Historical fiction author Siegel (Solomon’s Crown) spins a tale of dark sapphic romance in her addictive fantasy debut. As a First Daughter of her family, Cybil Harding is cursed from her birth in 1576 with dark, chaotic magic that dooms the people around her. Previous generations of the Harding family left firstborn daughters in the woods for the wolves, but Cybil’s father, Christopher, is convinced their family’s magic is a blessing and believes he can break Cybil’s curse. While he flounders trying to do so, Cybil grows up unintentionally leaving death and destruction everywhere she goes. When Christopher attempts to summon a demon to break the curse, Miriam Richter, a creation of the shadows, answers the call—only to reap Christopher’s soul. Later, however, when the witchfinder catches up with Cybil, Miriam steps in and makes her a deal: Cybil will be reincarnated each time a first daughter is born and will have 23 years in each lifetime to try to break the curse before Miriam returns for her soul. Thus agreed, the pair begin a cat-and-mouse dance across centuries. Siegel’s historical scene-setting stays vivid and impressive as the periods change, and the tension-filled dynamic between the leads keeps the pages turning. Fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue will be enthralled. Agent: Catherine Cho, Paper Literary. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

In Baldree’s endearing third Legends & Lattes fantasy (after Bookshops & Bonedust), rattkin bookseller Fern moves cross-country to open a bookstore next door to her old friend Viv’s coffee shop, hoping this will cure her ennui. Despite a warm welcome from her new community, however, she remains oddly dissatisfied. One night, she drunkenly stows away in a wagon belonging to Astryx One-Ear, an ancient elven adventurer and bounty hunter, who’s currently bringing a chaotic goblin named Zyll to face justice. Unwilling to return home as she’s unsure how to explain to Viv why she’s discontent, Fern arranges to keep traveling with Astryx and Zyll. The journey proves perilous, with rival bounty hunters and Zyll’s enemies all wanting a piece of the goblin, but Fern’s escapades on the road allow her to reassess her life’s trajectory and discover a passion for telling stories in addition to selling them. But when she must choose between old friends and new, it could change everything. While this road trip romp is more action-packed than previous installments, Baldree still conjures up the sense of cozy intimacy the series is known for. It’s a delight. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bak’s blood-soaked debut turns on a vicious sibling rivalry. The epistolary narrative follows four characters: Mira, a tutor; Yujae, her overlooked and attention-starved pupil; Yuchan, Yujae’s genius older brother and the family favorite; and the boys’ mother, Jiwon, who has sensed that something is deeply—perhaps murderously—wrong with Yujae from infancy. Mira’s true motives for taking the tutor job are quickly revealed: she blames Yujae’s cold-blooded killing of her family dog for the subsequent suicides of her mother and brother, and now she’s out for revenge. Achieving this goal is not the victory she hoped for, however. Meanwhile, through letters and journal entries, the true extent of Yujae’s escalating brutality is revealed, as is his plot to murder his own brother, leading to a nail-biting finale. It’s a squirmy tale centering a bleakly cruel cast and overflowing with unflinching depictions of violence toward humans and animals alike. Readers will need strong stomachs for this one. Agent: Marina Penalva Halpin, Casanovas & Lynch. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Qntm, the pen name of software developer Sam Hughes, makes his traditionally published debut (after the serialized online novel Ra) with this acrobatically absurdist tale of a team of special agents tasked with saving humanity from a menagerie of “Unknowns.” These “memetic threats” come in many forms: from monsters and supernatural objects to “contagious ideas, which require containment just like any physical threat.” What makes these Unknowns especially troublesome is that anyone who comes in contact with them loses their memories. Antimemetics Division director Marie Quinn is so desperate to learn more about the Unknowns that she doses her predecessor, Division founder Andrew Hilton, with a lethal memory-recovering drug. She discovers that the first Antimemetics unit was created within the British Army during WWII to combat “the idea of Nazism.” When one of the Unknowns attaches itself to Quinn, she suspects the only way to get free of the memetic threats forever may involve destroying humanity. Meanwhile, her husband, a violinist with a genetic mutation that has spared his memory, tries to save her, but she no longer remembers him. The zany narrative is further complicated by some formalist flourishes, including pages blackened by a censor’s pen and letters missing from words throughout. Hard sci-fi fans looking for riddles and spectacle will be entertained, if occasionally baffled. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Exploring religious trauma through an enemies-to-lovers romance, Reid’s evocative debut is as gothic as a cathedral and as haunting as the moors. Raised by the watchful elders of the Abbey, deeply devout Maeve has been trained as an iconographer, creating the paintings of saints that the Abbey’s faithful pray to. Now she’s tasked with visiting Jude, an exiled saint, and painting his updated icon. Jude, however, is decidedly hostile to the idea of her staying at his house and digging into his secrets. But when Maeve reveals the strange trance that comes over her when she paints, Jude realizes he must be honest with her about the terrible price the Abbey exacts from its faithful, rewriting their memories and perceptions of reality each time they pray. As a saint, Jude’s memories similarly erode each time someone prays to him. Meanwhile Maeve, who has more magic than she understands, is in terrible danger from her superiors. Between the two of them, they hold the key to bringing down the whole Abbey—if only they could remember it. Though the complex worldbuilding raises more questions than it answers, it’s deeply satisfying to watch Maeve start to question all that she’s been taught. Reid’s dreamlike twists of logic and vivid imagery will linger in readers’ minds. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Ashing-Giwa (A Splinter in the Sky) wows in this brilliantly immersive novel set 500 years after humanity left an overpopulated Earth to begin again on Newearth, an exodus enabled by the help of mysterious aliens known as the Makers. Despite the new lease on life offered by this opportunity, impatient settlers recklessly sped up the terraforming process, leading to dire environmental consequences felt in the present day. As ecological catastrophe looms, Newearth’s autocratic leaders, who have adopted the theory that criminal tendencies are genetic, stifle dissent. When heroine Fenyyang “Fen” Mekantai was just six, her fathers, both ambassadors, were arrested for encouraging citizens to air concerns about the future. Their arrest doomed Fen to a life of involuntary servitude to a nobleman, Onath, who trained her as a bodyguard. Years later, her fathers are assassinated in prison and Onath is ordered to kill Fen. Instead, he enables her escape, faking her death and giving her directions to reach the Broken Masks, a rebel force. What she finds when she does so is unexpected, and complicates her hopes for the future. Ashing-Giwa’s dystopian sci-fi worldbuilding is staggering, and her heroine proves easy to root for. Readers will be enthralled. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Berman (editor of Brute) brings together 15 haunting tales loosely riffing on Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera. As Berman puts it in his introduction, the anthology is “an homage to Erik—the first truly human monster of modern horror—and to those still drawn to his tragic song.” Several stories, such as “Trompe l’Oiel” by Tim Newton Anderson and “The Road of Mirrors” by James Bennett, offer straightforward tribute; both are set in turn of the 20th-century Paris and studded with invocations of and appearances from the Phantom himself. Some stories, however, go to truly unexpected places, such as Orrin Grey’s standout “The Phantom of the Wax Museum,” starring a young lesbian reporter in 1930s Hollywood covering a series of strange events following Phantom actor Lon Cheney’s death. Addison Smith’s eerie and grotesque “The Music We Became” is another highlight, following two teen girls who seek to create their own world in a sinkhole behind a theater. Capturing much of the menace and enchantment of the original, this will be a treat for Phantom fans. (Nov.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Jacobs (A Lush and Seething Hell) sends Florida ship captain Samantha Vineyard into peril in this nerve-rattling maritime horror novel. Too broke to fix her boat, Sam accepts a gig as an engineer on the Blackwatch, a supposedly haunted ship set to sail from Puget Sound to the Panama Canal and then across the Atlantic. She has a complicated history with Loick Archambault, the estranged friend who offers her the job, and the ship’s captain, Hank Huntington, and is familiar with most of the crew except for the first mate, a woman called Seabees, and three wealthy wannabe sailors all named Steve, who’ve paid Hank for the learning experience. During the journey, Sam finds a decrepit journal from the sailboat’s first voyage that details the captain’s increasingly erratic behavior and fascination with a mysterious ritual. After Sam begins to hear voices, one of the Steves disappears in San Diego, and a crewman falls from a mast in Panama City, where Sam meets a witch who warns her about disasters to come. Jacobs walks a fine line between foreshadowing and telegraphing, but manages to conceal enough surprises to make even seasoned horror fans jump. This delivers the goods. Agent: Stacia Decker, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Wolf (Beyond Enemies) launches her Arcane Hoard series with this thrilling if familiar fantasy. In an abandoned area of Broadside, gang leader Cima discovers a long-buried treasure chest overflowing with “loose gems, intricate jewelry, [and] gold, silver, metals she didn’t recognize.” Together with her friends Gaudi, Terio, Ackles, and Meesh, she begins selling off the loot, changing their lives overnight. When Cima comes back for more, however, the dragon Yagen appears and tells her the truth about the stolen treasures: they contain magic, a force that has otherwise vanished from Broadside in the wake of a catastrophic event called the Cataclysm and which is capable of corrupting anyone who handles the objects. As if to prove Yagen’s words, fire erupts, a building collapses, and two of Cima’s gang are killed. To save her remaining friends and all of Broadside, Cima must return the stolen items to the chest. But the merchants who’ve purchased from her aren’t eager to let their new treasures go, especially not the members of the ruling Council, which has its own agenda for magic. Though some subplots feel bloated, the search for these precious items propels the plot forward and the found family vibe between Cima and her gang adds charm. This is a promising start. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink

Entanglements—romantic, criminal, and quantum—shape this fanciful brainteaser from Lanza (The Grand Biocentric Design) and Kress (The Eleventh Gate). Nobel laureate Sam Watkins runs an outré research clinic in the Cayman Islands where reality-altering microchips are implanted into patients’ brains so they can create new realities and (maybe) attain immortality. When the chief neurosurgeon dies in a diving accident, Watkins recruits his grandniece, doctor Caro Soames-Watkins, as a replacement. Caro, who’s facing a misogynistic social media fire storm after accusing a prominent coworker of sexual harassment, seizes on the opportunity to escape. Rebuffing advances from Watkin’s womanizing right-hand man, Caro befriends the project’s mastermind, Weigert, a soft-spoken widower who educates her in quantum physics, particularly the idea that “probabilities turn into matter or energy only when they are observed.” It’s not long before Caro figures out Weigert wants the microchip so he can travel to the multiverse and reunite with his late wife and dogs; meanwhile her uncle, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, hopes the operation will make him immortal. When a staffer turns up murdered and the institute’s research reaches the dark web, Caro must use all her wits to untangle the mystery. The fascinating science and fun interpersonal puzzle will appeal to fans of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Dr. Moreau. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 08/29/2025 | Details & Permalink