Fantasy and Science Fiction November 2025 |
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Recent Releases in Fantasy |
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A Mouthful of Dust
by Nghi Vo
Wandering Cleric Chih of Singing Hills and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant come to the river town of Baolin chasing stories of a legendary famine. Amid tales of dishes served to royalty and desserts made of dust, they discover the secrets of what happens when hunger stalks the land and what the powerful will do to hide their crimes.
Trapped in the mansion of a sinister magistrate, Chih and Almost Brilliant must learn what happened in Baolin when the famine came to call, and they must do so quickly...because the things in the shadows are only growing hungrier.
Singing Hills Cycle #6
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Dead Hand Rule: Book Three of the Craft Wars Series
by Max Gladstone
The time until the end-times is ticking away. If the world has any hope of surviving, it must come together now.
The foundations of the world are quaking. Markets crash and cities burn as a new god struggles to be born. Ancient hunters skitter across space, eager and hungry. Dark forces conspire to undermine anything or anyone who could stand in their way. Divided, the world of the craft is certain to fall.
In Alt Coulomb, the great powers of the world gather in conference. Empires, divinities, and corporate concerns take seats at the table. Untold wealth and inexhaustible might is on offer, but coalition will not come easily. Can these forces come together to save the world? And if they do, what parts of it will they choose to save, and for whom?
Craft Wars #3
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Kill the Beast
by Serra Swift
The night Lyssa Cadogan's brother was murdered by a faerie-made monster known as the Beast, she made him a promise: she would find a way to destroy the immortal creature and avenge his death. For thirteen years, she has been hunting faeries and the abominations they created. But in all that time, the one Beast she is most desperate to find has never resurfaced.
Until she meets Alderic Casimir de Laurent, a melodramatic dandy with a coin purse bigger than his brain. Somehow, he has found the monster's lair, and--even more surprising--retrieved one of its claws. A claw Lyssa needs in order to forge a sword that can kill the Beast.
Alderic is ill-equipped for a hunt and almost guaranteed to get himself killed. But as the two of them search for the rest of the materials that will be the Beast's undoing, Alderic reveals hidden depths: dark secrets that he guards as carefully as Lyssa guards hers. Before long, and against Lyssa's better judgment, an unlikely friendship begins to bloom--one that will either lead to the culmination of Lyssa's quest for vengeance, or spell doom for them both.
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Our Vicious Oaths
by N. E. Davenport
Princess of the Aether Dominion, Kadeesha wants nothing to do with fae politics. She is a warrior, first and foremost, and believes her greatest strength is leading her squadron of elite winged serpent flyers to protect her homeland. But bound since infancy to be betrothed to the Hyperion High King, ruler of all Dominions, she has no choice but to do what men have chosen for her.
Repulsed by the idea, she decides to spend one last night of freedom--in the arms of a dangerous stranger who takes her to sexual heights she's never experienced before...but who is only using Kadeesha to set a trap for the High King.
For the High King and the kings of his six Dominions were responsible for the decimation of the Apollyon Court, and its new king, Malachi, wants his pounds of flesh.
On Kadeesha's wedding day, Malachi and his special forces attack. Her father is killed, and Malachi wounds the High King, ultimately taking Kadeesha as hostage back to his land.
But she is no true hostage. The two form a pact: she will help lure the High King so Malachi can kill him once and for all, and he in turn will not harm Kadeesha or the Aether people. And as much as Kadeesha hates politics, she is now the Queen of her folk. Fae bonds are unbreakable...and so, perhaps, is the attraction Kadeesha and Malachi feel for each other. For even as they must publicly display their connection to provoke the High King's jealousy, they struggle to resist the powerful allure between them in order to achieve their ultimate goals.
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Psychopomp & Circumstance
by Eden Royce
Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction, born to a family of free Black business owners in New Charleston. Coddled to within an inch of her life by a mother who refuses to let her daughter live a life other than the one she dictates, Phee yearns to demonstrate she's capable of more than simply marrying well.
When word arrives that her Aunt Cleo, long estranged from the family, has passed away, Phee risks her mother's wrath to step up and accept the role of pomp--the highly honored duty of planning the funeral service. Traveling alone to the town of Horizon and her aunt's unsettling home, Phee soon discovers that visions and shadows beckon from every reflective surface, and that some secrets transcend the borders of life and death.
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Queen Demon
by Martha Wells
Dahin, a beloved member of the Witch King's coterie, believes he has clues to the location of the Hierarchs' Well, and the Witch King Kai, along with his companions Ziede and Tahren, knowing there's something he isn't telling them, travel with him to the rebuilt university of Ancartre, which may be dangerously close to finding the Well itself.
Can Kai stop the rise of a new Hierarch?
And can he trust his companions to do what's right?
Rising World #2
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Red City
by Marie Lu
Alchemy is the hidden art of transformation. An exclusive power wielded by crime syndicates that market it to the world's elites in the form of sand, a drug that enhances those who take it into a more perfect version of themselves: more beautiful, more charismatic, simply more.
Among the gleaming skyscrapers and rolling foothills of Angel City, alchemy is controlled by two rival syndicates. For years, Grand Central and Lumines have been balanced on a razor's edge between polite negotiation and outright violence. But when two childhood friends step into that delicate equation, the city--and the paths of their lives--will be irrevocably transformed.
The daughter of a poor single mother, Sam would do anything to claw her way into the ranks of Grand Central in search of a better life. Plucked away from his family as a boy to become a Lumines apprentice, Ari is one of the syndicates' brightest rising stars. Once, they might have loved each other. But as the two alchemists face off across opposite sides of an ever-escalating conflict, ambition becomes power, loyalty becomes lies, and no transformation may be perfect enough for them both to survive the coming war.
New Alchemists #1
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Savage Blooms
by S. T. Gibson
For as long as Adam can remember, the legends passed down from his world-traveling grandfather have called him to a crumbling manor in the Highlands. His closest friend Nicola longs for the same adventure, as well as for Adam himself. She'll follow him just about anywhere - even to the remote wilds of Scotland - if it pushes the pair to surrender to their shared attraction.
But when a storm strikes and strands them unexpectedly, Adam and Nicola find themselves at the mercy of the eccentric owner of the infamous house, Eileen, as well as her brooding groundskeeper, Finley.
Trapped by the weather, and bound by ancient faery magic, Nicola and Adam get more than they bargained for as they become entangled in Eileen and Finley's world of mind games, deceit and forbidden desire. As ancestral sins are unearthed, Adam and Nicola will have to reckon with the spell Eileen and Finley have cast over them - and whether or not they even want to be free.
Unearthly Delights #1
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The Women of Wild Hill
by Kirsten Miller
There are places on earth where nature's powers gather. Girls raised there are bequeathed strange gifts. A few have powers so dark that they fear to use them. Such a place is Wild Hill, on the tip of Long Island. For centuries, the ghost of a witch murdered by colonists claimed the beautiful and fertile Wild Hill...until a young Scottish woman with strange gifts arrived. Sadie Duncan was allowed to stay.
Five generations of Sadie's descendants called Wild Hill home, each generation more powerful than the last. Then, in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy, the last of the Duncans, once prophesized to be the most powerful of their kind, abandoned their ancestral home.
One of them, Brigid Laguerre moved to California and turned her dark gift into fame and fortune. Her sister, Phoebe, settled on a ranch in Texas, where women visit in secret for her tonics and cures. Phoebe's daughter, Sybil, has become a famous chef. Seemingly powerless, Sibyl has never been told of the Duncan bloodline.
Now Brigid, Phoebe, and Sibyl have been brought to Wild Hill to discover their family legacy. The Old One, furious at the path mankind has taken, has chosen three powerful witches to turn the tide. The Duncans will fulfill their destinies--but only if they can set aside their grievances and come together as a family.
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When They Burned the Butterfly
by Wen-Yi Lee
Singapore, 1972: Newly independent and grappling for power in a fast-modernizing world. Here, gangsters in Chinese secret societies are the last conduits of their ancestors' migrant gods, and the back alleys where they fight are the last place magic has not been assimilated and legislated away.
Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight--a girl with a butterfly tattoo--she discovers she's far from alone.
Ang Tian is a Red Butterfly: one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline's mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Now that she's dead, Adeline's bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother's killer and the gang's succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girls' dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian.
But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of Butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light district suffused with a strange new magic. Adeline may have found her place for once, but with the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it.
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Alchemy of Secrets
by Stephanie Garber
It starts with a class in an old movie theater.
Folklore 517: Local Legends and Urban Myths, taught by a woman called the Professor. Most students believe the Professor's stories are just fiction, but Holland St. James has always been convinced that magic is real. When she tracks down a local legend named the Watch Man, who can supposedly tell you when you'll die, the world finally makes sense. Except that the Watch Man tells her she will die at midnight tomorrow unless she finds an ancient object called the Alchemical Heart.
With the clock ticking, Holland is pulled deeper into this magical world in the heart of Los Angeles--and into the path of a magnetic stranger. Everything about him feels like a bad idea, but he promises Holland that her sister sent him to protect her. As they chase clues and stories that take them closer to the Alchemical Heart, Holland realizes everyone in this intoxicating new world is lying to her, even this stranger. And if she can't figure out whom to trust, not even the Alchemical Heart will save her.
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Cinder House
by Freya Marske
Ella is a haunting.
Murdered at sixteen, her ghost is furiously trapped in her father's house, invisible to everyone except her stepmother and stepsisters.
Even when she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, there are limits. She cannot be seen or heard by the living people who surround her. Her family must never learn she is able to leave. And at the stroke of every midnight, she finds herself back on the staircase where she died.
Until she forges a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller, and makes a bargain for three nights of almost-living freedom. Freedom that means she can finally be seen. Danced with. Touched.
You think you know Ella's story: the ball, the magical shoes, the handsome prince.
You're halfway right, and all-the-way wrong.
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F*cked Up Fairy Tales: Sinful Cinderellas, Prince Alarmings, and Other Timeless Classics
by Liz Gotauco
F*cked Up Fairy Tales explores timeless themes that have long tickled the human subconscious, from accidental bestiality (""So . . . You Married an Animal"") and catastrophic marriages (""Crappily Ever After"") to the vexed question of what to do with your murderous lindworm child (""F*cked Up Family Trees""). Gotauco highlights the not-so-distressed damsels and overlooked voices of folklore, including heroes like the Philippines' unlucky-in-love goddess Maria Makiling, India's clever Princess Kalendrin, and Chile's no-nonsense Snow White. She also teases and topples fairy tale tropes: for every wicked stepmother there's a gaslighting sorcerer; for every royal wedding there's an embarrassingly public breakup; childhood lessons of idleness, innocence, and piety are put on hold for questions about lust, aging, and divine poetic justice. And her deeply researched yet hilarious asides offer insight into the stories' contested origins and spill deliciously weird details about fairy tale authors like Madame d'Aulnoy and the Brothers Grimm.
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The Glass Slide World
by Carrie Vaughn
The year is 1902, and the world is changing with the new century. Twenty-one-year-old Ava Stanley, the daughter of two celebrated Arcane Taxonomists, has much to live up to--however scarce her magical abilities may be.
While her parents draw power from spectacular birds and megafauna, Ava's connection to the natural world is much smaller, stemming from the microscopic. This is useful in her quest to become a doctor, as she studies the burgeoning links between bacteria and disease, but it means Ava's power itself is also smaller. Even so, she plans to make the most of it when she boards a ship to Nassau, where she'll continue her research.
But those plans change when pirates take over the ship, bringing with them danger, mystery, and the stirrings of war. Amid the chaos, Ava forges connections with her fellow travelers. And in them, she begins to find that every tiny piece of the world has the power to strengthen it...or shatter it completely.
The Naturalist Society #2
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The White Octopus Hotel
by Alexandra Bell
"Have you travelled a long way?" she asked carefully..
A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. "Well, yes," he said slowly. "Yes, you could say that. But it was worth the wait."
London, 2015. When reclusive art appraiser Eve Shaw shakes the hand of a silver-haired gentleman in her office, the warmth of his palm sends a spark through her.
His name is Max Everly--curiously, the same name as Eve's favorite composer, born one hundred sixteen years prior. And she has the sudden feeling that she's held his hand before . . . but where, and when?
The White Octopus Hotel, 1935. In this belle époque building high in the snowy mountains, Eve and a young Max wander the winding halls, lost in time.
Each of them has been through the trenches--Eve through a family accident and Max on the battlefields of the Great War--but for an impossible moment, love and healing are just a room away . . . if only they have the courage to step through the door.
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Witches of Dubious Origin
by Jenn McKinlay
Zoe Ziakas enjoys a quiet life, working as a librarian in her quaint New England town. When a mysterious black book with an unbreakable latch is delivered to the library, Zoe has a strange feeling the tome is somehow calling to her. She decides to consult the Museum of Literature, home to volumes of indecipherable secrets, some possessing dark magic that must be guarded.
Here, among their most dangerous collection, the Books of Dubious Origin, Zoe discovers that she is the last descendant of a family of witches and this little black book is their grimoire. Zoe knows she must decode the family's spell book and solve the mystery of what happened to her mother and her grandmother. However, the book's potential power draws all things magical to it, and Zoe finds herself under the constant watch of a pesky raven, while being chased by undead Vikings, ghost pirates, and assorted ghouls.
With assistance from the eccentric staff of the Books of Dubious Origin department--including their annoyingly smart and handsome containment specialist, Jasper Griffin--Zoe must confront her past and the legacy of her family. But as their adventure unfolds, she'll have to decide whether or not she's ready to embrace her destiny.
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Recently Released Science Fiction
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The Afterlife Project
by Tim Weed
With humanity facing imminent extinction, Centauri Project scientists use technology originally designed for interstellar travel to send a test subject ten millennia into Earth's future. Marooned in an uninhabited wilderness, microbiologist Nicholas Hindman searches for evidence of remnant populations. He has a protocol to follow and is determined to do so to the bitter end--though he knows he's probably searching in vain, stranded on an empty planet silently orbiting the sun. Meanwhile, back in 2068 AD, a devastating hyperpandemic has quelled all talk of interstellar travel and thrown the future of humanity into grave doubt. Four surviving members of the Centauri team board a vintage solar-powered sailing yacht for a harrowing journey in search of a second test subject. Their destination is a small volcanic island north of Sicily rumored to harbor that rarest of creatures: a woman capable of getting pregnant, thereby ensuring this generation of Homo sapiens isn't the last. But first they must make it halfway across the post-apocalyptic globe, risking heatwaves, oceanic megastorms, murderous gangs, deranged cult leaders, a volcanic eruption, and the dangerous microbes that continue to circulate through the planet's atmosphere.
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Conform
by Ariel Sullivan
A lifelong outcast, twenty-seven-year-old Emeline spends her days alone, sorting ancient art for destruction. Centuries after a catastrophic war nearly decimated humanity, society is now ruled by an elusive and technologically advanced group called the Illum, who constantly monitor the population's health and mandate procreation contracts. But Emeline's bleak existence is shattered when, for the first time in decades, an Illum named Collin takes a Mate: Emeline.
Baffled as to why she was chosen, Emeline is swept into the dangerous game of the Courting, where one wrong move can mean elimination. Soon, she discovers a rebellion rising in secret, and that her Mate may be keeping secrets of his own. Collin is confusing, both cold and protective, and worse, she finds herself drawn to the very last person she should be falling for: Hal, one of the resistance leaders.
As she draws closer to both Collin and Hal, the Illum exercise their power in increasingly brutal ways, forcing Emeline to question everything--most of all whether she'll have to give up her heart and even her life to stop them.
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Extremity
by Nicholas Binge
When once-renowned police detective Julia Torgrimsen is brought out of forced retirement to investigate the murder of Bruno Donaldson, a billionaire she worked with whilst undercover, she doesn't expect to find two bodies. Both are Bruno--identical down to the fingerprints--and both have been shot.
As the investigation sucks her back into the macabre world of London's rich elite, she finds herself on the hunt for a mysterious assassin who has been taking out the wealthy one by one. But when she finally catches up with her quarry, she unveils an entire world of secrets: impossible documents about future stock market crashes, photographs of dead clones, and a clandestine time-travelling conspiracy so insidious it might just mean the extinction of the entire human race.
If Julia is to have any chance of preventing this terrible future, she'll have to revisit her own past, the terrible choices she made undercover, and the brutal act that destroyed her once legendary career.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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