Archives de catégorie : Speculative Fiction

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.

THE POSSIBILITIES de Yael Goldstein-Love

Inception meets the transformational madness of early motherhood when a new mother ventures into the multiverse to save her missing child, in a mind-bending novel that turns the joys and anxieties of parenthood into an epic quest.

THE POSSIBILITIES: A Novel
by Yael Goldstein-Love
Random House, July 2023
(via The Gernert Company)

Hannah is having a bad day. A bad month. A bad year? That feels terrible to admit, since her son Jack was born just eight months ago, and she loves him more than anything. But ever since his harrowing birth, she can’t shake the feeling that it could have gone the other way. That her baby might not have made it. Terrifying visions from different paths her life could have taken begin to disrupt her cozy, claustrophobic days with Jack, destablizing her marriage, and making her husband concerned for her mental health. Are the strange things Hannah is seeing just new mom anxiety, or is something truly weird and sinister afoot? What if Hannah really did unlock something she wasn’t supposed to during childbirth? When Hannah’s worst nightmare comes true and Jack disappears from his crib, she discovers that her reeling mind has extraordinary powers that she must tap into in order to save her child: She has the ability to enter the multiverse—and she must visit different versions of her life while holding onto what is most important to her in this one to bring her child back home. From the intimate joys of parenthood to the cosmic awe of the multiverse, THE POSSIBILITIES is an ingenious and wildly suspenseful novel that dares to stare down into the dizzying depths of maternal love, vulnerability, and strength.

Yael Goldstein-Love is a psychotherapist working toward her doctorate in clinical psychology. She is the co-founder and Editorial Director of Plympton, a literary studio that innovates at the intersection of writing and technology, and has worked with luminaries such as Roxanne Gay, Min Jin Lee, Adam Haslett, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others. A graduate of Harvard University, where she studied philosophy of science, she lives with her four-year-old son and their cat in Berkeley, California.

THE MEADOWS de Stephanie Oakes

A queer, YA Handmaid’s Tale meets Never Let Me Go about a dystopian society bent on relentless conformity, and the struggle of one girl to save herself and those she loves from a life of lies.

THE MEADOWS
by Stephanie Oakes
Dial/ Penguin Young Readers, September 2023

Everyone hopes for a letter—to attend the Estuary, the Pines, the Glades, the Meadows. These are the special places where only the best and brightest go to burn even brighter.
When Eleanor gets her letter, she knows she’s freed from her hardscrabble life by the sea, in a country ravaged by climate disaster. But despite the Meadows’ luminous facilities, endless fields, and pretty things, it keeps dark secrets.
Four years later, Eleanor and her friends seem free of the Meadows, changed but not in the ways they expected. Eleanor is an adjudicator, ensuring her former classmates don’t stray from the lives they’ve been conditioned to live.
But Eleanor can’t escape her past, or thoughts of the girl she once loved. Because Rose isn’t here anymore. And as secrets emerge that force Eleanor to grapple with her history, she must wage a dangerous battle for her own identity and for the full truth of what happened to the girl she lost, knowing if she’s not careful, Rose’s fate could be her own.

Stephanie Oakes is the author of The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly, which was a Morris Award finalist and a Golden Kite Honor book, and The Arsonist, which won the Washington State Book Award and was an ALA/YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick. An elementary school librarian, Stephanie lives in Spokane, Washington with her wife and family.

THE SLEEPLESS de Victor Manibo

Perfect for fans of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon series, about a mysterious pandemic that causes people to become insomniacs and a man caught in a conspiracy at his workplace.

THE SLEEPLESS
by Victor Manibo
Erewhon, August 2022
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

A mysterious pandemic causes a quarter of the world’s population to permanently lose the ability to sleep—without any apparent health implications. The outbreak creates a new class of people who are both feared and ostracized, and most of whom optimize their extra hours to earn more money.
Journalist Jamie Vega is one of the Sleepless. When his boss Simon dies in an apparent suicidal overdose, Jamie is suspicious, given that their company is in the middle of a corporate takeover—and begins to investigate.
When Jamie discovers that he was the last person who saw Simon alive, Jamie realizes he can’t remember that night. Now a suspect to the police, Jamie worries his memory loss is related to the illegal procedure he underwent to become a Sleepless. As Jamie delves deeper into Simon’s final days, he is forced to confront past traumas, and the consequences of his decision to biohack himself. Along the way he uncovers a terrifying truth about what it means to be Sleepless.

• Featured on Polygon’s Summer 2022 “Most Anticipated” list

Victor Manibo’s The Sleepless is a thrilling debut with a fresh edgy voice.”
Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Manibo neatly dissects the drawbacks of capitalist demands on society in this taut near-future procedural. It’s smart, high-tech noir.” —Publishers Weekly

Victor Manibo is a speculative fiction writer living in New York City, and his writing is influenced by his experiences as an immigration and civil rights lawyer. As a queer immigrant and a person of color, he also writes about the lives of people with these identities.