Stephanie Storm is a talented young adult fantasy author whose writing is reminiscent of classic fantasy novels with a modern twist. Her imaginative storytelling and richly developed characters draw readers into immersive worlds filled with magic, adventure, and breathtaking landscapes. Her writing style is enchanting, capturing the hearts of readers of all ages and leaving them eagerly turning pages late into the night. Growing up with her nose buried in a book, she found solace and inspiration in the escapism and limitless possibilities of the genre. Her imagination was sparked by the enchanting stories she devoured, which fuelled her passion for writing and creating her own fantastical tales.
This is a refreshingly unique take on a classic fairy tale that we all know and love with some very dark themes.
This is my first book series with this author and she got me to laugh, cry and root for these characters that she’s created. I was so sad when I finished this series!
The beast. The creature that stalks the forbidden wood. The dragon prince.
He has suffered a fate worse than death. We all have. A curse put upon us by the mad king.
We are a kingdom locked in time. Shifters unable to feel our animals. Stuck here by a deal between the late king and a demon who seeks our destruction.
The only one keeping this kingdom alive is Nyfain, the golden prince to a stolen throne. The last dragon shifter.
I have an amazing daughter in my life, and I want there to be more books for her to read that feature strong, admirable, and good women in leading roles. That’s one of the things I keep an eye out for in the books I read as well as the books I write.
This one is a long, very long, fantasy epic, so be warned! Despite the length of the work, it ended up being an incredible read. Trin is one of the main characters the story follows. She’s a young woman who ‘accidentally’ unleashed a curse that has doomed the world to a future of death and destruction, and she’s desperately seeking a way to break this curse. In so doing, she gets caught up in an ancient blood feud between gods and full-blown war between mighty empires.
1200 Pages of Epic Fantasy that reviewers are comparing to Malazan and Wheel of Time.
War between gods. Mortals are pawns. Fate lays a curse to bring Death to the world. A boy makes a list of people to kill. What could go wrong?
Jem just killed his father. He should have done it five years ago, but kids don't always make good decisions. Next on Jem's list is a military tyrant. Maybe the whole Legion. With so many people to kill, Jem hopes to satisfy his hunger for vengeance... and obtain redemption too.
Journalistic interviewer Jacqueline Raposo has created hundreds of stories discussing the human condition for magazines, websites, podcasts, and her book, The Me Without—a personal growth memoir exploring the science and spirit of habit change. Chronically ill and disabled, she’s never uncovered a new app, product, or study as directly beneficial to emotional health as time spent observing the natural world.
Poet Ross Gay is a shape shifter who observes the struggle of living in a human body such with compassion and intelligence and artistry that he not only describes such struggles, but also transports us inside of the elements that create them. In this meditation on love and life and loss, we are soothed by the garden, the beehive, the orchard; by the mourning doves and dung-filled dirt and knots of dead bees that he reaches for to nourish and calm and heal. Gay is very much alive to the living and the dead around him. This collection of poems brings us back to life with gratitude transformed.
Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, poetry category. Winner of the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, poetry category.Finalist for the 2015 NAACP Image Awards in Poetry.
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away - loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it - that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all - death, sorrow, loss - is…
When it comes to books, I’m a wanna-be glutton, always on the lookout for the next story that strips my will, leaving me with no choice but to read it from cover to cover in a single sitting; the kind that forces me to gobble up the words even when I’d prefer to savor them slowly. I want a story to be a compulsion, the kind that keeps me up all night, feels like a roller coaster ride, and leaves me exhausted the following day. I call them my binge reads, and there have been quite a few, but here are the first five to come to mind.
You know that smell, the one that reminds you of the happiest moments in your childhood? Mine is freshly mown grass. Whenever I smell it, I’m a little boy jumping over the water sprinkler in our front yard with my sister. This trilogy triggers something as poignant every time I read about the young farmer who has an uncanny talent for unraveling all riddles except one: why are there three stars on his forehead? Set in the age after the great wizards have disappeared from the world, Morgon must find the answer before the nameless ones find him.
For over twenty years, World Fantasy Award winner Patricia A. McKillip has captured the hearts and imaginations of thousands of readers. Now at last her renowned Riddle-Master trilogy–The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, and Harpist in the Wind–long out of print, is collected in one volume.
It is considered her most enduring and beloved work. Now it is collected in one volume for the first time–the epic journeys of a young prince in a strange land, where wizards have long since vanished...but where magic is waiting to be reborn.
I come from a large family, both immediate and extended. As a result, my writing often includes a spectrum of family relationships, from the functional to the toxic. Nurturing or gaslighting? Supportive or undermining? Fantasy is my genre of choice for playing with these dynamics because its otherworldliness creates a safe space to consider true-to-life patterns, including the default trust we grant to those closest to us, how quickly that crumbles when expectations fall short, and the echo effect our earliest interactions have upon the rest of our lives.
Every time I read this book, I want to strangle basically every character except for Cat—and that’s half the fun! Charmed Lifetaught me that sometimes we can be too close to a situation to recognize its dangers or the safest paths to get away.
Cat assumes his sister is good, and everyone else assumes that he’s wicked because he’s always with her. I find his innocence endearing and I love that, as his understanding of Gwendolyn unfolds, he continues to seek goodness in others around him.
Glorious new rejacket of a Diana Wynne Jones classic award-winning favourite, featuring Chrestomanci - now a book with extra bits!
Everybody says that Gwendolyn Chant is a gifted witch with astonishing powers, so it suits her enormously when she is taken to live in Chrestomanci Castle. Her brother Eric (better known as Cat) is not so keen, for he has no talent for magic at all.
However, life with the great enchanter is not what either of them expects and sparks begin to fly!
I am a writer and performer born and raised in New York City. In my previous life, I was an Emmy-nominated journalist and digital media producer, covering sexual and reproductive health. In addition to writing, I love musical improv, opera, Olympic weightlifting, and spending time with my wife and dog.
One appeal of falling in love with a monster is the knowledge that a creature more than capable of killing you has chosen to cherish you instead.
The tigers in this book are dangerous, as both Dieu, paramour of tiger Ho Thi Thau, and Chih, a cleric anxiously telling Dieu and Ho Thi Thau’s story to a trio of hungry tigers can attest. Luckily for Dieu, Ho Thi Thau finds her more interesting than appetizing, with the romantic impulse to see each of her moods—anger and joy and frustration—knowing she will adore them all.
While there may be quibbles over the details of the story, it is safe to say that tigers and humans alike will agree that Ho Thi Thau deserves a little kiss, and that Dieu is just the woman to deliver it.
From Locus and Ignyte finalist, Crawford Award winner, and bestselling author Nghi Vo comes the second installment in a Hugo Award-winning series
"A stunning gem of a novella that explores the complexity and layers of storytelling and celebrates the wonder of queer love. I could read about Chih recording tales forever."―Samantha Shannon, New York Times bestselling author of The Priory of the Orange Tree
"Nghi Vo is one of the most original writers we have today."―Taylor Jenkins Reid on Siren Queen
The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache…
I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy, and specifically space opera, since I was seven and first discovered The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. I read my way through every book in the school library and public library that dealt with aliens, space travel, starships, and especially adventure.
Esen is a shapechanger, a young one. While exploring a world considered ‘safe’ by her matriarch, she is captured by the natives. Her only hope of rescue is to betray her species' strict rules and reveal her true nature to her fellow prisoner, a human.
I adore Esen as a character. She is very relatable. I also love the breadth and scope of species and habitats and worlds in this series. Julie Czerneda is one of my favorite authors. Her storytelling skills shine. Esen is definitely not human, but Czerneda creates such a warm character you can’t help but love her. Beholder’s Eye is part coming-of-age but mostly a darn good science fiction adventure.
United in their natural form they are one, sharing all their memories, experiences, and lives. Apart they are six, the only existing members of their ancient race, a species with the ability to assume any form once they understand its essence.
Their continued survival in a universe filled with races ready to destroy anyone perceived as different is based on the Rules. And first among those Rules is: Never reveal your true nature to another being. But when the youngest among them, Esen-alit-Quar, receives her first independent assignment to a world considered safe to explore, she stumbles into a trap…
I'm a long-time role-player/gamemaster and reader of SFF, and I've read, created, and played (and written!) a lot of stories.Good stories come from good characters. We all know that. But part of what makes characters good is that they're believable, and to me their believability is inextricable from the worlds they come from. A world-build—setting, weather, technology, magic, science, cultures, and languages—should BE as much of a character as the protagonist(s). While I admit a fond nostalgia for ye olde semi-Euro-medieval setting, I lovea world-build that challenges or surprises me, and I love the characters and stories that come out of those worlds. I hope you do too.
Shapeshifting lizard people. Oh. You want me to say something else?
How about... a world like no other, peopled by all manner of beings (but no humans, which is honestly a delight). The setting is so fantastic, but also so meticulously designed—every settlement and civilization feels organic, fully realized, and unlike anything else. But what about the story—?
Moon doesn't know where he's from, but he knows he's the only shapeshifter he's ever met, and the only person with wings...and worse, he thinkshe's part of the terrible Fell, a species that seems to be invasive and hostile and looks a lot like him.
Then he meets another Raksura, and learns how wrong he's been about everything, including himself.
Nominated for the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Series. "Wells...merrily ignores genre conventions as she spins an exciting adventure around an alien hero who anyone can identify with."-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Moon has spent his life hiding what he is - a shape-shifter able to transform himself into a winged creature of flight.
An orphan with only vague memories of his own kind, Moon tries to fit in among the tribes of his river valley, with mixed success. Just as Moon is once again cast out by his adopted tribe, he discovers a shape-shifter like himself . . . someone…
I’ve been writing fantasy for two decades now and still, I can’t resist a foul-mouthed rogue with a grubby soul. They’re usually the most entertaining characters to write and in the long days of plugging away at a book, they’re often the ones that remind you what’s so fun about the job. When I started Stranger of Tempest it was (pretty much solely) with that in mind – I wanted a disparate band of crazed, badass idiots to go on an adventure with and see where it took me. Of course, as I got to know them I found there was more to their tales than that, but it was fun right to the end!
The Raven is your classic band of mercs, a found-family of warriors caught up in world-ending levels of chaos. This is much more 90s style fantasy and unashamedly so – serious, sword-swinging, spell-casting stuff. As a result, you have to buy into that a bit given how the genre has changed, but at the same time, the series is all about the consequences of actions rather than any pretence about happily ever after so there’s real meat to it.
ELITE, UNSTOPPABLE ... AND HIRED TO DO THE UNTHINKABLE
The Raven are an elite. Formed of six men and an elf, they're swords for hire in the wars that have torn their land apart. For years their only loyalty has been to themselves, and to their code.
But that time is coming to an end. The Wytch Lords have escaped and The Raven find themselves fighting for the Dark College of magic, on a mission which soon becomes a race for the secret location of Dawnthief. It's a spell - one created to end the…
I am an African Australian author of several novels and fiction collections, and a finalist in the 2022 World Fantasy Award. I was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. I have a master's degree with distinction in distributed computer systems, a master's degree in creative writing, and a PhD in creative writing. The short story is my sweetest spot. I have a deep passion for the literary speculative, and I write across genres and forms, with award-winning genre-bending works. I am especially curious about stories of culture, diversity, climate change, writing the other, and betwixt.
Margo Lanagan’s mini-collection Stray Bats is an exceptional showcase of refined writing—less is always more. Powerful bite-size vignettes in this dark illustrated miscellany of micro fiction and prose poetry encompass rhyme, beauty, and something most sinister. Offering up constellations, maidens in flight, familiars, hag hunters, vixen wives, and spirit girls, this kind of dark, fantastical writing and the ghosts of its graphics haunt you for a super long time…
Dachshund droids, mad crones, shapeshifting children, a plethora of witches, dragonstalkers, familiars, slithering eels and, of course, bats, flit and fly through these pages, aided and abetted by Kathleen Jennings’s deft and inspired pencil drawings. Stray Bats is a glorious miscellany of vignettes based on poems by Australian women. While some of the pieces hie close to the originals in form and theme, some stray far, far from them even as Lanagan delights in playing with language, rhyme, and rhythm.
This could be the perfect gift for that slightly otherworldly person in your life—or for yourself, when you need a…
