Matthew Galloway

This Ghibli-esque slow-burn fantasy delivers on every promise it offers when it drops Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle inside Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Fans of Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld or Marie Brennan’s Driftwood will be in awe of Berry’s (The Manual of Detection) wonderfully odd ode to language, story, and family.

This compelling mix of horror, found family, and intricate mythology will appeal to those who loved Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys and The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin.

Fans of Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld or Marie Brennan’s Driftwood will be in awe of Berry’s (The Manual of Detection) wonderfully odd ode to language, story, and family.

Dual talents: Anton Hur both translates a new work and writes his own novel.

This sometimes unsettling yet consistently delightful fairy tale feels like a marriage of the clever schemes of Trip Galey’s A Market of Dreams and Destiny and the metaphors of Kelly Barnhill’s The Crane Husband.

Check out these starred fantasy debuts about a Trans-Siberian luxury train, an underwater humanity, a department store that sells dreams, and a hotheaded hero with nothing to lose.

A partially submerged Nigeria and a world at the edge of apocalypse, being destroyed by climate disasters and corporate greed, are settings for these starred climate fiction novels.

A story steeped in Irish folklore and mythology, a romantic fantasy quest, a goth-tinged speculative novel, and an entertaining series starter that combines galactic and personal stakes round out this list of first fiction.