Archives de catégorie : Fiction

THE DAUGHTERS’ WAR de Christopher Buehlman

This standalone novel follows young warrior Galva dom Braga on her journey from untested academy swordswoman to feared and bloodied veteran knight, set during the war-torn, goblin-infested years just before The Blacktongue Thief.

THE DAUGHTERS’ WAR
by Christopher Buehlman
Tor Books, June 2024

The goblins have killed all of our horses and most of our men. They have enslaved our cities, burned our fields, and inflicted a waking nightmare on the known world. Now, our daughters take up arms. Galva—Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill—has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind. The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted—not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

Christopher Buehlman (he/him) is an author, comedian, and screenwriter from St. Petersburg, Florida, whose books include The Blacktongue Thief and Those Across the River. He tours the country most years, writing fantasy and horror and performing at Renaissance festivals. He and his wife, Jenn, travel with their rescue dog, Duck, and a black cat named Jane Mansfield, who is proficient in ninjutsu.

CUCKOO de Gretchen Felker-Martin

IT meets But I’m a Cheerleader and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers in a brand new horror novel from the acclaimed author of Manhunt.

CUCKOO
by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Tor Nightfire, June 2024

In 1993, five young queer kids, whose parents want them “fixed,” find themselves thrown together at a secretive “tough love” camp deep in the Utah desert. Tormented and worked to the point of collapse by hardline religious zealots intent on straightening them out, they slowly become aware that something in the mountains north of the camp is speaking to them in their dreams and that the children who return home to their families aren’t the ones they sent away.

Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt, is a Massachusetts-based horror author and film critic. You can read her fiction and film criticism on Patreon, Nylon Magazine, The Outline, and more.

ELAINE de Will Self

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a brilliant portrait of motherhood, sublimated desire, and the reverberations of the Cold War in a novel that investigates and reimagines the life of the author’s mother.

ELAINE
by Will Self
Grove Press, September 2024

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language, dubbed “the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation” (Guardian). His work has been shortlisted for awards including the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year, and selected for best of the year lists, including those of the Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times. He also earns rapturous reviews, with his last novel, Phone, hailed as “one of the most significant literary works of our century” (New Statesman). Following a blistering personal account of addiction in his memoir Will, Self turns his forensic eye to the life of his own equally troubled mother, Elaine, in this brilliantly conceived new novel.

Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member, inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life.

Based on the intimate diaries Self’s mother kept for over forty years, ELAINE is a writer’s attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent’s interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, ELAINE shows Will Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.

ESPERANCE d’Adam Oyebanji

A whip-smart thriller in the vein of Blake Crouch, Andy Weir, and Neal Stephenson, ESPERANCE plumbs the depths of a seemingly impossible crime rooted in racism, intergenerational trauma, and an inhuman concept of justice.

ESPERANCE
by Adam Oyebanji
DAW US; Quercus UK, May 2025
(via JABberwocky)

Detective Ethan Krol is on the twentieth floor of a Chicago apartment building. A father and son have been found dead—their lungs full of sea water hundreds of miles from the ocean.

Abidemi Eniola has arrived in Bristol, England. She claims to be Nigerian, but her accent is wrong and she can do remarkable things with technology, things that Abi’s new friend, Hollie Rogers, has never seen before. Abi is in possession of a number of heirlooms that need to be returned to their rightful owners and Hollie is more than happy to go along for the ride.

But neither Abidemi Eniola nor her heirlooms are quite what they seem. Abidemi is a target of Ethan Krol’s investigations and Hollie’s life is about to become far more uncomfortable than she bargained for. In a clash of cultures, and histories and different ideas about right and wrong, Hollie’s safety is very much at risk. Someone’s justice will have to give way, and the consequences will be deadly.

Of Scottish and Nigerian descent, Adam Oyebanji is an escapee from Birmingham University and Harvard Law School. He currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA with a wife, child, and two embarrassingly large dogs. When he’s not out among the stars, Adam works in the field of counter-terrorist financing: helping banks choke off the money supply that builds weapons of mass destruction, narcotics empires, and human trafficking networks.

TINY THREADS de Lilliam Rivera

Black Swan meets The Devil Wears Prada in this creepy horror about fashion, about sexuality as a commodity, and the power wielded by men trying to harness it.

TINY THREADS
by Lilliam Rivera
Del Rey, March 2023
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

After the death of her grandmother, Samara Martín leaves her overbearing Cuban family behind in New Jersey for a job at a once-edgy fashion brand in Vernon, California. Touted as up-and-coming, Vernon turns out to be eerily desolate, made worse by the foul-smelling slaughterhouse near the office.
Trying to navigate office politics by appeasing her volatile boss, Samara throws all her focus into an upcoming runway show. But there are other forces at play; she finds names stitched into garments in the archive that disappear the next day, she starts having visions of a young girl that grow increasingly disturbing—and there’s Brandon Hernandez Murphy, a charming tech investor keen on reinventing Vernon who Samara finds herself drawn to.
Samara starts to hide her increasing instability by drinking more, casting aside her family’s warnings, but when the runway show is a success, the guardrails come off entirely. The afterparty is extreme in all senses: beauty, drugs, and sex—and Samara succumbs to every vice. But her visions aren’t through with her yet. They lead her to a disturbing discovery and a violent confrontation with consequences for both Samara’s world, and the world of the supernatural.

Lilliam Rivera draws upon her experiences as a founding editor of Latina magazine to examine the dark side of glamour and deliver a haunting story. She is also an award-winning writer and author of numerous young adult novels, including The Education of Margot Sanchez, We Light Up the Sky, Never Look Back, and Dealing In Dreams. She is also author of the middle grade Goldie Vance books. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.