Archives de catégorie : Speculative Fiction

BLACK WINE de Candas Jane Dorsey

Winner of the IAFA Crawford, the James Tiptree, Jr., and the Aurora awards, BLACK WINE beckons readers into a stark and richly realized world similar to yet very different from our own, to explore the many ways a woman can be cut off from her own history.

BLACK WINE
by Candas Jane Dorsey
Open Road Media, June 2023
(via The Rights Factory)

An amnesiac slave girl struggles to learn about her past—and secure a future outside the oppressive society that binds her. A female adventurer confronts danger as she searches for her lost mother. A wife struggles within a marriage to a man she does not want. How does a woman survive, maintain her sense of self in such a place? A world of female characters whose emotional journeys are intimately intertwined, where identity and history, language and perception, sexuality and oppression, unite them in their search for meaning, human connection, and ultimately, freedom.

Winner of James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Crawford Award, Prix Aurora Award. Originally published by Tor Books.

“As brilliant as William Gibson, as complex as Gene Wolfe, with a humanity and passion all her own. Candas Jane Dorsey isn’t just a comer, she’s a winner. ” —Ursula K. Le Guin

“A tantalizing, distinctive, sexy, and beautifully rendered first novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

Candas Jane Dorsey is an award-winning speculative and crime fiction novelist. The author of four novels (soon to be five), two short story collections and four books of poetry, her work has won the Otherwise Award (formerly the James Tiptree Jr. Award), the William L. Crawford Award, the Aurora Prize and the Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery from the Crime Writers of Canada.

BEAUTIFUL SHINING PEOPLE de Michael Grothaus

A remarkable Japan-set speculative novel about quantum computing and what it means to belong in a rapidly changing world – perfect for fans of Ex-Machina and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan.

BEAUTIFUL SHINING PEOPLE
by Michael Grothaus
Vulkan, March 2023
(via Northbank Talent Management)

Tokyo, late 2040s. It’s an ordinary world, one where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in hamburger shops. There are two superpowers and a digital Cold War, but all conflicts are safely oceans away. The new frontier: quantum computing – and it will change the world.
17-year-old coding genius John arrives in Tokyo, invited by Sony, who want to buy his quantum algorithm. One cold night he enters a small, strange cafe – a cafe run by a disgraced sumo wrestler accompanied by a peculiar dog with a spherical head. And then there’s the waitress, who hides a striking secret. There’s something different about her – a kind of splintering inside her, like there’s something in there that doesn’t belong. John might be the only person that can help her discover the truth – about what’s inside, where her missing father went, and who might be looking for them now. It’s a discovery that will take them from the neon streets of Tokyo to Hiroshima’s tragic past to the snowy mountains of Nagano, and from the safety of family to the machinations of Big Tech and man’s incessant struggle for power.

Michael Grothaus is an author and journalist from Saint Louis, Missouri, now living in London. He spent his twenties in Chicago where he earned his degree in filmmaking from Columbia and got his start in journalism writing for Screen. After working for institutions including The Art Institute of Chicago, Twentieth Century Fox, and Apple he earned his postgraduate degree with distinction in creative writing from the University of London. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Litro Magazine, Fast Company, VICE, the Irish Times, Screen, Quartz, and others. His debut novel, Epiphany Jones, was published in 2016 and his first non-fiction book, Trust No One, was published by Hodder in November 2021.

THE SHADOW SISTER de Lily Meade

A gripping, speculative thriller from a dazzling new voice about a teen who disappears…and returns, changed in ways that trauma alone can’t explain.

THE SHADOW SISTER
by Lily Meade
Sourcebooks Fire, June 2023
(via Laura Dail Literary)

Sometimes people are lost from you, no matter how much you wish they weren’t and before you can even begin to know how big of a hole they’ll leave behind.
Sutton going missing is the worst thing to happen to Casey, to their family. She’s trying to help find her sister, but Casey is furious. She knows Sutton is manipulative, meanwhile everyone paints a picture of her perfection. People don’t look for missing Black girls—or half-Black girls—without believing there is an angel to be saved.
When Sutton reappears, Casey knows she should be relieved. Except Sutton isn’t the same. She remembers nothing about while she was gone―or anything from her old life, including how she made Casey miserable. There’s something unsettling about the way she wants to spend time with Casey and watch her goldfish swim for hours.
What happened to Sutton? The more Casey starts uncovering her sister’s secrets, the more questions she has. Did she really know her sister? Why is no one talking about the other girls who have gone missing in their area? And what will it take to uncover the truth?

Lily Meade is a biracial Black woman living outside of Seattle, Washington. Her work has been published in Bustle and Teen Vogue, and she has been featured in Romper, Buzzfeed, and Rolling Stone. This is her debut novel, which was a finalist for the Eleanor Taylor Bland award for emerging writers by Sisters in Crime.

A FEAST OF ASHES de Victoria Williamson

An action-packed young adult dystopian eco-thriller — the first in a breath-taking new trilogy — set in East Africa.

A FEAST OF ASHES (Book 1)
by Victoria Williamson
Seven Seas/Neem Tree Press, October 2023
(via Randle Editorial & Literary)

It’s the year 2123, and sixteen-year-old Adina has just killed nearly every person she knows. All fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty-six of them. Brought up in the East African ecobubble of Eden Five, as far as she knows the whole world had been destroyed by ecological disasters brought about by human greed for profit. The Amonston Corporation built ecobubbles across Africa to keep the remaining plant and animal species safe, and their generosity saved thousands of people.
When Eden Five is incinerated by an explosion caused by a routine maintenance job Adina skipped, she and a small group of survivors have to brave the toxic wilds outside the ruined dome to get to the Sanctuary before their biofilters give out and their DNA starts to mutate in the toxic outside air.
With a strong environmental theme, and warnings on the dangers of corporate takeover, this action-packed novel takes a deep look at family, friendship, romance and sacrifice.
Feast of Ashes is the first in an explosive trilogy which includes Seeds of Hunger (2024) and Harvest of Flame (2025). Perfect for fans of The Hunger Games.

Victoria Williamson is an award-winning children’s author from Glasgow. She has taught maths and science in Cameroon, trained teachers in Malawi, taught English in China and worked with children with special needs in the UK.
Victoria is a qualified primary school teacher. Her books have been long-listed for the Branford Boase Prize, Waterstones Children’s Prize, and she has won the Bolton Children’s Fiction Award in 2020 and 2021.

THE DIVIDE de Morgan Richter

A debut mystery with slight speculative elements, which follows an actress turned psychic who finds herself embroiled in a murder investigation when the doppelgänger she never knew existed turns up missing.

THE DIVIDE
by Morgan Richter
Anchor/Knopf, publication date TBD
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

When Jenny St. John was eighteen, she moved to Los Angeles from her rural Iowa hometown and scored the lead role in an independent film called The Divide. She was working with the young auteur director Serge Grumet and on her way to becoming the next indie darling. But when the movie tanked and Jenny never caught a second break it seemed her charmed story had a different ending in mind. Now, two decades later, after floundering on the fringes of the entertainment industry, she’s barely keeping afloat running a low-level grift as a psychic life coach.
But when news surfaces that Serge has been murdered, Jenny’s life is turned upside down. Unbeknownst to Jenny, Serge’s ex-wife, painter Genevieve Santos, looks alarmingly similar to Jenny. So much so, that when Gena goes missing, the cops think Jenny is Gena.
Jenny finds herself pulled into Gena’s world and manages to somehow leverage both her resemblance to Gena and her ersatz psychic abilities to infiltrate the affluent yet unstable inner circle of friends, which include a Korean pop idol-turned-social media star and an Oscar-winning actress-turned-wellness guru. It becomes clear that Gena is either the culprit of Serge’s murder or another victim. Soon Jenny’s search to find Gena unearths dark secrets about her own past while putting her squarely in the sights of a killer.
THE DIVIDE is a propulsive, unputdownable novel full of sharp insights on identity, age, success, and the inescapable pitfalls of fractured memory.

Morgan Richter is a graduate of the Filmic Writing program at the University of Southern California’s film school and has worked in production on several television shows including ABC’s America’s Funniest Home Videos and E! Entertainment Television’s Emmy-winning comedy series Talk Soup. An avid popular culture critic, she is the author of Duranalysis: Essays on the Duran Duran Experience and has amassed a cult following on her analyses of classic Duran Duran videos. She has self-published five novels but THE DIVIDE is her first foray into traditional publishing. Morgan currently lives in Seattle.