Release Week: 8 October 2024
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Release Week: 8 October 2024
Posted on 2024-10-08 at 12:00 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn
FICTION PICKS:
The Witches of El Paso: A Novel By: Luis Jaramillo, read by Raquel Beattie for Simon and Schuster -- "A lawyer and her elderly great-aunt use their supernatural gifts to find a lost child in this richly imagined and empowering story of motherhood, magic, and legacy."
Our Evenings: A Novel By: Alan Hollinghurst, read by Prasanna Puwanarajah for Random House -- "Dave Win, the son of a a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates. Hollinghurst’s new novel follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security."
Dark Space by Alex Segura and Rob Hart, read by Nicol Zanzarella and Timothy Andrés Pabon for Blackstone -- "If life were fair, ace pilot Jose Carriles should have ended up a desk jockey like his former friend Corin Timony, back on the lunar colony of New Destiny. Instead, he’s the pilot of the Mosaic—a massive ship taking the Interstellar Union’s first-ever mission to outside our solar system. Timony should have been the best spy at the Bazaar, the lunar colony’s international intelligence arm. Instead, she’s been demoted to admin duties like monitoring long-range communications. She has no one to blame but herself—and maybe Carriles. But when the Mosaic experiences a series of strange malfunctions and Carriles is forced to take a wild gamble to save the ship, he begins to suspect the reasons behind the exploratory mission weren’t exactly on the up-and-up."
Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur, read by Eunice Wong, Major Curda, and Suzy Jackson for Macmillan -- "In an Empire run on necromancy, dead sorcerers are the lifeblood. Their corpses are wrapped in chains and drained of magic to feed the unquenchable hunger for imperial conquest. Born with magic, Arienne has become resigned to her dark fate. But when the voice of a long-dead sorcerer begins to speak inside her head, she listens. There may be another future for her, if she’s willing to fight for it. Miles away, beneath a volcano, a seven-eyed dragon also wears the Empire’s chains. Before the imperial fist closed around their lands, it was the people’s sacred guardian. Loran, a widowed swordswoman, is the first to kneel before the dragon in decades. She comes with a desperate plea, and will leave with a sword of dragon-fang in hand and a great purpose before her. In the heart of the Imperial capital, Cain is known as a man who gets things done. When his best friend and mentor is found murdered, he will leave no stone unturned to find those responsible, even if it means starting a war."
Swordcrossed By: Freya Marske, read by Omari Douglas for Macmillan -- "Mattinesh Jay, dutiful heir to his struggling family business, needs to hire an experienced swordsman to serve as best man for his arranged marriage. Sword-challenge at the ceremony could destroy all hope of restoring his family's wealth, something that Matti has been trying—and failing—to do for the past ten years. What he can afford, unfortunately, is part-time con artist and full-time charming menace Luca Piere. Luca, for his part, is trying to reinvent himself in a new city. All he wants to do is make some easy money and try to forget the crime he committed in his hometown. He didn't plan on being blackmailed into giving sword lessons to a chronically responsible—and inconveniently handsome—wool merchant like Matti."
NON-FICTION WATCH:
Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir By: Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann, read by Herzog for Penguin -- "Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before."
Slaveroad: An Autobiography By: John Edgar Wideman, read by David Sadzin for Simon and Schuster -- "A palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists."
BACKLIST WATCH:
- Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss, read by Jonathan Johns for Tantor -- "Aldiss's debut novel. Written in response to Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and published in the late 1950s, it is set in a primitive world, home to tribes of inhabitants who endure their harsh and stunted lives in a maze of corridors. Though legends exist that they're actually on a ship traveling through the universe, no one really believes it. But that conviction doesn't stop a group of people from embarking on a mission to find the rumored "Forwards" section and its control room. Through a tangled, hydroponic jungle, they'll encounter telepathic animals, giants, outcasts, and mutants in an epic race to uncover the truth-and survive."
MORE SCI-FI and FANTASY:
Constituent Service: A Third District Story By: John Scalzi, read by Amber Benson for Audible Originals -- "The aliens are here ... and they want municipal services!"
The Last Dragon of the East By: Katrina Kwan, read by Eric Yang and Feodor Chin for Simon and Schuster -- "At the spry young age of twenty-five, Sai has led a quiet life, keeping the family teahouse up and running—even if that means ignoring the past-due notices—and taking care of his ailing mother. But he has a not-so-secret gift that he’s parlayed into a side career: he was born with the ability to see the red threads of fate between soulmates, which lends itself nicely to matchmaking. Sai has thus far been content not to follow his own thread, the only one he’s ever seen that’s gray and fraying. But Sai’s ordinary existence is about to be turned upside-down by a pair of shining dragon scales."
A Dark and Secret Magic By: Wallis Kinney, read by Abigail Reno for Dreamscape -- "A warm, spellbinding tale about a witch and the secrets her coven has been keeping from her, with echoes of the classic Hades and Persephone story."
The Stone Witch of Florence By: Anna Rasche, read by Soneela Nankani for Harlequin -- "1348. As the Black Plague ravages Italy, Ginevra di Gasparo is summoned to Florence after nearly a decade of lonely exile. Ginevra has a gift—harnessing the hidden powers of gemstones, she can heal the sick. But when word spread of her unusual abilities, she was condemned as a witch and banished. Now the same men who expelled Ginevra are begging for her return. Ginevra obliges, assuming the city’s leaders are finally ready to accept her unorthodox cures amid a pandemic. But upon arrival, she is tasked with a much different mission: she must use her collection of jewels to track down a ruthless thief who is ransacking Florence’s churches for priceless relics—the city’s only hope for protection."
MOST MISSING:
Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Shaun Whiteside (FSG) -- "It is 2027. France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay. As the country plunges into a contentious presidential race, the government falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks in which videos of brutal decapitations and skillfully crafted deepfakes proliferate on the web."
Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art edited by Indrapramit Das (MIT Press) -- Das' first science fiction anthology (as editor), for the Twelve Tomorrows series: "10 writers imagine how art forms (and artists) might evolve, devolve, and transform across spacetime near and far, amid the myriad threats to all things creative. Featuring marvellous new and original stories by Samit Basu, Vajra Chandrasekera, Aliette de Bodard, Ganzeer, Cassandra Khaw, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Sloane Leong, Bruce Sterling, Wole Talabi, Lavie Tidhar, showcasing the living, organic artwork of Diana Scherer, and an intensive interview with Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine on the infection of generative AI within sff and more, by Archita Mittra."
A Dark and Subtle Light: Machiavelli The Immortal: Book One by Mark Hodder (Solaris) -- "Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli is a diplomat, an author, a philosopher and historian. An immortal. Touched by a malevolent alien intelligence with a vampiric lust for sensation and misery, Earth stands at a crossroads as many worlds have before it. When a rival species sends a warning to Earth, Machiavelli is transformed into a protector of mankind. Travelling the ages, an unlikely hero immune to death, he must stop the corrupted, from the Borgias to Friedrich Nietzsche, before we destroy ourselves for the watcher’s pleasure."