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Ghost Summer: Stories

Tananarive Due (Prime)

Due's thrilling debut collection easily transports readers to the past or the future, delicately weaving in threads of old magic and new technology. An extraordinary array of characters draw on their inner strength and love for one another—especially familial love—to survive achingly real global and personal disasters.

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The Fifth Season

N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

With exquisite technical skill, Jemisin crafts a tale of desperation, love, and loss in a world riven by terrible cataclysms, where the politically powerful inflict horrifying trials on the magically adept in the name of global survival. Grim, unflinching, and moving, this is hard fantasy at its very best.

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The Red: First Light

Linda Nagata (S&S/Saga)

A pacifist is pressed into military service and finds he's surprisingly good at it. Via his neural implants, an artificial intelligence called the Red keeps him out of harm's way, perhaps saving him for a greater purpose in which nonstop action, incisive political commentary, and fascinatingly plausible technology combine in a near-future thriller.

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Uprooted

Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

Novik's first standalone, a Polish fairy tale that feels both authentically antique and splendidly refreshing, may single-handedly resurrect the pastoral fantasy genre. Dualistic tensions between sprawling woods and bustling towns, nobles and gentry, and the restrictive roles of men and women spiral out into an engrossing tale of a young witch's struggle and triumph.

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The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury)

From the first page of Pulley's immersive debut, readers will be enthralled by her lightly retrofitted Victorian London. Against a backdrop of pea-soup fog and terrorist bombings, a precognitive immigrant clockwork artist, a down-at-the-heels telegraph operator, and a fiercely determined scientist all pursue their own ideas of success, safety, and that most elusive prize: a place to call home.

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The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps

Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com)

In Wilson's excellent debut novella, folklore, technology, ethnic tensions, and a glorious cacophony of languages swirl around a band of men whose rough, jocular camaraderie transcends time and place. This story reads like it was sent back in time from a decades-distant future in which speculative fiction has evolved in unexpected ways.

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