Written by Sophie. Last year I wrote about reading along with the 2023 Ursula K. le Guin Prize shortlist. Reading along has become something of an annual literary pilgrimage for me since the prize's inception in 2022, so I'm writing about it again (and again as long as the ABC Blog [...]
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez A solitary ship captain, drifting through time. Nia Imani is a woman out of place. A mute child, burdened with unimaginable power. The scarred boy does not speak, his only form of communication the haunting music he plays on an old wooden flute. A millennia-old [...]
A sweeping and epic love story, The Ghost Ship is the swashbuckling third volume in Kate Mosse's enthralling series, The Joubert Family Chronicles. The Barbary Coast, 1621. A mysterious vessel floats silently on the water — its hull splintered and its sails tattered and burnt. For months the Ghost Ship [...]
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling When Gyre Price lied her way into this expedition, she thought she’d be mapping mineral deposits, and that her biggest problems would be cave collapses and gear malfunctions. She also thought that the fat paycheck -- enough to get her off-planet and on the [...]
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka's bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in [...]
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor Disabled, disinclined to marry, and more interested in writing than a lucrative career in medicine or law, Zelu has always felt like the outcast of her large Nigerian family. Then her life is upended when, in the middle of her sister's lavish Caribbean [...]
Innocent series by Shin-ichi Sakamoto, translated by Michael Gombos This series was originally published as a nine-issue manga series and has been published in English in 3 omnibuses: Innocent 1, Innocent 2 and Innocent 3. Blood, death, and duty--the title bequeathed to the heir of the royal executioner becomes a [...]
Magnolia Parks by Jessica Hastings She is a beautiful, affluent, self-involved and mildly neurotic London socialite. He is Britain’s most photographed bad-boy who broke her heart. Magnolia Parks and BJ Ballentine are meant to be, and everyone knows it. She dates other people to keep him at bay; he sleeps with [...]
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow Opal Gravely has spent her life obsessed with the mysterious Starling House – but when its reclusive heir offers her a job, she discovers there may be monsters lurking within. This is a sweeping, Gothic fairytale from Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-shortlisted Alix E. [...]
Deep underground, thirty-nine women are kept in isolation in a cage. Above ground, a world awaits. Has it been abandoned? Devastated by a virus? Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. [...]
