Amal El-Mohtar
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Victor LaValle's story of a rare book dealer whose life is torn apart after his wife commits an act of violence and vanishes is by turns enchanting, horrifying, infuriating and heartbreaking.
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Kit Reed's would-be Southern Gothic chiller starts strong, with an amnesiac man stumbling into a house haunted by family secrets — but is ultimately undone by issues of plot, pacing and voice work.
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Sarah Gailey's alternate-history romp takes place in a United States that went ahead with a wild plan to farm hippos for meat. It's a delightful read that suffers only from being too short.
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Frances Hardinge's new novel is set in a wondrous underground city where crafts can be magic and the people are born with faces like blank canvas; they must purchase each new expression at great cost.
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In this prequel to Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein creates a charming, compelling heroine who, along with a diverse supporting cast, must solve the mystery of a disappearance on her parents' estate.
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Set in a real Florida town with a real history of devastating fires, Cherie Priest's Brimstone is a deeply loving story about a witch and a grieving veteran with a strange connection to the fires.
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Can Xue's book is hard to describe, much less explain — there's a town, and a mountain, and a poplar grove, and a host of people just trying to connect in a world of absent-minded strangeness.
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Nnedi Okorafor's Binti: Home is the second installment in her series following a young woman with grand interstellar dreams, who now must reconcile her university experiences with her home culture.
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Katherine Arden's new novel deftly weaves Russian fairy tales with tactile details to create a gorgeously wintry tale of magic, marred slightly by a clunky ending that's clearly setting up sequels.
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This new anthology of science fiction and fantasy, edited by Hassan Blasim, imagines Iraq 100 years after the invasion of 2003. Harrowing, necessary, often beautiful, it resists comfort and catharsis.