All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end. In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world. As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere. Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.

This book contains personal accounts of intersex individuals in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. They contain stories of isolation, disconnection but also hope and healing, and finding community.

A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga. Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul’s Mapo Bridge. But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white—her guardian angel. Ah Roa is a clairvoyant magical girl on a mission to find the greatest magical girl of all time. And our protagonist just may be that special someone. But the young woman’s initial excitement turns to frustration when she learns being a magical girl in real life is much different than how it’s portrayed in stories. It isn’t just destiny—it’s work. Magical girls go to job fairs, join trade unions, attend classes. And for this magical girl there are no special powers and no great perks, and despite being magical, she still battles with low self-esteem. Her magic wand . . . is a credit card—which she must use to defeat a terrifying threat that isn’t a monster or an intergalactic war. It’s global climate change. Because magical girls need to think about sustainability, too. Park Seolyeon reimagines classic fantasy tropes in a novel that explores real-world challenges that are both deeply personal and universal: the search for meaning and the desire to do good in a world that feels like it’s ending. A fun, fast-paced, and enchanting narrative that sparkles thanks to award-nominated translator Anton Hur, A Magical Girl Retires reminds us that we are all magical girls—that fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight can be anyone's game. Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur.

Ancient Egyptian Game of Thrones for YA readers! Romance, magic, adventure, and horror collide in the start to this lush, epic trilogy perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo and Sarah J. Maas. Desire, War, Magic, Monsters...a forgotten oracle will unite them against an ancient enemy. But who will be on the throne when the red dust of Khetara settles? The Kingdom of Khetara is gift of the River Iteru, the jewel of the desert. Yet a crisis looms on the horizon. The crowns of the north and south were joined through war a generation before, but Khetara remains a land divided. The pharaoh is wasting away from a mysterious illness—and forces in the south and within his own family are plotting against him. As rebellion grows and secrets flourish, an even more deadly threat emerges. An ancient evil awakes among the rolling dunes of the Red Land that threatens to destroy everything in its path. Four strangers—a princess, a young priestess, a rebel, and a tomb robber—are ripped from their lives and thrown into the conflict. Amid murder and betrayal, magic and monsters, gods and visions, love and war, these four unlikely heroes find themselves connected by a forgotten oracle that whispers insistently across the land. Only together can they save the kingdom from destruction, but when the bloodshed is done, who of Khetara’s children will sit on the throne?

A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square-shaped hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand. Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved - the object's origins, architects, and purpose unknown. But some can never stop searching for answers. Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top-secret team to crack the hand's code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the relic they seek. What's clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unravelling history's most perplexing discovery-and finally figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?

In the anthology Silk and An Erotic-Eco Horror anthology, our thirteen authors explore the space where horror, the erotic, and nature meet. In these tales of uncontrolled, unknowable, and visceral nature, we explore folk tales, modern dating woes, filthy body horror, delicate and dark magic, psychological torment, and the dark humor of nature’s revenge. These stories range from creepy to horrific, from sensual to sultry, and from grounded to entirely strange.

From a provocative new literary talent, a hilarious and haunted novel featuring an unlikable protagonist grappling with grief, inheritance, and the ghosts of his past We meet our ill-tempered protagonist—the story’s titular “brat”—at a low moment, but not yet at rock bottom. The Gabriel of the novel is mourning the death of his father as well as a recent breakup, and struggling to finish writing his second book. Alone and aimless, he agrees to move back into his parents’ house to clear it out for sale. Here, the clichés end. Gabriel has trouble delivering on his promise as the moldy, overgrown house deteriorates around him, so does his own health, and large sheets of his skin begin to peel from his body at a terrifying rate. In fragments and figments, Gabriel takes us on a surreal journey into the mysteries of the family home, where he finds unfinished manuscripts written by his parents which seem to mutate every time he picks them up, and a bizarre home video that hints at long-buried secrets. Strange people and figures emerge—perhaps directly from the novel’s embedded fictions—and despite his compromised state (and his more successful brother’s growing frustration) Gabriel is determined to try to make sense of these hauntings. Part ghost story, part grief story; flirting with the autofictional mode while sitting squarely in the tradition of the gothic, Brat crackles with deadpan humor and delightfully taut prose. Smith’s arrival heralds the next generation of fiction writers—formally inventive, influenced by the rhythms of the internet, and infused with a particularly Gen Z sense of alienation. Irreverent and boundary-pushing, but not for its own sake, the novel that follows is muscular yet lyrical, riddled with paradox, and told with a truly rare and compelling clarity of voice. Brat is a serious debut that refuses to take itself too seriously.

No light. No air. No escape. Hundreds of feet beneath the ocean's surface, a graveyard waits... Years ago, the SS Arcadia vanished without a trace during a routine voyage. Though a strange, garbled emergency message was broadcast, neither the ship nor any of its crew could be found. Sixty years later, its wreck has finally been discovered more than three hundred miles from its intended course...a silent graveyard deep beneath the ocean's surface, eagerly waiting for the first sign of life. Cove and her dive team have been granted permission to explore the Arcadia's rusting hull. Their purpose is straightforward: examine the wreck, film everything, and, if possible, uncover how and why the supposedly unsinkable ship vanished. But the Arcadia has not yet had its fill of death, and something dark and hungry watches from below. With limited oxygen and the ship slowly closing in around them, Cove and her team will have to fight their way free of the unspeakable horror now desperate to claim them. Because once they're trapped beneath the ocean's waves, there's no going back.

Packed with shocking plot twists and sapphic yearning, this romantic and thrilling queer dystopian YA is perfect for fans of Rachael Lippincott.In the utopian city of New Ionia, everyone gets a soulmate – and Zada can’t wait for hers. Now that she’s eighteen, it’s her turn to meet her destiny with the help of Heartsong, an algorithm that chooses your perfect match for you. Then Zada crashes into her soulmate, setting off their shared Heartsong, and the unthinkable she feels nothing for him. But the Heartsong program doesn’t make mistakes, and by the end of the night, Zada is engaged to a man she doesn’t love. Desperate for a way out, Zada turns to her beautiful, reckless, and utterly impossible former best friend Daphne. Together, the two embark on a quest for the truth that throws Heartsong – and their entire world – into question. As time runs out, Zada must find the courage to choose what she believes and who she loves.

An inventive exploration of Indigenous families, womanhood, and alternate post-colonial realities by a writer of Māori and Coast Salish descent. Tauhou envisions a shared past between two Indigenous cultures, set on reimagined versions of Vancouver Island and Aotearoa that sit side by side in the ocean. Each chapter in this innovative hybrid novel is a fable, an autobiographical memory, a poem. A monster guards cultural objects in a museum, a woman uncovers her own grave, another woman remembers her estranged father. On rainforest beaches and grassy dunes, sisters and cousins contend with the ghosts of the past — all the way back to when the first foreign ships arrived on their shores. In a testament to the resilience of Indigenous women, the two sides of this family, Coast Salish and Māori, must work together in understanding and forgiveness to heal that which has been forced upon them by colonialism. Tauhou is an ardent search for answers, for ways to live with truth. It is a longing for home, to return to the land and sea.

Winner of the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens in 2023 and the Strega Prize in 2024, the book that shook France to its core. “Sad Tiger forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult.” (Annie Ernaux)Like Annie Ernaux or Sheila Heti, Neige Sinno has created a powerful new literary autobiographical form.Through its radical honesty, and also through its thoughtful interrogations into the nature of life and literature, Neige Sinno shares with her readers her journey from someone who considered her life to have been stolen from her to someone who over the twenty years that elapsed from her reporting the rape to writing this book, somehow got her life back, all without ever being able to erase or even change what had happened to her as a child.“Reading Sad Tyger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie ErnauxThis international literary phenomenon—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem The Tyger—is a forensic exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. Repeatedly exposed to sexual violence as a child, Neige Sinno tells of a family life built around lies and deception. She was seven or eight years old when her stepfather started abusing her. At fourteen or fifteen the abuse stopped. At nineteen, she decides to break her silence which leads to a public trial and prison for her stepfather, and Sinno starts a new life in Mexico, far away from France.It is through the craft of her narrative and her powerful direct analysis of the deep-seated taboo that Sinno explores the different facets of memory, her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. How do we become who we are? What remains unsaid in families? How is society implicated? This harrowing auto-fictional account of the author's sexual abuse as a child is mediated through analysis of various literary texts, including works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes.In this unparalleled work that contains a thousand questions, a thousand jewel-like insights, there is an abiding how to protect others from the rape, the incest that she herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.Winner of the US and UK Goncourt Prizes, 2024Winner of the Goncourt Prizes in Belgium, Slovakia, India, Turkey, Tunisia, and South Korea, 2023Winner of the European Strega Prize, 2024Winner of the Goncourt des Lyceens, 2023Winner of the Femina Prize, 2023Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023Winner of the Inrockuptibles Prize, 2023Shortlisted for the Medicis Prize, 2023Shortlisted for the Decembre Prize, 2023

A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes. The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved. In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.

'An intriguing work of whimsi-grotesquerie'OLIVIE BLAKE He was sent to kill a pest. Instead, he found a monster.Enter the decadent, deadly city of Tiliard, carved into the stump of an ancient tree. In its canopy, the pampered elite warp minds with toxic perfume; in its roots, gangs of exterminators hunt a colossal worm with an appetite for beauty.In a complex, chaotic city, Guy Moulène has a simple keep his sister out of debt. For her sake, he'll take on any job, no matter how vile.As an exterminator, Guy hunts the uncanny pests that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is a worm the size of a dragon with a deadly venom and a ravenous taste for artwork. As it digests Tiliard from the sewers to the opera houses, its toxin reshapes the future of the city. No sane person would hunt it, if they had the choice.Guy doesn't have a choice.'A lush and seductive story, rife with opulent horror and decaying decadence'SUNYI DEAN