For those just dipping their toes into speculative fiction, Helen Phillips’ prescient dystopia Hum is relatable enough not to make you feel like a stranger in a strange land.
Peter Heller’s seventh novel, Burn, is one of his best: It’s full of heart and soul amid the bleak landscape, and even those who don’t normally turn to dystopian novels are likely to be completely captivated.
Moving from the dot com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways three women’s lives converge and diverge.
It’s in moments of earnest wonder that Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is most compelling, like the brief but glorious clearing of a tempestuous sky.
The Future is a daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.
Some books have the power to wake you up, shake you out of the old and push you toward something new and exciting and a little scary. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is one of those books.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah mashes up “Orange Is the New Black,” The Running Man, Gladiator and mixed martial arts into a brutal prognostication of what could be next year’s worst “reality” show.
C Pam Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in Zhang’s second novel, but there is outrageous beauty.
In his fast-paced debut novel, Zac Topping, who has served two tours in Iraq, focuses on the impact that unrelenting pain and helplessness have on a human’s soul’and how the thirst for power can corrupt the best of intentions.
The fifth novel from award-winning British novelist Ned Beauman is a mid-apocalyptic comic thriller ideally suited for a post-pandemic audience.
Dan Chaon’s Sleepwalk is both a dystopian thriller chilled to perfection and an often-touching exploration of the enduring power of parental and filial love.
In her striking multigenerational epic, Vauhini Vara combines three distinct stories into a genre-bending, kaleidoscopic spiral of a tale.
There is no shortage of parenting books on how to be a good mother. Jessamine Chan’s first novel will make you want to throw them all out the window.
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