A Half-Built Garden

Ruthanna Emrys

Judy Wallach-Stevens is woken one night to a warning about pollutants in the nearby Chesapeake Bay. With her wife and newborn in tow, she heads out to see what’s up—and ends up making first contact with a group of friendly aliens.

God Went Like That

Yxta Maya Murray

In the middle of the last century, a research and development complex in California’s Simi Valley experienced multiple near-catastrophic accidents, leaking radiation and other toxins into the surrounding communities.

Treacle Walker

Alan Garner

“Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!”

The Absolute Book

Elizabeth Knox

When the murderer of Taryn Cornick’s sister is himself murdered just days after his release from prison, detective Jacob Berger is certain she has something to do with it.

The Language of Power

Rosemary Kirstein

In the fourth and as yet final book of the Steerswoman series, Rowan and Bel return to Donner, where they last barely escaped an attack of dragons.

The Lost Steersman

Rosemary Kirstein

Rowan arrives in Alemath, at the steerswomen’s Annex, searching for information.

The Outskirter’s Secret

Rosemary Kirstein

The second book in the extraordinary Steerswoman Series follows Rowan and her companion, Bel, as they venture into the outskirts: a dangerous, inhospitable land marked by few sources of food and panoply of monsters intent on killing the humans who dare to live there.

The Steerswoman

Rosemary Kirstein

Ask a steerswoman any question, and she will answer it truthfully and to the fullest of her knowledge. In return, you must answer any question she puts to you.

The Silverberg Business

Robert Freeman Wexler

In 1888, Shannon, a private detective from Chicago, travels to Texas to investigate a missing person: one Nathan Silverberg, who had ventured south with a clutch of donated funds intended to buy land to found a colony for Jewish refugees.

Menewood

Nicola Griffith

Hild, now Lady of Elmet and wife to Cian Boldcloak, remains King Edwin’s seer—but what she can see is terrible.

The Vaster Wilds

Lauren Groff

A girl—who was once called Zed, and once called Lamentations, and now perhaps has no name—flees the famine and violence of a starving Dutch colony in the Americas and enters the wilderness.

Dr. Ha Nguyen has been summoned to the remote archipelago of Con Dao, where there are rumors of an octopus that walks upright on land and may have taken to murdering local poachers.

The Water Knife

Paolo Bacigalupi

In what reads like a plausible present (rather than the near future), the enforcer for the Southern Nevada Water Authority cuts a bloody fight over the little water that remains in the Colorado river.

Babel

R. F. Kuang

In the nineteenth century, the British empire has achieved exceptional power through its dominance of silver-working: an art that locates and exploits the magic in the gaps of meaning between languages.

Starfish

Peter Watts

A group of people “preadapted” to danger and stress have been recruited to run a power station at the bottom of the Pacific.

The City and the City

China Miéville

Inspector Tyador Borlú serves on the Extreme Crime Squad in the city of Besźel.

Nona the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir

In the third book of the Locked Tomb series, Nona lives with her friends Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha in a cramped apartment in a tall building in a city menaced by a great hulking creature in the sky.

The Gone-Away World

Nick Harkaway

A world-ending weapon that makes its targets “go away” has, perhaps predictably, gone awry and left large parts of the world uninhabitable.