A new YA SciFi trilogy by the New York Times bestselling author of Dragon Pearl.
WINTER’S AXIOM
(Book 1 in the Lancers series)
by Yoon Ha Lee
Delacorte, Spring 2024
(via The Gernert Company)
When Hwa Young’s home is destroyed and her family is on the run from enemy forces, she faces an impossible choice. Stay with her family and likely perish or be adopted by a new family connected to the Empire, which is enforcing conformity across the galaxy. She chooses her own survival.
Several years later, Hwa is a talented lancer pilot, manning a mecha robot on missions to planets under the Empire’s control, when she discovers the next mission is to destroy her home planet where her mother is still alive.
WINTER’S AXIOM is a novel about family, community, conformity, survival and about doing what’s right.
Yoon Ha Lee is the author of several critically acclaimed short stories and the Machineries of Empire trilogy for adults: Ninefox Gambit, Raven Strategem, and Revenant Gun. Yoon draws inspiration from a variety of sources including Korean history and mythology, fairy tales, higher mathematics, classic moral dilemmas, and genre fiction.

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.
In DEATH VALLEY, an unnamed woman arrives in the California desert seeking respite. Holding herself at bay and temporarily deserting her own life seems preferable to being filled by the anticipatory grief chasing her — both for a father attempting to recover from a near-fatal accident and a husband whose chronic illness is worsening. What the desert provides, however, is not inner peace but a path: a receptionist-recommended nearby hike. On this desert trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there. It is wounded. Its gaping injury beckons like a familiar door. So, she enters it. What this woman finds inside this mystical succulent is enough to make her believe her load can lighten. When she returns to the trail, however, the cactus is gone and in seeking it, she suddenly is more lost than ever before. Whether she can survive, and be reunited with all she found to live for while inside her cactus is up to what she is able to seek within herself. With no phone battery left to tell her where she is, whether her father is still alive, or whether her husband will be waiting if she returns, what’s written on her heart alone is her only map out.
A man. His ex-girlfriend’s cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.