Canadian author J.M. Miro’s Ordinary Monsters, a gaslamp fantasy with powered children at a secret school, an implacable enemy and an inimical other-world has plenty of obvious antecedents. But Miro has managed to spin these familiar elements into an enjoyable, tense and sometimes surprising narrative. A glowing blue baby is rescued from a train carriage…
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia seems determined to write a book in every sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy and horror. She has taken on vampires in Certain Dark Things, powers in The Beautiful Ones and the gothic tradition in Mexican Gothic. Now Moreno-Garcia takes on and reinvents The Island of Doctor Moreau, one of the slightly less famous…
Australian crime author Sulari Gentill is probably best known for her historical Roland Sinclair series. But as her 2018 Ned Kelly Award winning novel Crossing the Lines (also known as When She Wrote Him) showed, she is not above a little meta-textual playing around. In Crossing the Lines, a woman writes a crime novel in…
Mieko Kawakami is probably best known for her second novel in translation – Breasts and Eggs. Her third novel to be translated in to English All the Lovers in the Night (also translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd) is a deep character piece. The book focusses on a woman who has difficulty forming relationships,…
Alice Clark-Platts’ debut novel was The Flower Girls, an unsettling look at children who kill other children. Her most recent book, The Cove takes the domestic thriller to a small island off the coast of Malaysia and then turns up the heat on all of its main characters. Expat Brits Lou and Adam live in…
Former professional snowboarder Allie Reynolds wrote what she knew in her debut thriller Shiver. That book centred around the reunion of a group of old friends at an isolated ski resort when things start to go wrong. The world of professional snowboarding and the competitive nature of the characters comes very much into play in…
Nghi Vo’s new novel Siren Queen is both a celebration of and warning about the golden years of Hollywood. Vo creates a mesmerising world with fantasy elements just below the surface in which people can literally sell their souls for a shot at stardom. She effortlessly combines these elements with a queer, Asian-American viewpoint to…
Stella Rimington, former head of MI5, is probably now as well known for her series of espionage thrillers featuring English agent Liz Carlysle. The Devil’s Bargain is well within the spy genre but breaks out some new characters. It is currently a stand alone but is in some ways an origin story for a new…
Emily St John Mandel came to prominence with her fourth book, the pandemic post-apocalypse Station Eleven. That book gained a second wind when the COVID pandemic hit, and was turned into an HBO series. Some of the craziness of that success, and of the pandemic itself, is captured in St John Mandel’s latest book Sea…
A. Lee Martinez specialises in a kind of fantasy comedy that riffs on a range of fantasy, science fiction literary and movie tropes. His 2013 novel Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain centred around a super villain, and the book before that 2012’s Chasing the Moon was a comic hero’s journey fighting a range of…
