbit Books)
The Elsewhere Express
Samantha Sotto Yambao
Embark on a magical journey in this wistful, Ghibli-esque fantasy from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Water Moon – perfect for fans of Spirited Away, Dallergut Dream Department Store and The Starless Sea.
Raya is a lost soul, going through the motions of life without a dream of her own.One night, on her subway ride home, Raya’s thoughts wander too far. She wakes on the Elsewhere Express, a magical train that offers its passengers a sense of purpose, peace, and belonging. The journey is a chance for Raya to reimagine her life – but only if she finds her compartment before time runs out.
Once aboard, Raya meets an intriguing artist named Q and together they race to find their place on the train, through a boarding car carpeted in meadow grass and along a dining carriage where passengers picnic on lilypads.
But a mysterious stowaway has boarded with them, and with it a dark, malignant magic that threatens to destroy the train. The closer Raya comes to uncovering the stowaway’s identity, the nearer she draws to the ultimate question:
What is her life’s true purpose – and is it a destination the Elsewhere Express can take her to?
Expected release: 22nd January (Bantam Books)
Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead
K. J. Parker
Not even the Church of the Invincible Sun is invincible – and somebody has to do its dirty work. Enter Sister Svangerd and her accompanying priest, both accomplished practitioners. Their mission is simple: to make a meddlesome princess disappear (permanently).
To get to her, they must attend the legendary Ecumenical Council, the once-in-a-century convening of the greatest spiritual minds the world has to offer. But when they arrive, they find instead a den of villainy that would make the most hardened criminal blush.
To complicate matters further, it appears that some people long considered dead might not be after all. What began as a simple murder is about to escalate into a theological debate of terrifying complexity.
From World Fantasy Award-winning author K. J. Parker comes a devilishly clever tale of murder, intrigue, and existential crisis.
Expected release: 27th January (Orbit Books)
Enchanting the Fae Queen
Stephanie Burgis
Enchanting the Fae Queen is the second instalment in Stephanie Burgis’ irreverent and sparkling Queens of Villainy series, in which a seductive fae queen meets her unexpected match in the enemy empire’s valiant general.
Queen Lorelei is a notorious fae seductress, with a trail of broken hearts in her wake. But behind her glamorous lifestyle and sparkling mask lurks a dangerously intelligent woman who’d do anything to keep her people safe, even kidnap the empire’s most famous hero.
The virtuous high general Gerard de Moireul represents all that is moral and true. He has to – after his parents were executed for treason. The last thing he needs is the Queen of Balravia, who showers glitter and rainbow-colored sparkles everywhere she goes without the slightest regard for good taste, decorum or royal dignity.
They’re opposites in every way, but when they’re swept up together in a grand – and deadly – fae tournament, they discover all of each other’s most hidden truths – and how perfectly they might be suited for each other after all.
Expected release: 29th January (Pan Macmillan)
Silver and Blood
Jessie Mihalik
On a deadly mission to kill the mythical beast that has been haunting her woods, a desperate mage finds her fate intertwined with the handsome and powerful man who saves her in this dark and sexy romantasy – perfect for readers of Jennifer L. Armentrout, Callie Hart, and Holly Black.
There’s something in the woods…
When a vicious beast begins attacking her fellow villagers, Riela reluctantly agrees to enter the forbidden forest and kill the monster as she’s the only mage available – or so she thought.
Untrained and barely armed, Riela is quickly overwhelmed when one beast turns into two. She fears her death is at hand until the unexpected arrival of a scarred, strikingly handsome man with gleaming moonlit magic changes her fate – and provides a rare opportunity to learn more about her own fickle power.
After being rescued and healed from her fight in the forest, Riela awakens in a magical castle complete with a gorgeous library, a strange wolf, and the surly man who saved her life. She soon learns Garrick is both more powerful and far deadlier than a mere mortal mage –he’s a dangerous Etheri who has been locked out of his kingdom in Lohka for nearly a century, and his powers are weakening.
Trapped in his castle and surrounded by the treacherous woods, the spark of attraction between Riela and Garrick slowly ignites into fiery desire. But the more they discover about Riela’s magic, the more suspicious Garrick grows of her identity. As they unravel the secrets and lies connecting Riela’s past to Garrick’s, the tenuous threads of trust between them start to fray.
Because Riela’s life –or her death – might be the key to regaining everything Garrick has lost.
Expected release: 29th January (Magpie)
February
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs To Die
Greer Stothers
In this hilarious gay fantasy romance, a reclusive sorcerer is forced to protect a cowardly knight after a prophecy ties their fates together. Funny, touching and inventive, this brilliant debut is perfect for fans of How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying and Dreadful.
All his life, Sir Cameron has stayed as far away from danger as possible. He is quite frankly too handsome to die a pointless death in battle. But then the Church hands down a prophecy to his fellow knights: the only way to defeat their nemesis, the mad sorcerer Merulo, is to kill Sir Cameron. Short of ideas, Cameron throws himself on the mercy of the one person who now actually wants him to survive: the mad sorcerer.
Merulo isn’t thrilled to be babysitting a spoilt, attention-seeking knight, but transmogrifying him into a vulture is at least entertaining. Cameron, meanwhile, is on a voyage of self-discovery. It turns out he’s really, really into surly sorcerers who lock him up and tell him what to do. Who knew?
As a legion of knights surround their stronghold, the sorcerer’s poisonous ambitions draw ever closer to fruition. Cameron is quite invested in not dying, but he finds he’s also invested in Merulo. And sometimes, supporting the sorcerer you care about means taking an interest in their hobbies. Even if that hobby is trying to kill God.
Even if it might get you killed, too.
Fall in love with this laugh-out loud, genre-bending romp full of concussed elves and queer romance like you’ve never seen before.
Expected release: 3rd February (Titan Books)
The Apple and the Pearl
Rym Kechacha
A richly atmospheric fantasy set across one day, as a ballet troupe of lost souls perform an ancient dance for the faerie realms, knowing they could be snatched away by their audience of faerie princes, imps and sprites at any moment.
For fans of The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Caraval by Stephanie Garber, Pantomime by Laura Lam and The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee.
As dawn breaks on All Souls Day, the lingering mists part to unveil an unending vista of serried gravestones. Between them looms a theatre like a haunted house from a horror film and the sleek iron carapace of a steam train – the Pearl. On board are the cast, orchestra and crew of a travelling ballet company, performing a show called The Apple and the Pearl.
Nine o’ clock in the morning and as he stumbles toward the restaurant car the lighting director, Zach, is introduced to a new recruit, Lara. “Have you ever worked in ballet before?” he asks her and quickly follows up with, “Have you had any contact with the supernatural?”
Everyone from the principal ballerina to the first violinist, from the wardrobe mistress to the newest members of the corps de ballet does everything they can to get the show on stage and looking fantastic. But in the world of The Apple and The Pearl these artists also have to contend with the malevolent glamour of an audience of Fae creatures only too eager to snatch them away into the Otherworld.
Expected release: 3rd February (Titan Books)
Books and Bewitchment
Isla Jewell
In this warm-hearted, witchy rom-com a young woman works to create the bookstore of her dreams, only to discover a powerful magic that’s been lying dormant-and a forbidden love she can’t resist. Perfect for readers of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches and The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic.
Rhea Wolfe lives a simple, if mundane, life in small-town Alabama with her pet cockatoo, Doris. But when her estranged grandmother dies, leaving everything to her-including a magical heritage Rhea never knew she carried-she finds herself in Arcadia Falls, the quaint mountain town her mother made her swear never to set foot in. When she plans to turn the defunct video store she’s also inherited into a bookstore, Rhea’s lucky that resident handyman Hunter Blakely is more than happy to help-and more than easy on the eyes. It’s just too bad he’s the grandson of her grandmother’s sworn rival in witchcraft.
Yet as Rhea makes plans for the bookstore of her dreams, she learns that her grandmother made a terrible choice, one that could ruin her own chance at happiness. As she gets ever closer to solving the mystery of what exactly is happening, each clue points to Arcadia Falls’ magic hanging in the balance. To keep her new home safe, Rhea must step into her enchanted birthright and harness her newfound powers… before it’s too late.
Expected release: 3rd February (Titan Books)
Nightshade and Oak
Molly O’Neill
An Iron Age goddess must grapple with becoming human in this delightful historical fantasy of myth and magic from the author of Greenteeth.
When Mallt, the goddess of death, is accidently turned human by a wayward spell, she finds she’s ill-equipped to deal with the trials of a mortal life. After all, why would a goddess need to know how to gather food or light a fire?
Unable to fend for herself, she teams up with Belis, warrior daughter of Boudicca, on a perilous journey to the afterlife to try to restore her powers. Frustrated by her frail human body and its inability to run a hundred miles in a single day, Mallt might not make the best travelling companion. But as animosity slowly turns to attraction, these two very different women must learn to work together if they are to have any hope of surviving their quest.
Expected release: 3rd February (Orbit Books)
Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur
Ian McDonald
Come one, come all to the dinosaur circus!
Tif Tamim wants nothing more than to be a dinosaur buckaroo. An orphan in search of a place to rest his head and a job to weigh down his pockets, Tif has bounced from circus to circus, yearning for a chance to ride a prehistoric beauty under the sparkling lights of a big-top.
To become a buckaroo, Tif needs to learn the tools of the trade, yet few dino maestros want to take a scrawny nobody from nowhere under their wing. But when Tif frees a dino from an abusive owner and braves the roving gangs of the formerly-American west to bring the dino to safety, he catches someone’s eye. And boy, how those eyes dazzle Tif from the back of a bucking carnotaur.
Expected release: 12th February (Tor)
Operation Bounce House
Matt Dinniman
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU BECOME YOUR PLANET’S FINAL BOSS?
PRE-ORDER THIS EPIC AND FAST-PACED NOVEL FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SMASH-HIT DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL AND JOIN THE FIGHT.
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All New Sonoran colonist Oliver Lewis ever wanted to do is run the family ranch and keep their aging fleet of intelligent agriculture bots ticking.
But now the colossal Apex Corporation has been hired to commence an “eviction action” – exterminate all life on New Sonora in preparation for a reboot. And they charge bored Earthers for the opportunity to design their own war machines, remotely pilot them, and make it a game.
The game is called Operation Bounce House . . .
And New Sonora is its playing field.
Determined to defend the only home he’s ever known, Oliver and his friends find themselves fighting for their lives against these machines.
To earth its a game, but to Oliver, it’s war.
Expected release: 12th February (Michael Joseph)
Pretenders to the Throne of God
Adrian Tchaikovsky
As the Palleseen’s campaign to bring Perfection and Correctness to an imperfect world rages on, Eres Ffenegh – “the City on the Back of a Crab” – is the next state slated for conquest. But its citizens won’t give up sovereignty easily.
The siege has dragged into winter and the defenders – both locals and Pal renegades – hold an uneasy alliance against the enemy at the gates, while the Pal army is looking over its shoulder for the next self-destructive dictate of their government back home.
Within the city, Devil Jack, a good man apprenticed to the notorious conjurer known as the Widow, is driven to bargaining with hell to get back what he’s lost. Meanwhile Kiffel ea Leachan is the city’s champion, a child of privilege who’s just lost everything to the invaders. Both must try to survive the siege and make their own destinies in a world that’s cut them loose.
Outside the city, Pal reinforcements have arrived to take the city, but it’s the sort of help that might just damn them all…
Expected release: 12th February (Head of Zeus)
Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter
Heather Fawcett
All strays are welcome here.
From Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Heather Fawcett comes a healing and heart-warming fantasy with magic shops, rescue cats and a second chance at love.
Agnes Aubert is very fond of making lists. These lists kept her afloat when she lost her husband two years ago. And now, as the founder of a cat rescue charity, her meticulous organization skills feel like the only thing standing between her beloved cats – His Majesty, Banshee and sweet elderly Thoreau, to name a few – and utter disaster.
But when Agnes is forced to move the charity, she soon discovers that her new shop is being used as a front; right under her feet is the lair of the decidedly disorganised – not to mention self-absorbed and infuriatingly handsome – Havelock Renard.
Havelock is everything Agnes doesn’t want in her life: chaos, mischief, and a little too much adventure. But as she gets to know him, she discovers he’s more than the dark magician of legend, and that she may be ready for a little intrigue, perhaps even romance. After all, second chances aren’t just for rescue cats. . .
Expected release: 17th February (Orbit Books)
Beth and Nils Review | Goodreads | Bookshop.org
The Cellar Below the Cellar
Ivy Grimes
A playfully dark folk horror inspired by the fairy tale “Vasilisa the Beautiful” and the mythology around Frau Perchta, set under the blazing sky of endless auroras.
When a wild solar storm wipes out all electronics and traps Jane at her grandmother’s house in the woods, she is forced to start a new life off-grid as part of a small, isolated community.
However, there is something very strange about her new neighbors, and the longer she lives under the eerie glow of the auroras, the more she feels her grandmother may be hiding unsettling secrets.
To have any hope in her new world, Jane must find the courage to step into her power and claim her identity, but that would mean facing whatever hides in the cellar below the cellar–a place that seems to be waiting for her.
Full of delightfully weird surprises and off-kilter characters, this adult coming-of-age story explores themes of female empowerment, spirituality, identity, and community. For fans of Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Leonora Carrington.
Expected release: 18th February (Violet Lichen)
RSL’s review | Goodreads | Bookshop.org
A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing
Alice Evelyn Yang
Qianze has not seen her father in eleven years, since he walked out of her life the night of her fourteenth birthday and disappeared without a trace. But then she gets a call—there is a man on the porch of her childhood home, and he’s asking for her. This man isn’t the Ba Qianze remembers: he is much older, more fragile, and worst of all, haunted by a half-forgotten prophecy.
While Qianze wrestles with what she owes this near-stranger, Ba begins telling stories of his past. From his bloody days as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution to his mother’s youth under Japanese occupation, he circles around the prophecy he came to deliver. Qianze has always longed to know more about her family history, but as Ba reveals a past far darker than she could have imagined, she finds herself plagued by strange visions—fox spirits trail her on her evening commute, a terrifying jackalope stalks her nightmares, and the looming prophecy slinks ever closer.
Spanning decades and continents, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is a dark, magical realist family saga that moves through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the Cultural Revolution, and the present day to explore the effects of intergenerational trauma, the legacy of colonialism and inescapability of fate in stunningly rendered folklore.
Expected release: 19th February (Dead Ink Books)
Sentient
Michael Nayak
The survivors of the South Pole massacre will find that getting off the Antarctic continent may cost them their lives… Months after the events of Symbiote, sunrise has come to the ice continent, bringing with it the beginning of the annual tourist season.
Where 1,500 summer visitors will soon call the coastal McMurdo Station home.
With them are the architects of the classified CIA program that unleashed the deadly microbes, who are determined to uncover what happened with their experiment and harvest samples of the mutation to turn into a biological weapon.
However, when Ben Jacobs returns from an impossible journey to the Pole and is reunited with Penny – an asymptomatic carrier of the symbiotic microbes – all hell breaks loose.
When the sea ice surrounding the station becomes a fertile breeding ground for a new and more dangerous infestation, Rajan Chariya and his friends will have to join forces with the CIA to fight the onslaught of infected “sea people” roving the streets.
With tensions high and stakes even higher, the question becomes when will the group stop being useful, and start becoming targets who know too much?
Worse, there may be more than one asymptomatic carrier….
With a heart-stopping pace and twists that will leave readers breathless, Sentient is a thrilling sequel that brilliantly combines all the best horror tropes with real world scenarios.
Expected release: 24th February (Angry Robot)
Cleopatra
Saara El-Arifi
YOU KNOW MY NAME.
BUT YOU DO NOT KNOW ME.
Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love’s thrall.
Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves.
Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children.
How wilfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, divinely blessed to rule.
Death will silence me no longer.
This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived.
From one of the most remarkable and acclaimed storytellers of her generation, the #1 bestselling author of FAEBOUND and THE FINAL STRIFE, this epic and groundbreaking new novel shows us Cleopatra on her own terms.
Expected release: 26th February (The Borough Press)
The Misheard World
Aliya Whiteley
Before wars are won, they must be witnessed.
Elize Janview is a soldier, one of the few survivors of an unimaginably terrible weapon, which ended the long détente between the North and the South and plunged them back into all-out war. She enlisted with a dream of finding those responsible, of somehow getting revenge for the deaths of everyone she knew, but was posted to guard the prison at Crag, the fortress of the South, which has never fallen to the enemy.
Janview’s life is transformed when a rough wooden box is delivered to Crag, holding the performer and spy Marius Mondegreen, agent of the North: the Misheard Word, who can read minds, breathe fire, and make objects appear and disappear. Janview is to witness Mondegreen’s interrogation by his captor, the beautiful and cruel Allynx Syld, who promises the end of the war. As recorder – and by degrees participant – in the interrogation, Janview comes to question everything she knew about the war, and the very world she lives in…
Expected release: 26th February (Solaris)
The Red Winter
Cameron Sullivan
Inspired by the eighteenth-century legend of the Beast of Gévaudan, The Red Winter is a lusty, dark, queer fantasy – perfect for fans of The Witcher and Susanna Clarke.
A devastating love story. A bewitching twist on history. A blood-drenched hunt for purpose, power and redemption.
In 1785, Professor Sebastian Grave receives the news he fears most: the terrible Beast of Gévaudan has returned, and the French countryside runs red in its wake. Sebastian knows the Beast. A monster-slayer with centuries of experience, he joined the hunt for the creature twenty years ago and watched it slaughter its way through a long and bloody winter. Even with the help of Sarmodel, the demon he plays host to, bringing the monster down nearly cost him his life.
Now, two decades later, Sebastian has been recalled to the hunt by Antoine Avenel d’Ocerne, an estranged lover who shares a dark history with the Beast and a terrible secret with Sebastian. Drawn by both the chance to finish the Beast for good and the promise of a reconciliation with Antoine, Sebastian cannot refuse.
Some monsters, it seems, simply won’t stay buried . . .
Expected release: 26th February (Tor)
Saltswept
Katalina Watt
A RAGTAG CREW. A PERILOUS QUEST.
A pirate faces the gallows drop. A farmer is given a terrible ultimatum to save her daughter. An acolyte ascends to priestesshood, only to find that a blessing really can be a curse. These unlikely bedfellows band together with an inscrutable pickpocket and a talking ottercat in pursuit of the most hopeless of causes: to sail into the Maelstrom, a raging whirlpool from which no one has ever escaped, and find the mysterious treasure hidden within it.
The quest will test their fragile allegiance to its limits, but there is more at stake here than getting rich: the magic of the world is in peril, and the barrier between life and death has never been so thin. And in the Bastion, the seat of power in Paranish, the queen has an unquenchable thirst that threatens the world and everyone in it.
Can there be honour amongst thieves? Without it, they might never see another sunrise.
Lush and lyrical, Saltswept is a vibrant debut – the first book in an epic fantasy duology based on Southeast Asian mythology. Perfect for fans of The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, The Bone Ships, and Godkiller.
Expected release: 26th February (Hodderscape)
Weavingshaw
Heba Al-Wasity
‘Leena didn’t believe in monsters until she saw Weavingshaw.’
The Saint of Silence trades coins for every sordid divulgence uttered to him. The darker the secret, the higher the price.
Leena has a secret, one that has haunted her since she was seventeen – she can see the dead. When her brother falls ill, she knows what she must do: seek the Saint.
But Leena’s secret is more valuable to him that she could have imagined. To save her brother, she must make a deal with him to find the ghost he’s searching for.
All paths lead to Weavingshaw, a cursed estate on the moors. As Leena grows closer to the Saint, and is plunged into his world of danger, deceit and desire, she learns that he is hiding his own secrets – ones that have the power to destroy them all.
Expected release: 26th February (Bantam Books)
The Witch and the Wolf
Lindsey Kelk
Discover the sequel to gothic fantasy sensation The Bell Witches from Sunday Times bestseller, Lindsey Kelk.
Blood is thicker than water…
Since arriving in Savannah, Emily Bell has faced prophecies, werewolves, family secrets and her own grandmother’s attempt to take her life.
But, strangely, surrounded by her friends and new family, Savannah has never felt more like home.
Now, faced with the absence of her love, Wyn, as he wrestles with his new abilities as a werewolf, and burdened with the task of finding her fellow witches to avert the prophecy that surrounds her, Emily is attacked by a new threat. A lone wolf that will stop at nothing to destroy her.
Emily must act fast and find out the wolf’s identity before it kills her and all those she cares about. She will soon find out she can’t do everything alone, and that a burden shared is a burden halved…
Expected release: 26th February (Magpie)
Live Love Lasso
Hazel Mack
LEMON
I screwed up my first solo potion and now the customer is covered in hives. If that disaster wasn’t bad enough, knowing it might get my family’s potions house gobbled up by a competitor is the icing on the cake. What I didn’t expect was for my father to ship me off to the Wild West monster haven of Pine Gulch as punishment. He calls it an opportunity to learn. Pfft. Pine Gulch is a temporary setback—I’ll get back to the city in a New York minute.
Except things don’t go as planned when a mysterious sickness befalls the haven’s animals. Before I know it I’m smack dab in the middle of an investigation. Unfortunately, Furyon Zayle, the ranger in charge of the investigation, is a smoking-hot dark elf with an unnatural amount of charm. Him staring at me might be hot if I wasn’t being accused of somehow manufacturing the illness.
I’m a fish out of water in the worst possible way, but the pull between Furyon and me is stronger than the threat of my guilt. He introduces me to the beautiful corners of Pine Gulch—hidden pumpkin mazes, a herd of wild mustangs, a magical auction house, and the saucy town herself.
Our connection deepens as I start to fall in love with the wildness of this country haven and its people…one specifically. But good things don’t last as the investigation closes in on me. I know I’m innocent, but can Furyon and I find the culprit before I end up behind bars?
Expected release: 28th February
March
Paradise
Ben Tufnell
A world on the brink of collapse. Dense woods, mountains, a standing stone, a barrow, and a very old house. But if you’ve only ever known concrete and glass, how do you live in a place like this?
Recruited by a mysterious organisation, Nash thinks things are finally going his way. But when a job goes badly wrong, he is taken to an isolated location to await a decision on his fate.
Paradise is a crumbling cottage deep in a forest; Nash is free to leave the house but must not leave the woods. It is winter, and this wild and remote place is unknowable and terrifying. He attempts to map his surroundings to find a way out, but they resist him, the land seemingly shifting and changing. Moreover, he begins to suspect that his employers’ intentions may be much darker than anticipated.
Forming an unlikely friendship, Nash finally begins to understand the consoling power of the place that has become his home. Brigid is sure of herself and at home in the natural world, while he is urban, lost. But she longs for his world, and he longs for hers.
Now the wheel of the year is turning. As winter gives way to spring Nash’s fate has been decided, and they are coming to deliver their verdict…
Paradise is the brilliant new novel from Ben Tufnell, an uncategorizable Kafkaesque eco-thriller combining elements of noir, folk horror and nature writing, addressing the most urgent of contemporary issues.
Expected release: 5th March (Influx Press)
The First Step
Tao Wong
Long Wu Ying never expected to join a Sect or become a real cultivator. His days were spent studying, planting rice on the family farm and spending time with his friends. Fate, however, has different plans for Wu Ying and when the army arrives at his village, he and many other members of the village are conscripted. Given the opportunity to join the Verdant Green Waters Sect, Wu Ying must decide between his pedestrian, common life and the exciting, blood soaked life of a cultivator.
Join Wu Ying as he takes his first step on his Thousand Li journey to become an immortal cultivator.
The First Step is the first novel in A Thousand Li series, a book on cultivation, immortals, wondrous martial art styles and spirit beasts and will be loved by wuxia and xanxia fans. The First Step is written by Tao Wong, the bestselling scifi and fantasy LitRPG author of the System Apocalypse, Adventures on Brad and the Hidden Wishes.
Expected release: 10th March (Ace Books)
The Fox and the Devil
Kiersten White
An obsession with a beautiful serial killer entangles a vampire hunter’s daughter in an immortal sapphic romance in this mesmerising new gothic fantasy from the bestselling author of Lucy Undying.
Anneke has a complicated relationship with her father, Abraham Van Helsing – doctor, scientist, and madman devoted to studying vampires – up until the night she comes home to find him murdered, with a surreally beautiful woman looming over his body.
It soon becomes clear that her father isn’t the only inexplicably dead body.
So, obsessed with vengeance, and armed with the latest in forensic and investigatory techniques, Anneke puts together a team of detectives to catch her mysterious serial killer.
But, for reasons even she can’t explain, Anneke keeps some crucial evidence to herself: infuriatingly coy letters, addressed only to her, occasionally soaked in blood, and always signed Diavola.
Devil.
The obsession is mutual, and all the more dangerous for it.
And the closer Anneke gets to her devil, the less sense the world makes.
Could her father have been right all along?
Could Diavola be something even more deadly than a serial killer?
Because as Anneke unearths more of Diavola’s tragic past, she suspects there’s still a heart somewhere in that undead body.
A heart that beats for Anneke alone.
Expected release: 10th March (Del Ray)
The Midnight Muse
Jo Kaplan
When a metal band’s lead singer vanishes in the woods, the mushrooms in the forest might know more than they’re letting on in this mycelium-metal horror novel from Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author Jo Kaplan.
The dead collect in low places. That’s what Brynn Werner, lead singer of metal band Queen Carrion, wrote in her notebook before she vanished while staying at a cabin in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest.
A year later, on the anniversary of her disappearance, the rest of her bandmates visit the cabin to remember her and find a way to move on. But tensions arise over who should be their new singer and who is responsible for Brynn’s disappearance—tensions that boil over as they realize not all is as it seems at Trail Creek Cabin.
Strange entries in the guestbook write about visions of a pale form that moves through the trees, figures wearing gas masks lurk in the distance, and there’s a strange fungus growing from the wall of a tunnel in the cabin’s basement. Then they hear Brynn’s voice echo impossibly through the forest—and the pale form that emerges from the trees is her perfect likeness. Is it her ghost…or something else?
Brynn knew there was a secret in these woods. It’s why she chased her muse here to finish her masterpiece. The Midnight Muse is an alluring and grotesque dissection of self and fungus. Kaplan delivers an ominous spiral of psychological torment as the members of Queen Carrion slip into a more natural skin.
Expected release: 10th March (Clash Books)
RSL’s Review | Goodreads | Waterstones
The Memory Bookshop
Song Yu-jeong
THE KOREAN SENSATION
For lovers of The Midnight Library and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, discover a spellbinding novel about a mysterious bookshop that exists outside of time and space, where the past is only a page away…
If you’re lost, you’ll find The Memory Bookshop
Where the shelves are endless. The books, strangely familiar. And where memories are bound in pages.
When Jiwon cautiously crosses the threshold, she’s met by Manager K and offered no explanation, only a mysterious hourglass and a rare opportunity: to travel back to three chapters of her life.
But returning to the past isn’t without risk. In exchange, Jiwon has to give up time in her future.
As she wanders between the shelves, the bookshop humming with memories and regrets, she must ask herself: can the past truly be rewritten? Or does the real magic lie in the life she’s yet to live?
Warm, wise and full of wonder, The Memory Bookshop is a story about the power of books to carry us home.
Expected release: 12th March (HarperCollins)
A Remedy for Fate
M. A. Kuzniar
CAN SHE RECOVER HER HEART?
Prague, 1769. In the Magic Quarter of the jewel-box city of Prague, Thea runs Stiltskin’s Apothecary. There, she brews potions to chase away nightmares and soothe heartache – and strikes bargains to change her customers’ fates. The only fate she cannot change? Her own.
Seven years ago, Thea bargained away her heart and her memories to the apothecary’s owner, the cold, yet enigmatic Jasper, for reasons she cannot remember, and a reward she cannot recall.
Then one day a stranger arrives with an unusual request. One that will upturn Thea’s entire existence – and offer her a precious chance to recover her heart . . .
Prepare to be enchanted by this spellbinding historical fantasy romance from the author of Midnight in Everwood, steeped in magic, found family and love.
Expected release: 12th March (Hodderscape)
Intergalactic Feast
Lavanya Lakshminarayan
FEAST boggles the mind, delivers a sucker-punch to the senses, and launches food into the far future. It blends rich, evocative memories with impossible dreams. Just add water!
It has been three months since Saraswati Kaveri and Serenity Ko won Interstellar MegaChef with their groundbreaking new food simulation, Feast.
But victory is only the beginning. Saras is busy promoting their invention as the public face of Feast, while Ko keeps fighting battles to steer its development at XP Inc. And then there’s the kiss. They’ve decided to just be friends for now, at least until the sim’s impending launch, but the memory of that heady night hangs over them.
And sometimes it seems the whole galaxy is lined up against them. Saraswati’s secret past is coming under scrutiny, while old rivals are running smear campaigns against her. The cookery world is divided over Feast, proclaiming it a bold new invention and a betrayal of the chef’s art by turns.
And others see Feast’s darker potential—not as an experience, but as a weapon…
Expected release: 12th March (Solaris)
Spoiled Milk
Avery Curran
In 1928, Emily Locke’s final year at the isolated Briarley School for Girls is derailed when Violet, the school’s brightest star (and a cunning beauty for whom Emily would do anything), falls to her death on her eighteenth birthday. Emily and her buttoned-up rival Evelyn are, for once, in agreement: Violet’s death was no accident. There’s an obvious culprit, the French schoolmistress with whom Violet was getting a little too close – they just need to prove it.
Desperate for answers, Emily and her classmates turn to spiritualism, hoping for a glimpse of wisdom from the great beyond. To their shock, Violet’s spirit appears, choosing pious Evelyn as her unlikely medium. And Violet has a warning for them: the danger has just begun.
Something deadly is infecting Briarley. It starts with rotten food and curdled milk, but quickly grows more threatening. As the body count rises and students race to save themselves, Emily must confront the fatal forces poisoning the school. Emily’s fight for survival forces her to reevaluate everything she knows: about Violet, Evelyn, Briarley, and, ultimately, herself.
Avery Curran channels the indelible ambience and intrigue of the classic boarding school novel while turning the beloved genre on its head in this visceral, exuberant debut.
Expected release: 12th March (Riverrun)
The Book of Fallen Leaves
A. S. Tamaki
Sen Hoshiakari is an exiled prince of a clan that lost everything in his father’s failed rebellion. Deprived of his birthright, Sen is determined to restore his family’s lands and honour at any cost.
Rui is a peasant girl who saved Sen’s life on the night his family were put to the sword. But now, she is adrift and unsure of her place in the world, not knowing that the gods themselves have plans for her.
As civil war throws the empire into chaos, and demons seek vengeance on the living, Sen and Rui must fight for both their clan and their shared future . . .
But vengeance demands a bloody price.
Debut author A. S. Tamaki weaves a powerful tale of ambition, vengeance and sacrifice in this masterful fantasy retelling of an ancient Samurai saga, packed with memorable characters, stunning worldbuilding and epic adventure
Expected release: 17th March (Orbit Books)
Nils’ Review | Goodreads | Bookshop.org
The Fire Within Stars
E. C. Hibbs
If we are bound to be shunned regardless, then we can at least be happy. We can love, and be loved. That’s all that matters.
Beatrice, once a symbol of hope, now finds Nightland turning against her. Princess Alba has awakened, and despite objections from Queen Victoria, Rosahild is determined to restore the Wolfharts to full power.
Joining forces with roguish seafarer Theodore Frederic, and her mother’s enemy Prince Edward, Beatrice and her friends flee to the Ravenswood. However, their plan to revive Gretchen from poisoned sleep attracts the attention of an ancient order of fierce warriors.
With Rosahild on the hunt and General Fitcher’s forces growing stronger, Beatrice must find the delicate balance between her love for Gretchen and the safety of her fellow ravens. And when a ghostly nightingale targets her, she must face a new kind of threat, strong enough to tear the Nightland border apart.
Expected release: 17th March
The Wonder Engine
T. Kingfisher
In this brilliant sequel to Clockwork Boys, old foes resurface, and Slate and Caliban are forced to deal with the echoes of their past choices. From New York Times bestselling, Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher.
Slate and her crew have arrived in Anuket City, the city of artificial marvels where Clockwork Boys are created. But the secret of their existence is as mysterious as ever.
Slate has a history in Anuket City, history which just won’t leave her alone. And her increasing attraction to Caliban is driving her up the wall. Caliban is, of course, too noble to do anything about it.
As Slate’s history in the city grows more entangled with their mission, the group’s chances of survival seem to be getting ever slimmer. If they’re to stand a chance of destroying the Clockwork Boys, Slate must confront her past, and find a way to stop it from killing them all.
Expected release: 17th March (Titan Books)
Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories
Amal El-Mohtar
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth, Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories is a collection of acclaimed and awarded work from Amal El-Mohtar.
With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose.
Full of Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award-winning and nominated stories, Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories includes ‘Seasons of Glass and Iron’, ‘The Green Book’, ‘Madeleine’, ‘The Lonely Sea in the Sky’, ‘And Their Lips Rang with the Sun’, ‘The Truth About Owls’, ‘A Hollow Play’, ‘Anabasis’, ‘To Follow the Waves’, ‘John Hollowback and the Witch’, ‘Florilegia, or, Some Lies About Flowers’, ‘Pockets’ and more.
Expected release: 24th March (Arcadia Books)
Daughter of Crows
Mark Lawrence
The survivor of a brutal academy must exhume her own past in the first book in a new series from the international bestselling author of the Library Trilogy and the Broken Empire series.
Set a thief to catch a thief. Set a monster to punish monsters.
The Academy of Kindness exists to create agents of retribution, cast in the image of the Furies—known as the kindly ones—against whom even the gods hesitate to stand. Each year a hundred girls are sold to the Academy. Ten years later only three will emerge.
The Academy’s halls run with blood. The few that survive its decade-long nightmare have been forged on the sands of the Wound Garden. They have learned ancient secrets amid the necrotic fumes of the Bone Garden. They leave its gates as avatars of vengeance, bound to uphold the oldest of laws.
Only the most desperate would sell their child to the Kindnesses. But Rue … she sold herself. And now, a lifetime later, a long and bloody lifetime later, just as she has discovered peace, war has been brought to an old woman’s doorstep.
That was a mistake.
Expected release: 26th March (HarperVoyager)
Wolf Worm
T. Kingfisher
Something darker than the devil stalks the North Carolina woods in Wolf Worm, an original gothic masterpiece from Sunday Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher.
Perfect for fans of Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling.
The year is 1899 and Sonia Wilson is a scientific illustrator without work, prospects or hope. When the reclusive Dr. Halder offers her a position illustrating his vast collection of insects, Sonia jumps at the chance to move to his North Carolina manor house and put her talents to use.
But soon enough she finds that there are darker things at work in the Carolina woods.
What happened to her predecessor, Halder’s wife?
Why are animals acting so strangely?
And what is behind the peculiar local whispers about ‘blood thieves’?
With the aid of the housekeeper and a local healer, Sonia discovers that Halder’s entomological studies have taken him down a dark road full of parasitic maggots that burrow into human flesh – and that his monstrous experiments may grow to encompass his newest illustrator . . .
Expected release: 26th March (Tor Nightfire)
Steel Gods
Richard Swan
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION BECKONS. SPIRITUAL CATASTROPHE LOOMS.
AND THE EMPIRE OF THE WOLF TEETERS ON THE BRINK
The true horror of the Great Silence has been revealed. As nation after nation succumbs to the mind-plague and Sova scrambles to enlist help from across the globe, Ambassador Renata Rainer has been given a simple task: save the world.
While she travels to the Principality of Casimir to enlist the help of the Empire’s oldest enemy, Lieutenant Peter Kleist returns to the haunted forests of the New East to search for ancient answers – and finally confront the terrible fate that awaits him. In their wake, a task force of engineers, soldiers, and arcane experts will try and unpick the final secrets of the Great Silence – on both sides of the mortal plane.
But time is running out. Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg has returned to the capital, armed with a terrible vision and enough madness to see it through. Those who stand in his way face a simple choice: join the revolution, or die.
As the world tips towards chaos, all paths converge on the Eye of the Sea, where the fabric of reality wears thin – and where the Empire of the Wolf must confront the most terrible enemy it has ever known.
Steel Gods is the second novel in the Great Silence trilogy from Sunday Times bestselling author Richard Swan – a dark flintlock fantasy filled with epic adventure, arcane mysteries and creeping dread
Expected release: 31st March (Orbit Books)
April
The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains
Reena McCarty
Discover a world of enchanted contracts, faerie intrigue and French toast, in this delightful debut packed full of wit, charm, adventure and heart, with a dash of magical bureaucracy and a sprinkling of romance.
When Poppy Hill was a child, she was stolen from her family’s Montana homestead and taken ‘Otherside’ to the land of the Fae, where she spent more than a century as a cook in the Wild King’s castle. Now back in the human world, she works for a company that brokers faerie bargains, checking for loopholes in their contracts.
But when a bargain that Poppy is negotiating goes disastrously wrong, she must return to the world she grew up in to try to rectify her mistake, facing danger, intrigue and a pesky ex-boyfriend along the way.
Expected release: 7th April (Orbit Books)
The Book Witch
Meg Shaffer
Rainy March is a proud third-generation book witch, sworn to defend works of fiction from all foes real and imaginary. With her magical umbrella and feline familiar, she jumps into and out of novels to fix malicious alterations and wrangle characters that go off-script.
Book witches live by a strict code: Real people belong in the real word; fictional characters belong in works of fiction…. Do not eat, drink, or sleep inside a fictional world, lest you become part of the story. Falling in love with a fictional character? Don’t even think about it.
Except Rainy has fallen hard for the Duke of Chicago, the dashing British detective who stars in her favorite noir series. After their illicit romance is exposed, Rainy is forbidden from ever seeing her fictional lover again, lest she be expelled from her book coven-and forced to give up the magical gifts that are as much a part of her as her own name.
When a priceless book is stolen from her home, there’s only one person she trusts to help her get it back: the Duke. Thus their shared quest begins through the worlds of Alice in Wonderland, The Great Gatsby, and other classics that will reveal hidden enemies and long-buried family secrets.
Expected release: 9th Aptil (Arcadia)
The Faraway Inn
Sarah Beth Durst
Get cosy at The Faraway Inn, the YA fantasy from bestselling author of The Spellshop, Sarah Beth Durst.
When sixteen-year-old Calisa arrives at her great-aunt’s bed and breakfast for the summer, she’s shocked to find it run down rather than cosy. Grumpy and eccentric, Auntie Zee is determined to keep anyone from messing with her beloved inn . . . even though she clearly needs the help.
To convince her great-aunt to keep her around, Calisa sets to work fixing up the inn, enlisting extra help from the groundkeeper’s (handsome) son. But the longer she stays, the surer she is that there’s something strange about the B&B – and its residents. Something almost . . . otherworldly.
The inn is hiding a magical secret – but secrets are like doors. Once Calisa opens this one, she won’t be able to go back . . .
Expected release: 9th April (First Ink)
The Impossible Garden of Clara Thorne
Summer N. England
Enchantment is in the air . . .
After a lonely childhood, Clara Thorne is finally living “happily ever after” as the magically-gifted gardener for the town of Moss. Sure, her closest companion is a surly hedgehog, and she’s forever stuck on the first line of her novel, but she has a home. That is, until The Goddess chooses Clara for an important quest-travel to the cursed town of Dwindle and grow them a garden. In less than a month.
Only Clara’s hiding a terrible secret: her magic doesn’t work outside Moss. Worse, The Goddess has assigned the absurdly sexy, annoyingly cheerful Hesper Altanfall to keep her safe. Clara would rather eat thorns than accept help-especially since Hesper insists that Clara’s magic is bound to her heart, not her home.
Nevertheless, the two can’t help growing closer as they traverse enchanted woods and share tavern beds. But with an ancient evil threatening from the shadows, saving Dwindle will require more than enchanted crops. Clara will need to unearth a magic she’s always believed impossible.
Love grows in the most impossible of places in Summer N. England’s sweet and spicy debut cosy romantasy for fans of The Spellshop and Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea.
Expected release: 9th April (Hodderscape)
The Hive
Ronald Malfi
An epic, Lovecraftian horror novel in the vein of Black River Orchard and American Elsewhere about a small town that becomes obsessed with a series of random objects left strewn across their town in the aftermath of a storm. From the Bram Stoker award-nominated and bestselling author of Come with Me.
The residents of Mariner’s Cove are changing…
In the aftermath of a violent storm, a collective obsession is rapidly developing among the people of this quaint suburban neighborhood. Random, everyday items left scattered upon the lawns, the streets, and the shoreline all seem to call out to them. There is an item for almost everyone, and each item has a certain hold over the person who finds it-a hold that soon turns into unwavering infatuation. They hide their items from each other, obsess over them, and they will do anything-anything-to protect them.
The collective hum of bees’ wings…
A young boy finds himself the possessor of a strange and inexplicable power. Is the arrival of this power linked to the increasingly odd and dangerous behavior of the residents of Mariner’s Cove? Has he been granted this power in order to thwart whatever is about to happen in this small, bayside community, or is there a more sinister purpose?
All hail the Dragon…
All eyes are on him now.
The residents of Mariner’s Cove are watching.
They move as one, like a solitary organism, and will do anything to succeed in their single-minded purpose.
They will not be stopped.
Expected release: 14th April (Titan Books)
A River from the Sky
Ai Jiang
From the Nebula and Bram Stoker Award-winning author comes the lyrical and moving science-fantasy follow-up to A Palace Near the Wind, as Lufeng and her sister Sangshu fight to protect their culture and their world. For readers of Nghi Vo, Amal El-Mohtar and Kritika H. Rao.
Fleeing from the bone palace and crashing into the waters below its steep walls, Lufeng and her siblings reach Gear, with its huge deadly water wheels, where their sister Sangshu is waiting for them. In the chaos of the enormous waves, within moments they’re snatched away and taken into rebel territory, where they learn more of the deadly experiments Zinc has wreaked upon the people.
Loyal to Copper now, Sangshu herself is a victim of Zinc’s experiments. Desperate to find her family, she races through Gear to Engine, ruthless Zinc’s industrial heartland, where she burns with a desire to fix her own mistakes and those of others and find a way to save her world.
This powerful, beautifully told novella explores the bonds of family, the pain of leaving all you have known behind, and the terrible price of our industrial future.
Expected release: 21st April (Titan Books)
The Antiquarian’s Object of Desire
India Holton
When two history professors and best friends are forced to fake hate to protect their reputations, chaos ensues, in the next rollicking historical-fantasy rom-com from beloved author India Holton.
Magical-antique experts Amelia Tarrant and Caleb Sterling have been best friends forever, although lately each has begun secretly wishing for more than friendship. But when rumors about their relationship spread, they’re forced to fake being enemies to protect their reputations and keep their jobs.
The resulting arguments spark havoc across Oxford University, and when they cause an explosion while fighting over a magical antique, it’s the final straw for their exasperated faculty head. He dispatches them to a job in Cumbria where even they can’t get into trouble.…
Which proves just how wrong one man can be. In a stormbound old manor house, Amelia and Caleb face magical mayhem and rampaging ghosts that make the previous havoc look mild in comparison. Most troublesome of all, though, is the secret of how they feel about each other. When it comes to tackling deadly antiques, hiding the truth in their hearts could destroy them for real.
Expected release: 23rd April (Penguin Books)
Night Babies
Lucie McKnight Hardy
The haunting new folk horror novel from Lucie McKnight Hardy
‘All my fears have vanished, and I realise now that my dreams were not nightmares but a sign of what was to come, how this will end. An inevitability.’
Things were looking up for Astrid Aspden and her partner, Kit, until their house flooded. With Astrid’s first solo art exhibition just weeks away, her paintings are ruined and excitement has turned to despair.
She is thrown a lifeline when her best friend Flora invites her to stay in a run-down chapel she and her partner, Sim, are renovating in the Brecon Beacons. As Astrid and Kit settle into their new surroundings to salvage her work, they soon learn about the unsettling history of the chapel and what lies beneath the nearby reservoir.
As the weeks go by, tensions simmer between Astrid and Flora as sour memories flare up from their teenage past and deep wounds are laid bare from an ill-fated school trip to Florence. Her relationship with Kit begins to fray as the chapel and the surrounding hostile beauty of the valley begin to intrude on their lives.
Astrid throws herself into her work but the longer she spends in the chapel the more she begins to notice things: handprints on her paintings, shadowy figures reflected in the reservoir and voices whispering in the night. As the darkness of the Welsh valley closes in on Astrid, will she be able to run from the looming horror or be consumed by it?
Whether it is the past, the otherworldly, or the truth – they all haunt this menacing and claustrophobic novel.
Expected release: 23rd April (John Murray Publishers)
Thistlemarsh
Moorea Corrigan
FAERIES DISAPPEARED OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, AS SUDDENLY AS SLIPPING THROUGH A DOORWAY. IT WAS ONLY THE VERY FOOLISH, OR THE VERY DETERMINED, WHO HELD OUT HOPE FOR THEIR RETURN…
In the wake of World War I, the world is a decidedly unmagical place. Mouse Dunne once dreamed of becoming a Faerie anthropologist, but with one telegram, her world shattered. At the Somme, her cousin Bertie’s body disappeared into the mud, and her brother Roger came home with devastating shell shock. It was time, she knew, to put aside childish dreams.
Then Mouse receives news that her uncle has left her Thistlemarsh Hall, a crumbling manor in the English countryside, once blessed by the Faerie King himself. But there is a catch: if Mouse does not rehabilitate the house in one month’s time, she will forfeit her inheritance and any hope of caring for her brother.
It looks impossible, until a mysterious Faerie appears with a proposition. Mouse knows better than to trust a Faerie – especially one so insufferably handsome and arrogant – but she is out of options. There are wild and magical forces at work in the house, and Mouse must confront the ghosts of her past… or lose everything.
Expected release: 23rd April (Del Ray)
Witch Queen Rising
Savannah Stephens
PHINE WAS BORN OF THE BAYOU . . . NOW THE TICK WITCH HAS COME HOME
For New Orleans witchkin, there is no greater honor than to become the Prime – chosen to rule. But the title is meant to pass between two rival Houses of magic, not to the wayward daughter of the former Prime who died under mysterious circumstances.
As a girl, Seraphine Barreau was dubbed the Tick Witch for her ability to feed on magic and make it her own. Even among those who alter fate and manipulate reality, she was a powerful outcast feared and misunderstood by her people. Now dragged back to continue the legacy that nearly destroyed her, Phine has her work cut out for her. She must earn the respect of her people, navigate the politics of the paranormal communities residing in her city, and heal a broken heart, all the while battling a parasitic curse poisoning witchkin. Between her werewolf ex, power-hungry vampires, and the skeletons in her family’s closet, Phine must learn to make peace with her past to save her – and all of witchkin’s – future.
Expected release: 23rd April (Gollancz)
Japanese Gothic
Kylie Lee Baker
2025
Lee can’t remember exactly where he hid the body, but he can remember the blood. Hiding out at his father’s centuries-old home in Japan, Lee knows something is wrong with him, and he knows it has something to do with his mother’s disappearance almost a decade ago.
1877
A female samurai, Sen, stalks the borders of her home to protect her family from slaughter after the abolition of the samurai class. She’s not sure how they’ll ever survive, not without her father, who has returned from war with a different soul behind his eyes.
When Lee and Sen find one another through a door between their worlds, they’re both looking for answers. But what they find in the creaking old house they share is beyond what either of them could imagine…
Expected release: 30th April (Hodderscape)
May
The Last Contract of Isako
Fonda Lee
Get ready to be blown away by this searing standalone science fiction epic where corporate samurai fight beneath merciless stars, and death is always a mere breath away.
Isako is a legendary swordswoman, but every legend has to come to an end. When her long-time client unexpectedly retires, she plans to follow-to walk out into the frozen wasteland of their planet with her head held high and her family enriched by her legacy. But when a competitor offers her a final mission, it’s one she can’t refuse. Soon, she’s thrust deep into a world of corporate espionage, duty-bound duels, and shadowy secrets. What she uncovers will change humanity’s existence in the stars forever.
The Last Contract of Isako is the sci-fi you didn’t know you needed: corporate samurai… in space. This is the first adult science fiction novel from the award-winning author of Jade City.
Expected release: 5th May (Orbit Books)
The Bone Door
Frances White
How far will you go to open The Bone Door?
When Hop awakens in an ancient labyrinth, he has no memory of his life, or how he got here.
He does not recognise the mysterious girl trapped with him.
And he certainly cannot identify the shadowy figure stalking him, whispering terrible things . . .
But there is one thing he is certain of.
He must escape.
The only way out of the labyrinth is through The Bone Door. But it lies behind a series of locked doors hidden across an array of strange realms. To open the way, Hop must complete impossible tasks before his time runs out.
As Hop travels deeper into the maze, he discovers that he and his companions may be more connected to the place and its horrors than he could ever imagine.
Unless Hop is able to unravel the true mystery of the labyrinth, and his own role within it, the Bone Door and any hope of escape will be lost forever.
Expected release: 7th May (Michael Joseph)
The Girl with a Thousand Faces
Sunyi Dean
From the USA Today bestselling author of The Book Eaters comes The Girl with a Thousand Faces, a Gothic tale set in a historical Hong Kong that meshes ancient myths and local legends into a haunting story of ghosts, grief, and women who will not forgive.
When Mercy Chan washed up on the shores of Hong Kong with no family, no money, and no memories, she was thrust into the horrors of World War II. She only survived by hiding in Kowloon Walled City, an infamous, ghost-infested slum full of lost and traumatized civilians. Since the end of the war, she has rebuilt her life and found work with the local triad as a ghost-talker, dealing with the angry and bitter spirits who haunt this place. These days, the filthy gutters and cramped alleyways of Kowloon feel like home.
But the past she can’t remember won’t let her go. An unusually powerful ghost has infested Kowloon’s waterways, drowning innocents and threatening the district. Unnervingly, it claims to know Mercy―and her forgotten childhood. As Mercy is drawn into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with this malignant spirit, she begins to realize that the monster she fights within these walls may well be one of her own making.
33 years before, mere days ahead of the Japanese invasion, Sung Siu Yin and her mother flee Hong Kong, intending to hide out on her mother’s ancestral island home. It’s beautiful, tranquil, and remote. . . but also inhabited by ghosts ever since the entire village drowned in a storm many years ago. Still, it’s better than living under occupation.
But as the war drags on and isolation sets in, Siu Yin is increasingly drawn into the island’s grim past―a past that may still have a hold on the present. There is a darkness lurking beneath that idyllic ocean, and it has been waiting many years for someone to return.
Expected release: 7th May (HarperVoyager)
All Hail Chaos
Sarah Rees Brennan
SHE TRIED TO FIX HIM. SHE MADE HIM WORSE.
Rae is a fantasy reader who’s been transported to her favourite fictional world of swords and sorcery, castles and monsters. Playing the villainess, she thought she could change the narrative, but this version of the plot is far more deadly than the one she knew.
Her friends are on the run: the Cobra shelters in an eerie manor haunted by dark secrets, while Emer and Lia stoke a revolution in the gutters. Undead armies roam the kingdom, raiders camp at the city gates, and the all-powerful Emperor – Rae’s favourite character ever, now possibly the greatest monster in the land – wants her to be his evil queen.
Romantic in fiction, complicated in reality. What’s a villainess to do? Time for wicked bargains and fake engagements, in a fantasy where the most dangerous thing you can do is believe in someone.
All Hail Chaos is Sarah Rees Brennan’s wicked, unmissable sequel to the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling Long Live Evil (‘delicious, subversive’ Leigh Bardugo).
Expected release: 12th Maay (Orbit Books)
Moon Over Brendle
Jeff Noon
Magical contemporary fantasy meets fantastical memoir in the new novel from a cult favourite, Jeff Noon.
1968, Joe Sutter is enjoying his last summer before going to secondary school. But this is another world; like ours but very different. Beyond and beside the world we know is Greot; a vast swirling rainbow of many-coloured dust. It settles on the dead, it swathes cities and fields. Joe is one of the 10% of the population who have the gift of being able to see it. But neither he or nor anyone else know what Greot is. Is it the trillion-eyed god? Is it the history of everything told grain-by-grain? Is it prophecy? Is it the magic of creativity?
Joe knows he is something of an outsider, all he wants to do is draw comics and listen to music but one day, as the moon rises over Brendle hill, he meets an old writer of cheap pulp SF books who is determined to pass on to Joe the power and joy of telling stories and everything changes. Decades later Joe is a successful writer of strange and powerful SF novels. And now the time has come to tell the story of how he became a writer and how Greot coloured everything.
Expected release: 12th May (Angry Robot)
Radiant Star
Ann Leckie
Space opera’s sharpest mind returns to the world of the Imperial Radch in this brilliant standalone from
award-winning author Ann Leckie.
The Temporal Location of the Radiant Star has always been a source of both conflict and hope for the people of Ooioiaa. However, the imperial Radch see it only as an inconvenience, an antiquated religious site soon to be absorbed into their own, superior culture. But local politics is complicated, and the Radch have made one last concession: One last man will be allowed to join the mummified bodies in the temporal location to become a “living saint”.
But this one decision will ripple out to affect every part of the city. Amidst a slowly worsening food shortage, riots, and a communication blackout from the rest of the Radch Empire, a religious savant will entertain visions of his own sainthood, a socialite will discover zer comfortable life upended, and a young man sold into servitude will find unlikely escape.
Expected release: 12th May (Orbit Books)
Abyss
Nicholas Binge
This job will eat you alive.
From the bestselling author of Ascension, Nicholas Binge, Abyss is a creeping, Lovecraftian horror about work, technology and existential dread.
Joe Rice is lost – lonely, disconnected and terminally online. His new job as an administrative assistant at the Ponos corporation seems like just another unfulfilling stop-gap. But from his first day, something is deeply wrong. The vast Canary Wharf office is empty, his line manager is a bundle of paranoid energy, and his work is monitored by WellBot, an AI wellness chatbot that demands total honesty while tracking his every move.
As Joe’s tasks descend into a surreal nightmare, he’ll eventually learn that handing in his notice could have deadly consequences . . .
Expected release: 14th May (Macmillan)
The Republic of Memory
Mahmud El Sayed
The Safina is a city ship, two hundred years into its voyage from the ruins of Earth towards a new habitable world. Its crew maintain the ship, generation after generation, while protecting their ‘ancestors’ – the final remnants of Earth’s doomed Network Empire – by keeping them alive in cryostasis.
But a lot can change in two hundred years, and people are starting to ask questions. Why should the crew continue to toil for people none of them remember? What exactly gives Administration its authority over everyone else?
And when the blackouts start, they set in motion a chain of events that will change life on the Safina forever. A reckoning is coming. The system is only secure so long as those in power maintain the obedience of those beneath them.
And the crew has had enough.
A science fiction odyssey of breathtaking scope, The Republic of Memory is a gripping examination of what divides us, and what brings us together. This is a modern and ambitious work of Arabfuturism, and is perfect for fans of The Expanse, A Memory Called Empire or Children of Time.
Expected release: 14th May (Gollancz)
Mortedant’s Peril
RJ Barker
Irody can speak to the dead.
But the living want him silenced.
Mortedants can speak to the dead – and Irody Hasp is the greatest of them. Not that they’ll admit it. And not that anyone actually likes the Mortedants, or Irody in particular.
Nonetheless, Elbay is a city of tradition, and tradition calls for Mortedants to attend a death. But when Irody reads the corpse of a low-level worker, he’s dragged into a conspiracy that will see those closest to him murdered and Irody framed for the crime, the eyes of the city’s guilds, nobles and villains all fixed on him.
With only days to prove his innocence before his execution, Irody is forced to work with unlikely and unwanted allies: a street urchin and a hulking, inhuman mercenary from the sea people’s city of Oknosuka. With danger and death lurking round every corner, and trust a luxury, Irody is running out of time. He must save himself and his friends as well as Elbay – the magnificent, terrifying, complicated city that he loves. Or darkness will fall on them all.
Expected release: 19th May (Tor)
Startup Hell
Caitlin Rozakis
A hilarious contemporary fantasy about a junior sales witch stuck in corporate hell, who has to evade devilish pacts and her kickass, world-saving, demon-slaying mum to save a (surprisingly hot) demon, and work out how to hit her quarterly target. From the New York Times-bestselling author of Dreadful and The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association.
Morgan Blackwater’s mother is a kickass, world-saving, demon-slaying Shadow Council wizard. As for Morgan? Morgan’s a junior salesperson at a tech startup that can’t even decide what its product is. But with magic dyslexia and a disinclination to kick ass, Morgan is doing her best carving out a niche for herself in the mundane world.
Leaving work late one night, she discovers her boss dead from the effort of summoning a demon to trade his soul in order to make his quarterly target. The disturbingly-attractive demon, Lucareoth (Luke for short), is trapped here until he finds someone to sell their soul. While trying to sneak Luke out of the building, Morgan runs into her infamous mother. Apparently, someone has been summoning demons and she’s here to get to the bottom of it.
Trying to protect Luke from her mother, Morgan gets sucked into the Infernal Plane and discovers hell really is a corporate nightmare. She only gets back home with a promise to deliver a human soul of her own. While her coworkers are really annoying, she’s not willing to sacrifice their souls. The company’s tech bro CEO, though, is another story.
With Caitlin Rozakis’s signature wit, STARTUP HELL is a contemporary fantasy that exposes the demonic nature of the corporate world.
Expected release: 19th May (Titan Books)
The Temptation of Charlotte North
Camilla Bruce
A rebellious young woman desperate to escape her predetermined life joins forces with an unlikely ally—a sinister spirit—in this dark gothic fantasy from the acclaimed author of At the Bottom of the Garden .
Be careful what you wish for. It might come true….
In 1910, on a small, remote island that boasts more sheep than people, life does not hold a lot of promise for spirited Charlotte North. Her only escape from both this insular community and a family who does not understand her seems to be through marriage—an institution she is not at all eager to join, given the unhappiness of her parents’ own union. Plus, eligible suitors are few and far between, which is why Charlotte has fallen hard for one the few outsiders to join their community in recent the handsome—and likewise unhappily married—new priest.
And then an ancient tower once rumored to have imprisoned a witch—or an unfaithful wife—crumbles, and releases . . . something. A restless spirit that knocks inside the walls and sends household objects flying. A spirit that seems to have an affinity for Charlotte herself. Though many on the island are terrified of this new interloper, Charlotte sees in it potential. Power. And perhaps even a way to get everything she has most wanted out of life.
Expected release: 19th May (Del Ray)
I Hear A New World
Alan Moore
A continuation of The Great When; a dark and beguiling tour through the streets of London – fictional and real – by a legend of modern fantasy
It’s 1958. A time of Rock and Roll, of protest, riot and change… and London is full of danger. Dennis Knuckleyard is finally growing up, and above all he wants to leave the Great When in the past. For nine years, he’s avoided so much as thinking about the magical shadow version of London, managing even to palm off what should’ve been his last souvenir of that experience – an iron key he secretly brought back.
But while Dennis may believe he’s done with the Great When, it’s not done with him. The unsuspecting rube now in possession of the key has discovered its magical properties, bringing forth mythic, occult beings into Dennis’s London and sparking riots in the capital. Worse still, Dennis hears his first love Grace has returned to the Great When to investigate strange happenings in both cities.
Desperate to keep Grace safe and return London to normal, Dennis follows her back into the hidden city. But once it has him back, The Great When will not let him go away again so easily. He and Grace must fight to set things right or forever lose everything.
Electrifying, absurd, magical and more true than you might believe, I Hear A New World takes the reader back to Long London for a thrilling and fantastical second instalment.
Expected release: 21st May (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Tapestry of Fate
Shannon Chakraborty
Set sail into the second adventure of Amina al-Sirafi as her quest to track down magical artifacts brings her to the island lair of a sorceress whose woven enchantments are impossible to flee…
Amina al-Sirafi thinks she’s struck gold. Tasked with hunting down magical artifacts for the council of immortal peris, she can savour the occasional adventure on the high seas with her cherished criminal companions while still returning home to raise her beloved daughter.
But when Raksh, the spirit of discord with whom she is reluctantly wed, provokes the council’s wrath, Amina is charged with a seemingly impossible quest: steal a spindle capable of rewriting fate from a mysterious sorceress on an island no one can escape.
Forced to leave her daughter, Amina finds her mission almost immediately thrown into peril. But deadly storms, an erratic poison mistress, and old enemies are the least of her worries. For the peris’ story is unravelling, hinting at a far deadlier game whose rules Amina must swiftly puzzle out. A game that sets her against an adversary more cunning and powerful than she has ever faced.
A game that not everyone on her crew wants her to win.
Expected release: 21st May (HarperVoyager)
June
The Unicorn Hunters
Katherine Arden
Anne of Brittany was a child when her land was invaded, her castle besieged, and her royal father driven to his death.
Now Brittany is occupied by her enemies, her treasury empty, and only one thing is lacking to complete her realm’s subjugation: she is required, on pain of the sword, to marry the King of France.
But Anne cannot. She has promised her dead father that Brittany would never be conquered.
Defiantly, she betroths herself in secret to France’s greatest enemy. But in a world where courts may spy on each other by magic, there is only one way to solemnize this illicit union.
Under the guise of a hunting party, Anne takes her court deep into a deep forest, a strange place dogged with rumours of ancient enchantments; a place where diviners cannot see. She tells the French that she had gone there to hunt unicorns.
It’s a ruse, a lie, a feint.
But when, against all expectations, a unicorn does appear and a wounded stranger stumbles from the trees and falls at her feet, Anne is plunged into a world of enchantment where a doomed sovereign might find the power to change the destiny of her nation – or be lost in the mist for ever.
Expected release: 2nd June (Century)
Carrying
Samantha Josephs
An audacious, inventive debut and a cult classic in the making, from a thrilling new talent in fiction.
Martha is a trans woman and the picture-perfect Los Angeles housewife, though she is concealing her identity even from her own husband. When she is struck down by a mysterious illness, she begins a series of bizarre experimental treatments that awaken strange new appetites in her and even leave her seemingly – impossibly – pregnant. Equal parts inventive, funny and compulsive, Carrying mixes the sensational body horror of The Substance with the transgressive camp comedy of John Waters in a style that’s all its own, and announces the arrival of a thrilling new talent in fiction.
Expected release: 4th June (4th Estate)
Dark Reading Matter
Jasper Fforde
The final novel in the highly acclaimed and beloved Thursday Next series. Will Thursday find her happy ending?
The Dark Reading Matter is a theoretical realm that suggests that the observable bookverse can only account for 20% of the calculated total readable mass. Out there somewhere, possibly, is a larger and more expansive and unseeable ‘Dark Bookverse’ that contains millions of deleted novels, slush-pile manuscripts, lost poems, forgotten pop culture references, stories and ideas that were still in people’s minds when they died.
It seems The Goliath Corporation hope to exploit the Dark Reading Matter for profit, and Thursday Next is once again pitted against a familiar foe. As is so often with Thursday’s World, a visitor named Roger Thatt who purports to be from Fourth Wall Publishing has some peculiar ideas of his own that require careful thought.
With existential questions the least of her troubles and a family to take care of, Thursday must defeat the Goliath Corporation, ensure that a tear in the fabric of the Bookworld does not suck all literature from hers, assist Roger Thatt to dealing with the issues in his own reality, and conclude her own series so she can enjoy a comfortable retirement, while dodging the threat of the worse fate imaginable for a story: The Scooby Doo ending.
Expected release: 4th June (Hodder & Stoughton)
The End of Everything
M. John Harrison
It feels like the end. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been yet the exact cause of the catastrophe remains obscure. Is it an alien invasion? An ecological collapse? Or an unprompted change in the nature of reality?
Phillip Tennent makes a living selling exotic lifeforms washed up from the Channel – until he lands a creature whose shapeshifting properties threaten to destabilise everything he thinks he knows. M. John Harrison, acknowledged master of science fiction, unsettles and entertains in this slyly satirical adventure into the limits of human knowledge and mastery.
Expected release: 18th June (Serpent’s Tail)
The Tinder Box
M. R. Carey
Prepare to be entranced by this utterly unique, historical fantasy novel with a fairytale feel from the million-copy bestselling M. R. Carey, author of The Girl With All the Gifts.
In a kingdom forgotten by history, a legend unfolds . . .
Wounded in his county’s endless wars, former soldier Mag Tresti finds work in the home of a reclusive widow, Jannae Mirchella. But Jannae is more than she seems. A witch of great skill and might, she hides her powers and her deep-laid plans behind a mask of harmless respectability.
When a dead demon falls out of the sky, the fates of the soldier and the witch are irrevocably intertwined. On the demon’s body Mag finds a tinderbox – an artefact of terrifying magical power that can not only grant his every wish, but also change the fate of nations.
This is a tale of spellcraft and devilry, of witchcraft and trickery – of the wickedness that resides within a few, the goodness that lies deep within us all, and the choices on which our lives turn.
Expected release: 23rd June (Orbit Books)
All We Have Left
Emily Paxman
Cosy, hopeful and uplifting, this heartwarming post-apocalyptic romance is perfect for fans of Fable for the End of the World and Emily Henry.
Thirty years after the end of the world, a young woman enters into a marriage of convenience with a man she hardly knows so she can secure vital medical care for her beloved younger sister.
The world might not have ended all at once. But end it did.
Kayla Hollins is a survivor. Living in the fragmented wasteland of the Canadian Pacific Northwest, she’s outlived a colony, a cult, a paramilitary group, and most of her family. So when her younger sister April falls seriously ill, Kayla will do anything to save her. They trek to Salt Spring Island, a beacon of hope in their otherwise brutalized world, which is rumoured to still have a hospital. But Salt Spring’s utopia comes with a price. Not just anyone can enter paradise or access their medical care, and Kayla’s past is chequered.
Desperate, Kayla makes a deal with Sid Charles, an aspiring politician with whom she had a chance encounter before arriving on Salt Spring. If Kayla and Sid get married, it will boost Sid’s chances of election, and grant April automatic access to the medical treatment she desperately needs. And in two years, when Kayla is eligible for citizenship herself, they can get a divorce. Simple, right?
Sid is distant and cranky, but Kayla comes to learn he is also shockingly kind. The more time she spends with him and his ragtag group of rescued boys, the more she comes to admire him. But with April’s treatment and Sid’s election on the line-and the constant terror of her past being discovered-Kayla isn’t sure she can risk trying to change their arrangement.
Trapped together in the closest thing left to paradise, Kayla and Sid both know what it means for the world to end. But as they try to rebuild with the people of Salt Spring Island, there may be time left to save-if not the world-themselves.
Expected release: 30th June (Titan Books)
July
The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance
Chiara Bullen
BEHIND EVERY HERO, THERE’S A HISTORIAN
An ambitious young scholar is sent to research the mysteries of an adventurer’s inn – only to uncover a centuries-old secret in this heart-warming and poignant fantasy.
Mount Vengeance is legendary, a monumental climb with a dragon at its peak.
For most, it’s an adventure, or a quest to prove themselves worthy of fame and glory.
For Ainsworth, it’s perfect thesis material.
Ainsworth Gladsly, ambitious young scholar, research fellow and up-and-coming historian is finally ready to make his mark on the world. When his supervisor learns of a rustic inn at the foot of the legendary Mount Vengeance, she send him to be the first to to document the exploits of the bold adventurers who face the perils of the mountain – and the dragon said to inhabit it.
But the inn is far from the sophisticated city life he’s grown to love, and even as he grudgingly warms to its rustic charm – and its lovely innkeeper, Honey – the mystery of the mountain refuses to reveal itself. Worse, Ainsworth can’t find evidence that anyone has ever undertaken the climb – every adventurer comes to the inn, stays for a single night, and then returns home.
And with Ainsworth’s reputation as an academic on the line, it’s a mystery he can’t allow to remain unsolved – even if he has to push the adventurers up the mountain himself.
Expected release: 7th July (Del Ray)
August
Eyes of Kings
Chloe Gong
War beckons in the kingdom of Talin. On one side sits Calla Tuoleimi and Anton Makusa, and on the other, the recently dethroned August Shenzhi and Calla’s own predecessor Sinoa Tuoleimi. Neither will rest until the opposition is buried.
Calla assumed victory would be easy. She wears the divine crown after a violent coup, wielding the most powerful weapon in the kingdom. Then the provinces start to whisper of the old gods returning to earth, and suddenly the game board is flipped upside-down.
Anton thought he aligned himself with victory. When he swore to serve as Calla’s general, he understood the battle they were waging. But he fears Calla is no longer herself with the crown. Rather, he fears that Calla is returning to who she once was.
August would sacrifice anything for victory. He has waited his entire life for the throne, and surrender is not an option. In the face of age-old immortals challenging his terrain and the possibility of betrayal from his closest and most cherished guard, he must be careful who he trusts.
Because when the war ends, there can only be one king.
Expected release: 6th August (Hodderscape)
Infinite State
Richard Swan
WHO GIVES YOU LIFE?
PATER AETERNUS.
Katherine Fuller’s husband is dead. As an esteemed member of Pater Aeternus – governing party of the fascist, galaxy-spanning Decurion Empire – he has left behind an estate of immeasurable wealth. And Katherine is going to inherit it.
WHO GIVES YOU PURPOSE?
PATER AETERNUS.
Life under the Eternal Father is rigidly stratified, surveilled, and controlled – each new day to be endured, not lived. But with Katherine’s newfound fortune, she is presented with a rare and dangerous opportunity: purchase a virgin world, and create a better, fairer society.
WHO GIVES YOU JOY?
PATER AETERNUS.
But the Empire cannot allow its wayward daughter to succeed. And as Katherine works in secret, recruiting allies she’s not even sure she can trust, she will discover exactly how far Pater Aeternus is willing to go to stop her. Because Katherine is going to create something nobody has seen for many years.
A democracy.
In this blistering science fiction epic, Sunday Times bestselling author Richard Swan presents a thrilling tale of survival and an eviscerating examination of totalitarianism.
Expected release: 6th August (Gollancz)
Sea of Charms
Sarah Beth Durst
Her boat. Her rules. His music. Their hearts . . .
Marin has always belonged on the great blue sea. Betrayed by love, she lives and works as a supply runner, sailing from island to island, delivering an array of goods with Perri the sea serpent and Ree the sailor shrub as her crew.
On one of her routine trips to the capital, Alyssium, Marin finds a revolution underway — and a friend in the line of fire.
What starts as a rescue evolves into a deal: Marin will keep Dax on as a member of her crew if he pretends to be her boyfriend at the End-of-Harvest Festival back home.
But against her better judgment, Marin finds herself intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories, his charming smile — and realizes that perhaps she isn’t saving him. Maybe it’s the other way around.
From the acclaimed author of The Spellshop, Sea of Charms is a delightful cosy fantasy romance about finding your crew, your family, and moreover, finding yourself.
Expected release: 6th August (Tor)
The Dungeon Book
Gareth Hanrahan
Bait doesn’t remember a time before the dungeon. Before the dragon stole her from her cot. She doesn’t know what her name was before she was handed over to the monstrous denizens of the dungeon beneath the sorcerer’s tower. Luckily for Bait, they decided not to eat her. And so, she grew up in the dark – the goblins her adopted family, a vengeful minotaur her protector, a sentient skull her tutor and a faithful blob of corridor slime her main source of nutrition.
But the labyrinthine dungeon, with its haunted halls, buried temples and forgotten magics, draws treasure hunters like moths to flame. And as the outside world starts to intrude, Bait will learn what it means to be monstrous, and she will have to decide where she truly belongs.
Expected release: 11th August (Orbit Books)
The Last Chance Convenience Store
Kim Ho-Yeon
A pandemic has hit Seoul hard, but the beloved convenience store remains a beacon of hope. A year and a half after a former homeless man named Dokgo began working the night shift, the store faces a new challenge. With owner Mrs. Yeom moving to the countryside, her troubled son, Minsik, is left in charge of the struggling business.
Just when the future seems most uncertain, a peculiar new part-time employee arrives for the night shift: Geunbae. With a large build and a quirky presence reminiscent of Dokgo, Geunbae is an eternal optimist who begins to bring about unexpected changes. He helps a young job seeker regain her confidence, inspires a local business owner to adapt, and forces Minsik to confront his past.
But just as Geunbae begins to shine, he is cast in a play based on the real-life story of Dokgo, the former convenience store employee. Can the truth about his predecessor be revealed? And can Minsik finally take charge of his life and business to secure his family’s future?
The Last Chance Convenience Store by Kim Ho-Yeon, translated from Korean by Janet Hong, is the sequel following on from The Second Chance Convenience Store about a moving and joyful story of a woman fighting for her community and a man who has lost everything except the will to try again.
Expected release: 13th August (Macmillan)
Dreamland
Olivie Blake
She wanted fame. But she found secrets and a passion that could kill.
As summer heat lingers in Los Angeles, girls are found murdered, the winds are blowing a strange energy into the city and wildfire warnings are everywhere. Yet Anya Morris has other things on her mind. A TV pilot should have been her big Hollywood break. But she lost out and now she’s willing to risk it all.
Enter William de Witt, an aging movie star who offers an unusual opportunity. His son Jude’s rare heath condition forces him to live as a recluse – and in exchange for spending time with him, William will grant her access to Hollywood’s most powerful circles. Wealth, influence and access are all on offer within the de Witt family mansion. However, behind the gilded veneer lie decades of bloodstained secrets. As her duties draw her deeper into their world, she wonders if the villa is cursed or if Jude himself is touched by the occult? Yet there’s a dark magnetism to him that Anya can’t resist, despite all the warning signs. As the city’s body count continues to rise, something has to give. There’s smoke in the air, but who will strike that final, fatal match?
Expected release: 20th August (Tor)
Daggerbound
T. Kingfisher
New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher returns to the cozy fantasy world of Swordheart in this deliciously charming sequel.
Four hundred years ago, three warriors were trapped inside enchanted swords, cursed to be immortal servants of whoever wielded the blade. One of them is the Dervish, a restless, fiery soul who hates his captivity and hates his wielders even more, but has never found a way to escape the sword’s magic.
Then one day, a disillusioned scholar named Learned Edmund is tasked with delivering the sword to a distant city, and, in the greatest of peril, draws the blade. The Dervish finds himself bound to a sweet, brilliant, and above all kind young man. And while he may be able to protect Edmund from bandits, cultists, dragons, and strange inhuman diplomats, he may find it much harder to protect his own heart.
Expected release: 25th August (Orbit Books)
September
Kiss Slay Replay
Rachel Harrison
Expected release: 1st September (Berkley)
The Knave and the Moon
Rachel Gillig
Rachel Gillig, the queen of gothic romantasy, returns with higher stakes, darker mysteries and deeper longings in this gorgeous sequel to the No. 1 international bestselling sensation The Knight and the Moth.
Aisling Cathedral is in ruins. Rodrick Myndacious, Bartholomew and Maude Bauer are rumored to be dead – and the king has taken Sybil Delling as his bride. To show off their union and solidify his power over Traum, Benji proposes a series of tournaments throughout the hamlets. Captive and drugged, Sybil remains determined to vanquished him as she once did the Omens, even if she destroys the kingdom’s faith – and herself – in the process.
But then a mysterious knave rises to the top of the lists, a man with no name and no memory who may just be Sybil’s ticket to undoing Benji’s power. For in a land where stories repeat themselves, where a king can prove as cruel as a god, the only way to truly destroy the Stonewater Kingdom’s faith is to save it.
Expected release: 1st September (Orbit Books)
Claimed by the Orc King
Roxy Taylor
ICE PLANET BARBARIANS meets Katee Robert’s monster romance in this sexy contemporary fantasy romance debut about a powerful orc king who has found his mate in a woman whose brains, beauty and sharp wit threaten to bring him and his kingdom to their knees.
Thena just wants to survive FantastiCon with minimal human interaction and maximum sarcasm. What she didn’t plan for is a seven-foot plus mountain of muscle built like a Norse god, painted in green, who smells like he was forged in Valhalla and seems hell-bent on ruining her day.
Viggo Klausson isn’t a cosplayer. He’s the High Chieftain of the Eastern Orcs, and he’s spent two years in the human world tracking down one his mate. The moment he scents Thena, he knows she belongs to him. The problem? Thena doesn’t believe in destiny, mating Bonds, or any of the magic that surrounds Viggo and his world.
One portal mishap later, Thena lands in Korule, a dangerous and divided world where women are rare–and suddenly, Thena is the most valuable thing in sight. Then an ancient power wakes up inside her, throwing her to the center of a political storm, guarded by an orc who is entirely too steady, too patient, and entirely too good at getting under her skin.
If she wants to survive, she’ll have to navigate a new world and a future she never asked for, all while fighting against the one thing more dangerous than the world around her growing, undeniable attraction to the orc king who swears she’s his.
Expected release: 8th September (Titan Books)
Bodies of Magic
Freya Marske
Grey’s Anatomy meets A Deadly Education in this dark academia fantasy set at a magical medical school, with murder, magical discovery, and burnt-out medical students
At the Academie of the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr, mages with the healer’s gift undergo a demanding six-year course of study before facing the Grand Exam: a five-day trial whose results will determine what shape their future holds. For five of this year’s students, what awaits them on the first day is—murder.
Ysabel was not well liked, but she was one of the brightest students to come through the Academie in
years. The institution has reasons to want to pass her death off as a suicide, but as her best—or only—friend, Clement knows they’re wrong. And when the five members of their Exam group receive a letter from Ysabel from beyond the grave, it becomes clear she was up to something someone was willing to kill for.
The friend who stood in the dead girl’s shadow.
The academic rival who was battling her for the top class ranking.
The girl no one ever thought would amount to anything.
The foreigner conscripted into this life who would rather be doing something, anything else.
The boy whose traitorous secrets Ysabel had already uncovered years ago.
If they can solve her murder, they may find more answers than they bargained for—but if they don’t, one of
them may be forced to take the fall.
Expected release: 17th September (Tor)
Our Cut of Salt
Deena Helm
There is something haunting Nuhad’s childhood home in Haifa. Cats avoid its perimeter, strange noises come from within, and residents have been known to disappear entirely in its walls without a trace.
Our Cut of Salt is an unflinching, sinister and moving take on the haunted house novel, from a bold new Palestinian voice. Perfect for fans of The Only Good Indians and The Haunting of Hill House.
Although Nuhad has not returned to her home since the Nakba in 1948, she always held a place for the house in her heart. And, in return, the house did the same for her.
After Nuhad passes away, her granddaughter, Marina, is determined to visit her grandmother’s home in Haifa after a lifetime of being kept in the dark about her culture and family history. Marina’s mother, Haifa-named for the city that was lost to their family-reluctantly agrees to her trip, despite her omnipresent anxiety.
When a long-buried spirit of the past begins to haunt both dreams and waking life, Marina develops breathing problems that cause her to feel as if she is drowning on dry land. Despite Nuhad’s warnings, Haifa rushes to help her daughter. As the three women converge in their ancestral haunted home, they must learn what the price of the past truly is.
Expected release: 22nd September (Run For It)
Under A Fur Coat
Sonya Vatomsky
I became obsessed with Seurasaari, with the curative properties I assigned to it in my desperation for an action, a ritual – something that could fix everything…
Vivienne, a photographer from Manchester, arrives at a boarding house on a tiny Finnish island hoping to rekindle her creativity and heal her broken heart. Instead, she misses her wife. Her camera hangs at her side unused. And her fellow guests keep inviting her into the forest.
Vivienne quickly grows close with Ilya, the affable caretaker, and Gagarin, a rebellious mycologist. And when Gagarin confesses she’s searching for a mythical bracket fungus – the Bigfoot of mushrooms – Vivienne throws herself headfirst into the cause.
The days pass in a blur of snow and birch trees and vodka. Yet the longer Vivienne spends in the forest, the more it consumes her. Haunted by lost time, inexplicable acts of violence, and rising tensions among the guests, Vivienne begins to suspect there’s something darker behind Gagarin’s determination. Because ambition always requires sacrifice. She’s just not sure whose…
Expected release: 24th September (Manilla Press)
