Archives de catégorie : Fiction

ROGUE SEQUENCE de Zac Topping

Perfect for fans of Tom Clancy and Nicholas Irving’s Reaper books, ROGUE SEQUENCE is pulse-pounding technothriller about an imprisoned soldier who has a chance at freedom but the price to pay is greater than he could have ever imagined.

ROGUE SEQUENCE
by Zac Topping
Forge, June 2024
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

It’s 2091 and independent contract companies around the world are producing genetically modified soldiers…to be sold to the highest bidders.

Ander Rade is a super-soldier, a genetically engineered living weapon, and has been dutifully following orders since he gave himself to Xyphos Industries’ Gene-Mod Program several years ago. But when a mission goes sideways, he’s captured, imprisoned, and forced into brutally violent fighting pits for the better part of the next decade…until agents from the Genetic Compliance Department of the United American Provinces appear in the visiting room.

Things have changed since Rade was captured. Shortly after his incarceration, the World Unity Council banned human genetic engineering and deemed all modified individuals a threat to society. Overnight, an entire subculture of people became outlaws simply for existing. But instead of leaving Rade locked behind bars, the GCD agents have come with an offer: Freedom in exchange for his help tracking down one of his former teammates from that ill-fated mission all those years ago.

It’s an offer Rade can’t refuse, but he soon realizes that the situation is far more volatile than anyone had anticipated, and is forced to take matters into his own hands as he tries to figure out whose side he’s really on, and why?

Zac Topping grew up in Eastern Connecticut and discovered a passion for writing early in life. He is a veteran of the United States Army and has served two tours in Iraq, and is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Wake of War. He lives with his wife and dog in a quiet farm town and currently works as a career firefighter.

THE KNIGHTS OF BRETON COURT de Maurice Broaddus

The Wire meets Excalibur in this urban fantasy reimagining of Arthur and Camelot, in which gang leader King gathers his brethren and attempts to end the cycle of greed, desperation, and honor in their crime ridden neighborhood.

THE KNIGHTS OF BRETON COURT
by Maurice Broaddus
JAB Books, January 2024
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

KING MAKER (Book 1)

The King Arthur myth gets dramatically retold through the eyes of street hustler King, as he tries to unite the crack dealers, gangbangers and the monsters lurking within them to do the right thing. From the drug gangs of downtown Indianapolis, the one true king will arise. Broaddus’ debut is a stunning, edgy work, genuinely unlike anything you’ve ever read.

KING’S JUSTICE (Book 2)

Spurred on by ever more urgent visions by his mystic advisor, Merle, King attempts to unite the warring gangs. But the knights of Breton Court are assailed on all sides by greed, temptation and some very real monsters. But worse, there is betrayal from within King s innermost circle.

KING’S WAR (Book 3)

From the street gangs of downtown Indianapolis, the one true king will arise. King has been betrayed, but he has no time to lick his wounds – he has to draw his people together to fight the ultimate foe in this conclusion to the stunning THE KNIGHTS OF BRETON COURT trilogy.

Available as three volumes or in omnibus format.

An accidental teacher, an accidental librarian, and a purposeful community organizer, Maurice Broaddus’ work has appeared in Magazine of SF&F, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, and Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His novels include the urban fantasy trilogy, THE KNIGHTS OF BRETON COURT, the steampunk novel, Pimp My Airship, and the middle grade detective novel series, The Usual Suspects. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Fireside Magazine, and Apex Magazine. His gaming work includes writing for the Marvel Super-Heroes, Leverage, and Firefly role-playing games as well as working as a consultant on Watch Dogs 2.

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYARD GIRLS de Grady Hendrix

In the vein of Rosemary’s Baby, Grady Hendrix’s highly-anticipated horror novel takes place in the 1970s at a home for unwed mothers, exploring motherhood and women’s autonomy.

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYARD GIRLS
by Grady Hendrix
Berkley, January 2025
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

“Hendrix’s genius as a horror writer is his ability to develop complex, human-scale emotional arcs. He gilds these dramas with a glorious, gory layer of monsters and magic, but in his work, the uncanny exists primarily to symbolize real-world issues. His characters are complex, particularly the women, and don’t fall into the easy tropes that often plague horror stories…never before has one of his books so aptly met the moment…at turns frightening, anxiety-producing, infuriating, beautiful and sad.” – The New York Times

“Another stellar novel from Hendrix, a perfectly constructed story that has a strong emotional core, compelling plot, unforgettable characters, and 360 degrees of terror.” – Booklist (starred review)

Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (which was adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, and the New York Times bestseller The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Award–winning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, and his latest non-fiction book is These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World.

THE ONES WE LOVED de Tarisai Ngangura

An aching love story and literary debut for readers of Britt Bennett, NoViolet Bulawayo and Yaa Ghasi.

THE ONES WE LOVED
by Tarisai Ngangura
HarperCollins Canada, Winter 2025

On a bus moving across a rural landscape, town to dusty town, two young people are escaping with their lives. She has committed a crime for which there will be retribution. He is staggering from a sudden loss.

These two will find each other and attempt a new way forward. But the talons of the past have dug deep and the wounds have not yet healed. Moving back and forth in time, from the fragile bonds of this new relationship to the lives they lived before, THE ONES WE LOVED tenderly weaves both myth and memory. It’s a story about generational living written in the rhythms of oral retellings practiced by Zimbabwe’s Shona ethnic group, where the soundscape of a ngano (story)— its melodies, pauses, lifts and stops—are a call and response with the listener.

The novel also pulls from literary stewards of Black Americana such as Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, shaping characters whose way of loving is inherited and channeled into the lands they inhabit, the people they care for and the present they cling to.

Tarisai Ngangura’s photography, essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Style Magazine, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, New York magazine, The Globe and Mail, VICE, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Jezebel, The New Republic and Lapham’s Quarterly. She was formerly a writer and social manager at Vanity Fair and a Senior Content Strategist at The Atlantic. She currently freelances and reviews music at Pitchfork and NPR.

THE IMMORTALITES de Claire Robertson

In frontier country, travelling in a van containing a mysterious diva, a young woman must find her feet.

THE IMMORTALITES
by Claire Robertson
TBD
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)

By the winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Ellen Kent has been called several things in her short life: orphan, governess, harlot. None is accurate, but here she is, a problem to be solved by her party of English settlers on an African shore in the year 1834. She is placed in the care of a retired cavalryman, and together they become the custodians of a van, a white horse and a silent, abundant woman – a grubby goddess and a thorough mystery. They travel through the war-struck frontier lands; Ellen is protector and handmaiden as the questions grow in her: how to find accommodation with this uncanny place of enchantment and death. How to find a way to stay.

For 30 years, award-winning journalist Claire Robertson has reported from South Africa, the US and the USSR. She has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Her debut novel, The Spiral House, won South Africa’s most important literary award, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, as well as a South African Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize. She is the author of three more novels: The Magistrate of Gower, Under Glass, both shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and ISLE. She lives in Sydney.