Archives de catégorie : Speculative Fiction

THE FOUND OBJECT SOCIETY de Michelle Maryk

An atmospheric speculative suspense novel following a mysterious society offering its members the chance to relive the death of another person—and the self-destructive woman determined to uncover its secrets. This ambitious, genre-bending debut is perfect for fans of time-travel ﬁction including Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors.

THE FOUND OBJECT SOCIETY
by Michelle Maryk
Hyperion Avenue, February 2026
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights))

For twenty years, Greta Davenport has lived with the guilt of surviving the accident that killed her parents. She’s tested the limits of her own mortality ever since, but little gives her the dopamine rush she craves. Not until the night she almost drunkenly crashes her car into a tree, and a peculiar blank card slides under her front door—an invitation to the Found Object Society. What she discovers there is beyond comprehension: an opulent, subterranean playground filled with aisles of objects from different eras and regions of the world. Pick an object and go on a voyage to relive the final moments of the person who died holding it, along with an unparalleled, irreplicable high. Greta’s hooked, but she can’t quiet her questions about the society and its enigmatic creators, the answers to which have implications far beyond her growing dependence on the voyages. Death is addictive, and what she uncovers will put her entire life into question.

A fever dream of a novel with episodic, time-traveling chapters told from multiple points of view, The Found Object Society examines the depraved whims of the ultrarich and the breadth of unresolved trauma—all while asking how grief and the choices we make in its aftermath can change the course of our lives. Michelle Maryk’s wholly original and ambitious debut opens an impeccably wrought speculative world of greed, power, and destiny.

“The Found Object Society is a mind-bendingly brilliant exploration of the nature of grief, the seductions of liminal experiences, and how alternate reality can renew, deepen, and destroy us. Addictive and beautifully rendered . . . Michelle Maryk has written one hell of a novel.” —Danielle Trussoni, New York Times bestselling author of The Puzzle Master

Michelle Maryk graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English and attended the Yale Writer’s Workshop. For the better part of twenty-five years, she’s been a successful voiceover, on-camera commercial, and comedic actor, and she is a dual Swedish and US citizen. THE FOUND OBJECT SOCIETY is her debut novel.

BATTLEGROUND STATES de Shawn Otto

A scientist and her young son embark on a harrowing journey through the Midwest in the not-too-distant post-civil war future in which the country has divided into different geographical factions, disinformation reigns, and the most powerful weapon ever created is about to be unleashed. Pitched as The Road meets Station Eleven.

BATTLEGROUND STATES
by Shawn Otto
Milkweed, 2027
(via David Black Agency)

For those millions who binged “The Last of Us” and those millions more who still look to 1984, It Can’t Happen Here and The Handmaid’s Tale as dystopian classics.

What if you alone could save the world, and the enemy trying to stop you was your father?

Ten years have passed since the outbreak of the second American Civil War. The United States has been torn into four new nations and an ungoverned Midwest region known as Heartland, where the war rages on.

Christine Haber, once the UW-Madison’s youngest endowed chair in genetics at age twenty-three, lost everything in the war. Now she runs the Preserve, the last functioning university in Heartland, while her father rises in power as a ruthless demagogue intent on controlling the war-torn region.

Situated in tents on a former nature preserve in Wisconsin, the Preserve has survived because it offers objective, neutral education to anyone regardless of their politics. There Christine has also been raising her eight-year-old son Robby alone, after his father was killed in the war.

One night Christine is woken by a fellow scientist seeking her help. The woman carries a stolen vial containing a new type of biological weapon—a deadly virus designed using advanced epigenetic editing to infect and kill “genetic liberals,” the people Christine’s father blames for the war. The scientist wants Christine’s help to smuggle the stolen vial out of Heartland to Canada so researchers can develop a vaccine before it’s too late.

But then the Preserve is attacked. Christine and Robby escape with the vial and begin a harrowing journey through a darkly beautiful world that is both recognizable and strange, where destruction and disinformation reign and questions about what is true or not become more and more unanswerable.

Ultimately, Christine’s odyssey leads her to confront her radicalized father and, in a stunning twist, to make a devastating choice that will change them all forever. Otto’s unforgettable novel imagines a dysfunctional family writ large and, by probing the biological roots of how we see ourselves and each other, asks how different we really are.

Shawn Otto speaks to audiences worldwide about writing, the scientific foundation of democracy, and the causes of anti-truth, antidemocratic movements. He is a past board chair of the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, where he lives in a solar- and wind-powered home he designed and built. His award-winning debut novel, Sins Of Our Fathers (Milkweed), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He wrote and co-produced the Academy-Award nominated movie House of Sand and Fog, starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. Otto is also author of two award-winning nonfiction science books, Fool Me Twice (Rodale) and The War On Science (Milkweed), which predicted the rise of anti-truth authoritarianism. The Guardian called The War On Science “a game changer, and probably the most important book you’ll read this year.”

THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME de Jared Young

A mind-bending locked-room mystery where every suspect is the same man—and so is the corpse. Knives Out meets Everything Everywhere All At Once: clever, twisty, and impossible to put down.

THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME
by Jared Young
Crown Fiction, spring 2027

Joshua Hoffman is throwing a weekend-long party at his remote lakeside home with nine alternate versions of himself—other selves who made different choices at various crossroads in Joshua Hoffman’s life and ended up in wildly different circumstances.

To distinguish themselves from one another, they adopt nicknames. Among them are: The Argentinian, who fled his dreary hometown for a life of luxury in South America; The Townie, who stayed behind to marry his high school crush; The Marksman, a single father struggling to raise his troubled daughter; The Director, a Hollywood filmmaker facing an embarrassing end to his career; and The Teacher, a man of faith and moral duty who unknowingly carries a dark secret.

Some of the Joshua Hoffmans have gained fame and fortune, others have embraced the stability of family life. But over the course of the weekend, all of them will uncover deep wells of existential doubt and unhappiness as they reckon with what might have been. And when one of the Joshua Hoffmans turns up dead – brutally strangled in an upstairs bedroom – the others must confront a horrifying truth: a killer is among them.

As the violence escalates and the bodies pile up – stabbed, drowned, and burned alive – paranoia tears the group apart. Which Joshua Hoffman wants to kill his other selves, and why? Desperate to survive until the end of the weekend, they interrogate, accuse, and attack each other. When every suspect looks just like the others, finding the murderer is next to impossible.

Deftly told in rotating first-person perspectives, each chapter immerses readers in the consciousness of a different Joshua Hoffman—men divided by circumstance but bound by identity. THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME is for readers who love the ingenious puzzles of Agatha Christie and Stuart Turton, the unsettling tension of Iain Reid and Paul Tremblay, and the raw emotional introspection of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s for fans of high-concept mysteries that double as philosophical meditations, for readers who want both page-turning suspense and a work of literary ambition that asks philosophical questions about how to live a life.

Jared Young’s body of work spans books, magazines, and feature films. He is the author of the novel Into the Current, which was longlisted for the ReLit Award in 2016. His stories and essays have appeared in publications around the world, and have been anthologized by McSweeney’s. He is the writer of the feature film, Sinister Switch, and currently has multiple scripts optioned and in development.
As a creative director, his brand and campaign work has won international recognition, and has been covered by Adweek and The Globe & Mail. His book trailer for Into The Current was the first ever to screen at a major international film festival when it premiered at SXSW in 2017, where it won both the Audience and Jury Awards. Jared also publishes “Tolstoyan,” a Substack newsletter about culture, literature, and philosophy. His essay Youth, about the regrets of middle-age, recently went viral, generating thousands of new subscribers and becoming a Substack Editors’ Pick. He lives in Chelsea, Quebec, with his wife and two children.

IN TIME WITH YOU de Kristin Dwyer

You’ve Reached Sam meets Before I Fall in this gripping speculative romance about one girl saving her first love’s life by falling for the last person she ever should—his best friend.

IN TIME WITH YOU
by Kristin Dwyer
Wednesday Books, Winter 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Nieve Monroe is devastated after her boyfriend Carter dies saving her from drowning. Even worse she blames herself for his death… and so does his best friend, Max. He was there with them on that fateful day, and he’s never liked Nieve.

Unable to pull herself from her grief and wanting to hide from the accusation in his eyes, Nieve goes to stay with her grandmother, who has always had strange stories to tell of uncanny happenings, of magic and make believe. The next morning, Nieve wakes up on the first day of college… the year before.

This time she plans to make sure Carter never follows her into that river. She’ll do everything in her power to keep him safe, even if it means losing him in other ways. But the more distance she puts between her and Carter, the closer she gets to Max, drawn to him in ways she never expected. But is she betraying Carter if the only way she can save him is to move on? And can she ever forget her past to embrace her future?

Kristin Dwyer’s IN TIME WITH YOU is a heartbreaking story of first love, loss, and one chance to change everything.

Kristin Dwyer grew up under the California sun and still prays every day for a cloudy sky. When she’s not writing books about people kissing, she and her spouse can be found encouraging their four mischief makers to get into trouble. Kristin is a part-time hair model and wants you to know she is full-time TSA PRECHECK, and one time a credible news outlet asked for her opinion on K-pop (it was the best day of her life). Please do not talk to her about your fandom, she will try to join.

ABSENCE de Andrew Dana Hudson

Pitched as The City & The City meets The Leftovers, ABSENCE is a propulsive mystery, combining the best elements of speculative fiction and detective noir, one which explores a world confronted with the new reality of Spontaneous Human Absence, or the sudden disappearance of people into thin air, never to return.

ABSENCE
by Andrew Dana Hudson
Soho Press, Spring 2026
(via Vertical Ink)

With millions around the world having already “popped” out of existence, and the numbers increasing daily, humanity’s long-term survival is now in doubt. Now, Bureau of Depopulation Affairs agents Harvey Ellis and Shonda Erins must unravel a mystery that could answer the impenetrable question of where the absent go, as one day a disheveled woman with no identification appears at the sheriff’s office in the small town of Dawnville, Kansas, claiming to have returned from Absence and providing a highly-detailed description of the “life after” and a mysterious post-Absence city called Strangertown.

Is she just another charlatan styling herself as a prophet, or is she really Gabby Reyes, a Dawnville teenager who popped a decade before under notorious circumstances? If true, her story holds the key to understanding humanity’s future and would give hope to the millions of people mourning the unfathomable disappearance of their loved ones – a group that also includes agent Ellis.

As the agents navigate a hostile town awash in conspiracy theories with its own secrets to hide, they get closer to the answer, and agent Ellis finds himself caught between his professional skepticism and his own personal desire for the possibility of hope in a hopeless world.

But as Absence begins to ravage Dawnville, the townspeople focus their ire on Gabby and the agents, and in a world where no one knows how long they have left, agents Ellis and Erins must unravel the mystery of Gabby Reyes before Dawnville explodes into violence, and before they themselves disappear.

Andrew Dana Hudson is a speculative fiction writer, sustainability researcher, and futurist. He is the author of Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures, as well as over twenty-five short stories appearing in Slate Future Tense, Lightspeed Magazine, Escape Pod, Vice Terraform, MIT Technology Review, Grist, and many more. His nonfiction has appeared in Slate, Jacobin, and others. His fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, longlisted for the BSFA, and translated into Italian. Andrew has a master’s degree in sustainability from Arizona State University, where he is now pursuing an MFA in creative writing (fiction). He is also an Imaginary College Fellow at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. His research, partnering with institutions like Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, uses speculative fiction to explore the entwined social and technical dynamics of future scenarios, particularly the challenges and opportunities of decarbonization and climate repair. He has previously worked in journalism, political consulting, and healthcare innovation. He also teaches yoga. Follow his work via solarshades.club.