FATE IS A CRUEL MISTRESS The daughter of a powerful but disgraced Blood Worker, Shan LeClaire has spent her entire life perfecting her blood magic, building her network of spies, and gathering every scrap of power she could. Now, to protect her brother, she assassinates their father and takes her place at the head of the family. And that is only the start of her revenge. Samuel Hutchinson is a bastard with a terrible gift. When he stumbles upon the first victim of a magical serial killer, he's drawn into the world of magic and intrigue he's worked so hard to avoid - and is pulled deeply into the ravenous and bloodthirsty court of the vampire king. Tasked by the Eternal King to discover the identity of the killer cutting a bloody swath through the city, Samuel, Shan and mysterious Royal Bloodworker Isaac find themselves growing ever closer to each other. But Shan's plans are treacherous, and as she lures Samuel into her complicated web of desire, treason and vengeance, he must decide if the good of their nation is worth the cost of his soul.

When a young book publicist finds herself in an all-consuming workplace affair with her literary idol, she learns that the things you love most can sometimes be the very things that tear you apart in this intoxicating and moving debut novel.Charlie hasn’t always had high hopes for herself. But now at twenty-three, she’s landed her dream job as an assistant at a historic London publishing house, moved into a stunning townhome with two of the most glamorous, kind and generous people she’s ever met, and her favorite author, the award-winning, generation-defining, charming Richard Aveling, is about to publish his magnum opus—and Charlie is going to be working with him.She couldn’t be more excited to help publish the man whose writing has inspired her since she was a teenager. When Charlie bumps into Richard while having a smoke in the rain, the attraction is immediate, and the moment feels nothing short of cinematic.So when the Richard Aveling begins to take her advice over that of more senior staff, Charlie finds herself drawn to him despite their thirty-year age gap, his marriage, and the disparity in their power at the publishing house. Once Richard makes it clear that he’s drawn to her as well, they begin an affair that Charlie never saw coming; it is a relationship founded in control and silence.Too soon, she can’t imagine her life without Richard, and too late, she understands that losing him will unravel more than just their relationship…it might also unravel her.Tender and poignant, Bitter Sweet is an intimate exploration of power, of vulnerability, of what it means to love another person, and of what it means to love yourself.

This is an upcoming Summer 2025 title from Wednesday Books.

The apocalypse will be televised! A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible. In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe. Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. And what's worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over. In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style. You can't just survive here. You gotta survive big. You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that "it" factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That's the only way to truly survive in this game—with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy. They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it's anything but a game.

This darkly funny and provocative novel reimagines classic fairy tale characters as modern women in a support group for trauma. In present-day New York City, five women meet in a basement support group to process their traumas. Bernice grapples with the fallout of dating a psychopathic, blue-bearded billionaire. Ruby, once devoured by a wolf, now wears him as a coat. Gretel questions her memory of being held captive in a house made of candy. Ashlee, the winner of a Bachelor-esque dating show, wonders if she really got her promised fairy tale ending. And Raina's love story will shock them all. Though the women start out wary of one another, judging each other’s stories, gradually they begin to realize that they may have more in common than they supposed . . . What really brought them here? What secrets will they reveal? And is it too late for them to rescue each other? Dark, edgy, and wickedly funny, this debut for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, and Kelly Link takes our coziest, most beloved childhood stories, exposes them as anti-feminist nightmares, and transforms them into a new kind of myth for grown-up women.

The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn't matter that the girls often die from the mental strain. When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it's to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister's death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected—she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​ To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way—and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus. A flying demon feeding on human energies. A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down. And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw. The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates. She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

In this period drama set in the 16th-century Netherlands, the unlikely pair of a proper Dutchwoman and her husband’s slave mistress collaborate on a scientific discovery that could free them from the bounds of patriarchal society. The print debut of Korean manga artist Yudori is a richly imagined, erotic, feminist graphic novel. Amélie is a brilliant woman trapped in the restricting social mores of high Dutch society in the mid-16th century. Her marriage to Hans, a swashbuckling merchant, is a terrible match. While he charms the townsfolk, at home he is her intellectual inferior and treats her with cruelty and sexual violence. Expected to be a devoted housewife, Amélie can only be her true, free-spirited self when Hans travels away on business ― when she can explore the town alone, lose herself in literature, and study winged animals to learn about the mechanics of flight. She looks to the skies and dreams of flying far away. Her life changes when Hans returns from his journey with Sahara, a slave mistress from a distant land. The two women are drawn to each other ― each recognizing their confinement in a world dominated by men ― and work together to seek their freedom. Told as a fiercely feminist story and spectacularly illustrated, Raging Cloud is the dazzling graphic novel debut of Korean comic book artist Yudori. In her lush manga style, Yudori imagines the period in rich detail with careful attention to settings and costumes, while evoking the cultural and societal standards of the time. She creates complex women characters who grapple with indignity over their social position, engage in lustful fantasies, and ultimately relish in seizing agency in their lives. Raging Clouds is a powerful story about the role of women in society, the reality of existing within a non-consensual relationship, and the struggle to push back against the boundaries these women have been boxed into.