Archives de catégorie : Speculative Fiction

72 HOURS WITH YOU de Darianne Schramm

A speculative YA romance that will delight readers of They Both Die at the End, and You’ve Reached Sam.

72 HOURS WITH YOU
by Darianne Schramm
Disney-Hyperion, July 2026
(via Mushens Entertainment)

72 hours before someone dies, Sydney Hoffman sees a pink neon clock appear over their head.

When a classmate and a teacher tragically die in the same month, the seniors start wearing all black and hosting drunken grief groups, making it impossible for Sydney to ignore the clocks.

Enter transfer student Peter Beckett: outgoing, open, charismatic, and handsome.

When he discovers what Sydney can do, he convinces her that she doesn’t have to handle the clockings alone. The more people they secretly help, the more Sydney starts to believe that maybe she can let go of the memories that haunt her and hold on to Peter instead.

But just when she starts to feel a shred of happiness, the universe delivers a devastating blow that reminds her: death never plays by the rules, but she realizes, she doesn’t have to either.

Darianne Schramm currently lives in a small coastal town in Florida, where she is lucky enough to enjoy long walks on the beach nearly every weekend. She is passionate about centring diverse voices in her novels which reflect her own identity and experiences. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Elon University and her Masters from the University of Southern California where they reluctantly let her write her thesis on rock and roll lyrics.

LISTEN TO YOUR SISTER de Neena Viel

For fans of Jordan Peele’s films, Stranger Things, and The Other Black Girl, LISTEN TO YOUR SISTER is a laugh-out-loud, deeply terrifying, and big-hearted speculative horror novel from electrifying debut talent Neena Viel.

LISTEN TO YOUR SISTER
by Neena Viel
St. Martin’s Press, February 2025
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

Most Anticipated by Goodreads, People, BookRiot, Reactor, Screenrant, and more

Twenty-five year old Calla Williams is struggling since becoming guardian to her brother, Jamie. Calla is overwhelmed and tired of being the one who makes sacrifices to keep the family together. Jamie, full of good-natured sixteen-year-old recklessness, is usually off fighting for what matters to him or getting into mischief, often at the same time. Dre, their brother, promised he would help raise Jamie–but now the ink is dry on the paperwork and in classic middle-child fashion, he’s off doing his own thing. And through it all, The Nightmare never stops haunting Calla: recurring images of her brothers dying that she is powerless to stop.

When Jamie’s actions at a protest spiral out of control, the siblings must go on the run. Taking refuge in a remote cabin that looks like it belongs on a slasher movie poster rather than an AirBNB, the siblings now face a new threat where their lives–and reality–hang in the balance. Their sister always warned them about her nightmares. They really should have listened.

« Deliciously terrifying and belly laugh-inducing…Viel incorporates well worn genre tropes in new ways and provides plenty of bloodcurdling surprises along the way. » — BookPage, Starred review

« Unique and compelling … a terrifying and immerse supernatural horror story that is clearly underpinned with love. » — Library Journal

« [An] addictive supernatural thriller. » — Publishers Weekly

« Heartfelt and darkly humorous…Fans of Jordan Peele’s films will want to check this out. » — Booklist

« Anxiety metamorphoses into terror for a young Black woman fiercely protecting her own… A relentless descent into familial fears made manifest, both haunting and terribly familiar. » — Kirkus

Neena Viel is a horror writer who lives in a cabin in the Washingtonian woods with her husband and the best dog on the planet. Her passion for philanthropy (almost) rivals her love for ghost stories. LISTEN TO YOUR SISTER is her debut novel.

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU d’Erin Jones

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU explores themes of climate change, wealth inequality, queer lives, and immortality, combining the ensemble storytelling of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, the speculative nature of Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark and C. Pam Zhang’s Land Of Milk and Honey, with the humor and heart of Glass Onion.

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU
by Erin Jones
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, publication 2026-2027
(via Frances Goldin Literary Agency)

In a not-too-distant future, the world’s last glacier has been downgraded to the world’s last iceberg. While society mourns another natural wonder lost to climate change, the billionaire—a former tech mogul turned restaurateur—becomes obsessed with obtaining a piece of the ice to serve at his restaurant. The iceberg has been deemed a protected entity by the United Nations, but that doesn’t worry the billionaire. He needs the ice.

THE LAST ICEBERG TASTING MENU is a speculative, propulsive literary novel-in-stories following the waning days of the world as we know it, and the nine people who find their fates intertwined with the iceberg and one another across space, time, and class. There’s the helicopter pilot who aids and abets the billionaire’s heist despite physical and emotional scars from what she saw while working in search and rescue amid environmental catastrophes wrought by global warming; the billionaire’s wife, who reserved her place in a future Mars colony by allowing her consciousness to be contained in a box as the world burned; a pair of twins who have only ever lived at sea and now lead scuba tours of communities drowned by rising waters; and finally, the security guard who will do whatever it takes to provide protection (and air conditioning) for his young family, and becomes embroiled in a plot to reclaim the little of the iceberg that remains in containment before it’s gone forever.

Erin Jones is the author of the YA novel Tinfoil Crowns (Flux Books, 2019), a 2020 Moonbeam Awards Silver Medalist, and one of Barnes & Noble’s most anticipated YA books of the year. Jones graduated with her MFA in fiction from Emerson College where she is now affiliated faculty and a writing consultant for ELL students. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

DON’T LET ME GO de Kevin Christopher Snipes

They Both Die at the End meets See You Yesterday in this speculative YA romance about two star-crossed boys trapped in a millennium-spanning cycle of reincarnation whose only hope of escape may be a price that neither is willing to pay.

DON’T LET ME GO
by Kevin Christopher Snipes
HarperCollins Children’s Books, May 2025

Out and proud, Riley Iverson knows there’s nothing more cringe than crushing on a straight boy. But from the moment that the handsome, sporty, and painfully heterosexual Jackson Haines walks into his life, Riley can’t help but feel an instant and undeniable connection. Mainly because, as impossible as it seems, Jackson is the spitting image of the boy who’s recently appeared in Riley’s dreams—dreams set in another time and another place where he and Jackson were desperately in love.

At first Riley tries to dismiss the coincidence as a product of his hormone-fueled, overactive imagination, but as his friendship with Jackson deepens into something more, the dreams prove harder to ignore. Especially when Jackson begins having them too. Plunged into increasingly vivid visions of the past, the boys find themselves in various eras scattered throughout history. No matter where or when their dreams take them, though, two things remain constant: Riley and Jackson are always together, and they always die at the end.

As it becomes increasingly difficult to view their dreams as anything but warnings, the boys are forced to consider the possibility that their burgeoning relationship might be propelling them headfirst into their own tragic ending. But is it worth staying apart to save their lives if the price is forsaking a love that has defied not only time and space but even death itself?

Kevin Christopher Snipes is a New York–based writer who was born and raised in Florida. He spent his early career in the theater writing plays, including A Bitter Taste and The Chimes. Later, for Gimlet Media/Spotify, he created the queer fantasy podcast The Two Princes. His children’s poetry and short fiction have been published internationally, and his debut novel, Milo and Marcos at the End of the World, was an official selection of the NEA’s Read Across America program.

THE REPEAT ROOM de Jesse Ball

Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos in this provocative new novel from one of America’s most brilliant and distinctive writers.

THE REPEAT ROOM
by Jesse Ball
Catapult, September 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant’s lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.

The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel’s shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy’s broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.

Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, THE REPEAT ROOM is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball’s absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.

Jesse Ball is the author of fifteen books, most recently the novel Autoportrait. His works have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and has been a fellow of the NEA, Creative Capital, and the Guggenheim Foundation.