Of the many great books I read this year, the following 10 have stayed with me, undergirded my thoughts as I go about my days and provoked excellent, chewy conversations about craft and pleasure, empire and resistance. While I’m a little haunted by the violence publishers seem to be doing to the very concept of a series — claiming sequels are stand-alones, while insufficiently supporting and labeling the parts of actual series — I hope you find something to enjoy among these fantastic works.
The Book of Love
By Kelly Link
“The Book of Love” is a landmark, the kind of fantasy novel that has its own gravity and distorts the genre terrain around it. Set in a small town called Lovesend, it tells the story of teenagers who return from the dead and must compete to remain alive by completing magical tasks. A tender tribute to romance novels, fairy villains and fairy lovers, “The Book of Love” does justice to its name.
Rakesfall
By Vajra Chandrasekera
Chandrasekera’s second novel shifts wildly in structure and narration to dazzling result. Souls recur in various combinations and circumstances, organized around how to endure fascism and kill kings. A TV show that is perhaps reality gives way to a play about beings who reincarnate over thousands of years, which gives way to a murder mystery involving a cybernetically enhanced near-immortal who wakes from an ancient sleep. Ambitious and kaleidoscopic.
In Universes
By Emet North
This is a haunting and hopeful book, as precise and lingering as the pressure of a finger in a delicate, vulnerable place. Each chapter explores how the life of a gender-fluid researcher named Raffi could change in the wake of different choices. Sometimes wrecked by climate disaster or alien invasion, Raffi’s world nevertheless offers small spaces of intimacy. A gently devastating debut.
The Melancholy of Untold History
By Minsoo Kang
Kang braids a horror-inflected narrative of a raconteur about to be killed by his emperor, a mythic tale of discord between the gods, and a story of a recently bereaved present-day history professor, in a spellbinding book that invites us to question who is telling stories about whom. It’s also — unexpectedly — superbly funny.
The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
By Sofia Samatar
Small but perfectly formed, this novel is set on spaceships stratified into social hierarchies. At the bottom are laborers bound by an enormous chain, in the middle are people who are policed but mostly free, and at the top are unburdened people whose whims shape the lives of those beneath them. Written with Samatar’s usual grace, “The Practice” reads like a précis of her body of work.
Exordia
By Seth J. Dickinson
Dickinson’s science-fiction debut is a first-contact story about a Kurdish war orphan and the warmongering six-headed snake alien she meets in Central Park. Scrutinizing ethics, theoretical physics and the military-industrial complex, “Exordia” is so brilliant that I’m including it in this list despite its decidedly non-stand-alone ending, for which I feel the publisher owes me either an apology or the next two volumes in quick succession.
The Mercy of Gods
By James S.A. Corey
By contrast, “The Mercy of Gods” explicitly launches a series, harrowing in a more measured way, combining campus novel and science-fiction thriller. An alien empire of giant creatures called the Carryx descends on the human-colonized planet Anjiin, slaughtering an eighth of the population and abducting the planet’s elites to test them for “usefulness” on other worlds.
Those Beyond the Wall
By Micaiah Johnson
This is a stand-alone sequel to “The Space Between Worlds,” Johnson’s postapocalyptic debut. Here, travel through the multiverse is possible but comes with the risk of being crushed to death by a cosmic “backlash.” But someone has figured out how to shift that risk from the traveler to others, and innocent people are being killed. Stopping this will require old nemeses and unlikely friends to unite against a common enemy.
The Tainted Cup
By Robert Jackson Bennett
Bennett’s perfectly executed fantasy mystery novel introduces two dynamic detectives in a strange world, as if Nero Wolfe were solving mysteries in Area X. Dinios Kol is an “engraver,” able to remember crime scenes in perfect detail; his employer, Ana Dolabra, is an ostracized investigator whose sensory sensitivity often requires her to wear a blindfold. When a wealthy man is spectacularly murdered, Ana and Din are called in to solve the crime.
Long Live Evil
By Sarah Rees Brennan
“Long Live Evil” launches a series. I cannot stress this enough. This careening meta-fantasy delight, in which a young dying woman enters her little sister’s favorite fantasy novel as its villain, stole a night’s sleep from me as I reveled in it, convinced that it would end cathartically if I could just stay up long enough. But there is no end. There will be more, which is good, but only next year, which is terrible.
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