Literary Fiction Fantasy

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader.

A number-one New York Times best-selling author, Charlaine Harris penned the addictive Sookie Stackhouse series. In Day Shift psychic Manfred Bernardo is hounded by the press after a client drops dead during a reading. Turning to the local vampire's lover for help, Manfred hopes she can put the squeeze on the scandal before someone else is put on ice.

Personne ne l'a vue venir. La Grande Tempête : un ouragan de vent et de neige qui plonge le pays dans l'obscurité et l'effroi. D'étranges éclairs bleus rampent le long des immeubles, les palpent, à la recherche de leurs proies.

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears - an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories. Ory and his wife, Max, have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day, Max’s shadow disappears, too.

This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.

Lud-in-the-Mist - a prosperous country town situated where two rivers meet: the Dawl and the Dapple. The latter, which has its source in the land of Faerie, is a great trial to Lud, which had long rejected anything 'other', preferring to believe only in what is known, what is solid. Nathaniel Chanticleer is a somewhat dreamy, slightly melancholy man, not one for making waves, who is deliberately ignoring a vital part of his own past: a secret he refuses even to acknowledge.

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

You know the future that people in the 1950s imagined we'd have? Well, it happened. In Tom Barren's 2016, humanity thrives in a techno-utopian paradise of flying cars, moving sidewalks, and moon bases, where avocados never go bad and punk rock never existed...because it wasn't necessary. Except Tom just can't seem to find his place in this dazzling, idealistic world, and that's before his life gets turned upside down.

Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, is riding high after her victory that tore southern China from its Mongol masters. Now she burns with a new desire: to seize the throne and crown herself emperor. But Zhu isn’t the only one with imperial ambitions. Her neighbor in the south, the courtesan Madam Zhang, wants the throne for her husband—and she’s strong enough to wipe Zhu off the map. To stay in the game, Zhu will have to gamble everything on a risky alliance with an old enemy: the talented but unstable eunuch general Ouyang, who has already sacrificed everything for a chance at revenge.

What will the future hold for those who are left? Koli has come a long way since being exiled from his small village of Mythen Rood. In his search for the fabled tech of the Old Times, he knew he'd be battling shunned men, strange beasts and trees that move as fast as whips. But he has already encountered so much more than he bargained for. Now that Koli and his companions have found the source of the signal they've been following - the mysterious "Sword of Albion" - there is hope that their perilous journey will finally be worth something.

Some of the parchment pages were the color of cream, thick and substantial, made to last many, many lifetimes. Other pages were thin and desiccated, positively yellow from age, and crackled alarmingly as Van Richten turned them over. There were no ornate illuminations, no fussy borders, only lines of plain text in hard black ink. The flowing handwriting was a bit difficult to follow at first; the writer's style of calligraphy had not been in common use for 300 years. No table of contents, but from the dates it looked to be some kind of history.

Englishman Edward Prendick finds himself shipwrecked on the open ocean. When a passing ship takes him aboard and revives him, things are starting to look less gloomy for the young scientist. Yet little does he know things about to get much worse. He is taken to an abandoned island occupied only by Dr. Moreau, a disgraced English scientist for his unethical treatment of live creatures. Prendick finds that the Doctor has been up to old habits, using the island's animals to create animal-human hybrids.

In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural 21st-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power - and limitations - of family bonds.

In a back alley in Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee - the chance to travel back in time. With faces both familiar and new, Tales from the Cafe follows the story of four patrons who visit to take advantage of café Funiculi Funicula's time-traveling offer and revisit moments with family, friends and lovers. Each one must face up to the past to move on with their life.

Abbie awakens in a daze with no memory of who she is or how she landed in this unsettling condition. The man by her side claims to be her husband. He’s a titan of the tech world, the founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most innovative start-ups. He tells Abbie that she is the perfect wife. He says she had a terrible accident five years ago and that, through a huge technological breakthrough, she has been brought back from the abyss. But as Abbie pieces together memories of her marriage, she begins to question her husband’s motives - and his version of events.

The Amazon jungle holds many dangers, as Kathleen McKnight well knows after her mission to bring down a drug cartel goes horribly wrong, leaving her the only survivor on her team. Determined to find the mysterious man who saved her, she returns to the jungle a year later only to find it holds more secrets than she could have ever imagined. Since saving Kathleen, jaguar shifter Connor Anderson hasn't been able to get her out of his mind. When she returns to the jungle to seek him out, he only knows one thing: that he must claim her for his own.

Une muraille opaque de brouillard et ses cohortes de monstres avancent inexorablement vers Eden. La Grande Tempête qui a balayé l'Amérique reviendra-t-elle détruire la nouvelle civilisation que les Pans, les enfants étrangement épargnés par le cataclysme, tentent de créer ? Sauront-ils déjouer les complots du Buveur d'Innocence ? L'Alliance des Trois pourra-t-elle s'opposer à la menace d'Entropia, royaume du chaos et de la mort ?

With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Rebecca Roanhorse, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 explores the ever-expanding and changing world of contemporary science fiction and fantasy.

The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind.

Tristran Thorn will do anything to win the cold heart of beautiful Victoria Forester - even fetch her the star they watch fall from the night sky. But to do so, he must enter the unexplored lands on the other side of the ancient wall that gives their tiny village its name. Beyond that stone barrier, Tristran learns, lies Faerie . . . and the most exhilarating adventure of the young man's life.