A Magic Murder Cruise, Bad Witches, and More of This Week’s Best SFF New Releases
Hello, friends! Down below you’ll find two highly anticipated new SFF releases and two more great releases out in paperback, which means more bang for your book.
Bookish Goods
Science fiction alphabet print by TheFictionPhantom.
Ooooh, nerdy and wordy! This print has a fun science fiction-related word for each letter of the alphabet. Sing it with me now: “A-B-C-D-E-F-G, take-your-stinking-paws-off-me…” $14.
New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Hardcover Releases Out This Week
She Who Knows by Nnedi Okorafor
First up is a new novella from the legendary Okorafor! It’s the first in an Africanfuturist trilogy set in the same universe as her last novella, Who Fears Death. As far back as anyone remembers, only men and boys have received The Call to the Salt Roads. But when thirteen-year-old Najeeba gets The Call, she knows it is something big, something universe-changing, and she dare not ignore it. And as she travels to the salt mines, it indeed becomes apparent that Najeeba — and the world — will never be the same.
Voyage of the Damned by Frances White
This is a romantasy-mystery that has been all over TikTok since its release in the UK — and now it’s available in the States! Thank goodness, because it is such a delightful romp. It’s a magical murder mystery set aboard a cruise ship containing the emperor of Concordia and the twelve heirs of the provinces. Each of the heirs has a special secret magic unique to them, except for Ganymedes Piscero, the disappointment of his family. Which is too bad, because when someone on the ship starts murdering the magical heirs, Ganymedes has no way of protecting himself and not much of a chance of discovering the killer without the help of magic. Can he solve it on his own before it’s too late?
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Paperback Releases Out This Week
Here are two more recommendations, out today in paperback, to fry your TBR’s circuit board!
The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins
In this exciting debut, the climate crisis has turned into a catastrophic environmental event. Before Emi Vargas was born, her parents were climate heroes, fighting dangerous fires and storms. Three decades later, her mother disappears after the murder of several of the world’s climate criminals, and they discover they are not the only people wondering where she went. Emi has never seen the world outside of their climate refuge home in Nuuk, Greenland. But now, she and her father must travel to what remains of New York City, her mother’s last known location, in the hopes of finding her before anyone else does.
Bad Witches by H. B. Akumiah
Last but not least, this chonky fantasy debut! In the Sphere, where the witches reside, their population has been shrinking since a crisis years before caused more typics (non-witches) to be born than witches. In the human world, three young women, each celebrating their twenty-second birthday, are about to all arrive at the same bar in NYC. Maya, Gabbie, and Delali have never met before, but somehow the universe conspired to get them in the same place, which sets off magic alarms in the Sphere. Because it turns out, somehow, that these three women are actually untrained witches. (Unbeknownst to them, of course.) And it just might be possible that they could be the answer to the witch population problem that the Sphere has been waiting for. If they can manage to get it together, that is.
That’s it for me today, star bits. I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me make lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and in our New Books newsletter.
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