Godkiller (Fallen Gods, #1)

Hannah Kaner

Kissen’s family were killed by zealots of a fire god. Now, she makes a living killing gods, and enjoys it. That is until she finds a god she cannot kill: Skedi, a god of white lies, has somehow bound himself to a young noble, and they are both on the run from unknown assassins. Joined by a disillusioned knight on a secret quest, they must travel to the ruined city of Blenraden, where the last of the wild gods reside, to each beg a favour. Pursued by demons, and in the midst of burgeoning civil war, they will all face a reckoning – something is rotting at the heart of their world, and only they can be the ones to stop it.

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Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

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Katabasis

R.F. Kuang

Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own. Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world. That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams…. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion. With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like. But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.

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200 Monas: A Novel

Jan Saenz

For fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda July–and the darker edge of Breaking Bad and Uncut Gems–comes a whip-smart, irresistible debut novel about a college senior who has 48 hours to sell her recently deceased mother's surprise stash of rare pills, or suffer the consequences. Arvy Keening is just trying to get through the week. Tantalizingly close to leaving her college years at Westheimer University behind, all she has to do is pass her finals, pack up her life, and ship off to San Francisco for a prestigious Big Pharma internship. The problem? Arvy just found 200 hits of Molly in her dead mother’s closet. And when two drug dealers come to collect what they are owed, they reveal that the pills are not Molly, but Mona – a rare pharmaceutical that induces intense orgasms. The dealers give Arvy an Sell 200 Monas in 48 hours or die. To aid in her seemingly impossible quest, Arvy recruits Wolf, Westheimer's resident drug dealer who also happens to be infuriatingly charming and distractingly sexy. In a race against the clock, Arvy and Wolf barrel through their college town, leaving a series of erotic shenanigans in their wake; appealing to horny co-eds, lonely barflies, and a mysterious sorority whose sisters have their own ideas for Mona’s potential uses. But if Mona has a knack for unleashing visceral reactions in the body, what will it unlock in Arvy, who has been repressing grief over her mother’s death for weeks? Unashamedly brash, bold, and blistering, 200 Monas is a truly one-of-a-kind listen, a playful and honest examination of sexuality and grief, and a sharp, searing love letter on how to release all that’s inside you.

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Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

Heather Fawcett

When mysterious faeries from other realms appear at her university, curmudgeonly professor Emily Wilde must uncover their secrets before it’s too late, in this heartwarming, enchanting second installment of the Emily Wilde series. Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore who just wrote the world’s first comprehensive encyclopaedia of faeries. She’s learned many of the secrets of the Hidden Ones on her adventures . . . and also from her fellow scholar and former rival Wendell Bambleby. Because Bambleby is more than infuriatingly charming. He’s an exiled faerie king on the run from his murderous mother and in search of a door back to his realm. And despite Emily’s feelings for Bambleby, she’s not ready to accept his proposal of marriage: Loving one of the Fair Folk comes with secrets and dangers. She also has a new project to focus on: a map of the realms of faerie. While she is preparing her research, Bambleby lands her in trouble yet again, when assassins sent by his mother invade Cambridge. Now Bambleby and Emily are on another adventure, this time to the picturesque Austrian Alps, where Emily believes they may find the door to Bambleby’s realm and the key to freeing him from his family’s dark plans. But with new relationships for the prickly Emily to navigate and dangerous Folk lurking in every forest and hollow, Emily must unravel the mysterious workings of faerie doors and of her own heart.

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Our Numbered Bones

Katya Balen

When her life is unexpectedly upended, Anna escapes London – and her husband – for a remote cottage in the wetlands of rural England. She hopes the solitude might unblock the novel she can’t bring herself to write. Out in the marshes, the locals discover something shocking, risen to the surface after many years buried in the silty earth. Anna is drawn to the site, fascinated and shaken by what she finds there. And as researchers descend, her curiosity gives way to obsession . . . An unsettling, propulsive and fiercely tender novel about buried loss and renewal, Our Numbered Bones explores how we must unearth the past in order to make peace with what we’ve lost.

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We Hexed the Moon

Mollyhall Seeley

Shortlisted for the Weatherglass Novella Prize 2024 The Secret History meets Stranger Things Ali Smith says: “Some teenage girls have – yes – performed a spell and hexed the moon. Now the moon, smooth-skinned, street-smart, dryly witty, seductive, powerful beyond belief, is literally hanging out in one of their bedrooms. Pitch Perfect gone cosmic: in stylish sleight of hand and with pleasurable bravado this pop song of a novella reveals the huge issues, importances, losses, survivals, impotence and potencies in the everyday existence of a group of best friends and their families. Full of young-adult wisdom, braiding dark and light together, it’s a charmer.”

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Whoever You Are, Honey

Olivia Gatwood

This darkly brilliant debut novel explores how women build themselves—beneath the gaze of love, friendship, and the algorithm—showcasing Olivia Gatwood as a thrilling feminist voice for our hyper-digital age. Only when Lena stepped into that house did she realize what she’d been missing. A life. An entire life. There’s no way Sebastian would have planned for that epiphany. Because as soon as she had it, she felt the urge to run. On the Santa Cruz waterfront, every house is as flawless as the people inside—except for Mitty and her elderly roommate, Bethel. For ten years, Mitty has found refuge in their secluded existence after a traumatic adolescence. Now, they’re the oddball pair in the dilapidated bungalow, the last vestiges of a town taken over by the tech elite. But their lives are about to be irrevocably disrupted when a new couple, Lena and Sebastian, move in next door. Because on the quiet outskirts of Silicon Valley, nothing is off-limits, and what was once considered dystopia is now reality... Sebastian is a renowned tech founder and Lena is his spellbinding girlfriend, seemingly floating through their luxurious life. But just like Mitty, Lena has her own secrets; she feels uneasy about her oddly spotty memory, and is growing increasingly wary of the way Sebastian closely controls their life together. As the two women begin to form a close friendship, they are finally forced to face their pasts—or lack thereof—which have overpowered their lives for far too long, and the urgent truths that could change everything. A kind of Stepford Wives meets Grey Gardens for the age of artificial intelligence, Whoever You Are, Honey is gripping, seductive, and prescient as it dissects relationships between women, unpacks perfection and desirability, and explodes the intersection of passion, technology, and power.

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