SFF Readers’ Advisory
For readers advisors looking for science fiction and fantasy titles for the end of summer, io9 offers a list of 15 suggestions, ranging from the return of blockbuster authors to worthy reads by lesser-known writers.
Sure to cause excitement are new books by Orson Scott Card and China Miéville.
Card joins with author Aaron Johnston on The Swarm: The Second Formic War (Volume 1) (Macmillan/Tor Books; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample), the first book in a new trilogy “set before the events of Ender’s Game [and after the events chronicled in the First Formic War series] … about the people of Earth’s ongoing battle in space with their dreaded alien opponents.”
The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville (PRH/Del Rey; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample)
relates what happens when “an eccentric French dissident takes on the occupying Nazis with a peculiar invention: a ‘surrealist bomb’.”
Other big new titles include the next in two popular series, the YA title A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir (PRH/Razorbill; Listening Library)
and The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin (Hachette/Orbit; OverDrive Sample).
Tahir “follows up her hit debut with a sequel that returns to the dystopian Martial Empire. It picks up right where An Ember in the Ashes left off, following slave Laia and soldier Elias as they continue the quest to break her brother out of prison.”
io9 says of Jemisin’s newest that “it continues the story of The Fifth Season—last year’s acclaimed tale of an apocalypse-prone planet teetering on the brink of yet another catastrophic climate change, and the complex characters who have a hand in its fate.”
The author of Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal, returns with a new story, Ghost Talkers (Macmillan/Tor; OverDrive Sample). io9 describes it as “Espionage meets spiritualism … Set during World War I, it follows the adventures of an American heiress serving in England as part of the Spirit Corps—a group of mediums who help the war effort by using their psychic powers.”
Also look for The Hike, Drew Magary (PRH/Viking; OverDrive Sample), a book that “blends folklore and video games [and is] about a suburbanite who gets lost while hiking through an unfamiliar forest—and soon, to his surprise, finds himself on an epic and magical quest.”