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Fantasy and Science Fiction November 2019
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| Ninth House by Leigh BardugoThe offer: A full scholarship to Yale for Galaxy "Alex" Stern, a high school dropout with the rare ability to see ghosts.
The catch: Tasked with monitoring the university's secret societies, Alex soon discovers that the elite institution is often willing to turn a blind eye to their occult transgressions.
Is it for you? This adult fantasy novel by Grisha trilogy author Leigh Bardugo is grittier than her YA books and includes scenes of murder, child abuse, sexual assault, and self-harm. |
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Velocity Weapon
by Megan E. O'keefe
Series Alert: The first book in the Protectorate trilogy "leaves multiple plot threads open for future development, and readers will look forward to the next installment." (Publishers Weekly)
What happens: The last thing Sanda remembers is her gunship breaking up around her as she evac pod expanded, sealing her away for salvage-medics to pick up.
Unfortunately: She wakes up 230 years later on an empty enemy smartship. The war is lost. The star system is dead.
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| The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee NewitzWhat it's about: The Daughters of Harriet, a coalition of feminist activists, and the Comstockers, a men's rights group, travel through time, editing history like a Wikipedia page.
Reviewers say: "A matryoshka doll meditation on the pointlessness and necessity of violence...bathed in pop culture references (real and imagined)" (NPR).
For fans of: The LGBTQIA-friendly change wars of Amal El-Mohtar's and Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War; |
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| A Song For a New Day by Sarah PinskerBefore: Musician Luce Cannon is a star on the rise -- until a disease outbreak and a wave of terrorist attacks prompt the government to ban public gatherings.
After: Rosemary Laws becomes a talent scout for a VR event company, which leads her to Luce, who now organizes underground concerts.
About the author: Nebula-award winning author and indie musician Sarah Pinsker is a member of the band Stalking Horses. |
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| Chilling Effect by Valerie ValdesWhat it's about: Captain Eva Innocente of La Sirena Negra and her crew must take on dangerous secret missions to raise the ransom money to save Eva's sister, Mari, from crime syndicate The Fridge.
Want a taste? "Someone is paying me to take you to another planet, and if I don't deliver, I don't get paid. And if I don't get paid, I lose my ship, so pretty please with sugar on top, get in your cabrón crate already, coño."
For fans of: The appealing characters in Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; the space-faring capers of Mike Brooks' Keiko novels. |
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Focus on: Alternative Histories
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The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde
Imagine a world...Where you can actually get lost (literally) in literature,
What happens: Thursday Next, a notorious Special Operative in literary detection, races against time to stop the world's Third Most Wanted criminal from kidnapping characters from works of literature, forcing her to dive into the pages of a novel to stop literary homicide.
What critics say: "James Bond Meets Harry Potter in the Twilight Zone." -Publishers Weekly
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The Invisible Library
by Genevieve Cogman
Not your average librarian: An undercover librarian who works for an occult organization collects books from different realities.
What happens: The librarian must determine what happened to a particularly dangerous book that has been stolen and becomes mired in a mystery infused with peril and conflicting clues.
Who's it for: Anyone who enjoys an suspenseful fantasy involving a quest for magical items.
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Machines Like Me: And People Like You
by Ian McEwan
What it's about: Presents the story of two lovers in an alternative 1980s London who construct a perfect synthetic human before finding themselves in a morally complex love triangle.
Provocative questions: What makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart?
What if: This thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control.
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| Everfair by Nisi ShawlWhat happens: In 1885, a group of European socialists and African American missionaries establish a safe haven for black people in the Congo. However, the well-meaning benefactors of this multiracial, steam-powered utopia fail to recognize their own blind spots.
Inspired by: King Leopold II of Belgium's real-life reign of terror over the Congo Free State, as well as the American Colonization Society's founding of Liberia.
For fans of: Steven Barnes' Lion's Blood, another Afrocentric alternate history novel that examines colonialism. |
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His Majesty's Dragon
by Naomi Novik
Setting: Napoleonic Wars
What happens: Captain Will Laurence is swept into an unexpected kinship with an extraordinary creature and joins the elite Aerial Corps as a master of the dragon Temaraire, in which role he must match wits with the powerful dragon-borne forces of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Quotes: "Just when you think you've seen every variation possible on the dragon story, along comes Naomi Novik. . . . Her wonderful Temeraire is a dragon for the ages."--Terry Brooks
"Terrifically entertaining."--Stephen King
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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