Special Collections
World Fantasy Award
Description: Award given annually to the best fantasy fiction novel published in the previous calendar year. #award
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Ysabel
by Guy Gavriel KayIn this exhilarating, moving novel set in modern and ancient Provence, Guy Gavriel Kay casts brilliant light on the ways in which history - whether of a culture or a family - refuses to be buried.
Ned Marriner, fifteen years old, has accompanied his photographer father to Provence for a six-week shoot of images for a glossy coffee-table book. Gradually, Ned discovers a very old story playing itself out in this modern world of iPods, cellphones, and seven-seater vans whipping along roads walked by Celtic tribes and the Roman Legions.
On one holy, haunted night of the ancient year, when the borders between the living and the dead are down and fires are lit upon the hills, Ned, his family, and his friends, are shockingly drawn into this tale, as dangerous, mythic figures from conflicts of long ago erupt into the present, claiming and changing lives.
Witchmark
by C. L. PolkC. L. Polk arrives on the scene with Witchmark, a stunning, addictive fantasy that combines intrigue, magic, betrayal, and romance.One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2018!In an original world reminiscent of Edwardian England in the shadow of a World War, cabals of noble families use their unique magical gifts to control the fates of nations, while one young man seeks only to live a life of his own.Magic marked Miles Singer for suffering the day he was born, doomed either to be enslaved to his family's interest or to be committed to a witches' asylum. He went to war to escape his destiny and came home a different man, but he couldn’t leave his past behind. The war between Aeland and Laneer leaves men changed, strangers to their friends and family, but even after faking his own death and reinventing himself as a doctor at a cash-strapped veterans' hospital, Miles can’t hide what he truly is. When a fatally poisoned patient exposes Miles’ healing gift and his witchmark, he must put his anonymity and freedom at risk to investigate his patient’s murder. To find the truth he’ll need to rely on the family he despises, and on the kindness of the most gorgeous man he’s ever seen.
Who Fears Death
by Nnedi OkoraforInternational award-winning Nnedi Okorafor enters the world of magical realist literature with a powerful story of genocide in the far future and the woman who reshapes her world.
In a post-apocalyptic Africa, the world has changed in many ways, yet in one region genocide between tribes still bloodies the land. A woman who has survived the annihilation of her village and a terrible rape by an enemy general wanders into the desert hoping to die. Instead, she gives birth to an angry baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand. Gripped by the certainty that her daughter is different--special--she names her Onyesonwu, which means "Who fears death?" in an ancient language. It doesn't take long for Onye to understand that she is physically and socially marked by the circumstances of her violent conception.
She is Ewu--a child of rape who is expected to live a life of violence, a half-breed rejected by both tribes. But Onye is not the average Ewu. Even as a child, she manifests the beginnings of a remarkable and unique magic. As she grows, so do her abilities, and during an inadvertent visit to the spirit realm she learns something terrifying: Someone powerful is trying to kill her.
Desperate to elude her would-be murderer and to understand her own nature, she embarks on a journey in which she grapples with nature, tradition, history, true love, and the spiritual mysteries of her culture, and ultimately teaches her why she was given the name she bears: Who Fears Death.
Watchtower
by Elizabeth A. LynnIn a land brought to life by warriors and lovers, war and honor, the legendary tower Tornor Keep is invaded by raiders. No longer the watchtower at the winter end of a summer land, Tornor turns to a young prince with the hopes that he might protect the future of the enchanting land.
Trouble the Saints
by Alaya Dawn JohnsonThe dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in Alaya Dawn Johnson's timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City, where an assassin falls in love and tries to change her fate at the dawn of World War II.
Amid the whir of city life, a young woman from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear among its most dangerous denizens. Ten years later, Phyllis LeBlanc has given up everything—not just her own past, and Dev, the man she loved, but even her own dreams. Still, the ghosts from her past are always by her side—and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she keeps in her heart. And so Phyllis will have to make a harrowing choice, before it’s too late—is there ever enough blood in the world to wash clean generations of injustice?
Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel—a magical love story, a compelling exposure of racial fault lines—and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Towing Jehovah
by James MorrowGod is dead, and Anthony Van Horne must tow the corpse to the Arctic (to preserve Him from sharks and decomposition). En route Van Horne must also contend with ecological guilt, a militant girlfriend, sabotage both natural and spiritual, and greedy hucksters of oil, condoms, and doubtful ideas. Winner of a 1995 World Fantasy Award.
Thraxas (Omnibus
by Martin ScottThis hilarious two-in-one volume introduces Britain's fantasy hit to America. Portly private eye Thraxas is hired by a Princess of the enchanted city of Turai on a case which leads him right to the corrupt Imperial Palace.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope
by Claire NorthMy name is Hope Arden, and you won't know who I am. But we've met before-a thousand times.
It started when I was sixteen years old. A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger.
No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit, you will never remember who I am.
That makes my life difficult. It also makes me dangerous.
The Sudden Appearance of Hope is the tale of a girl no one remembers, yet her story will stay with you forever.
A Stranger in Olondria
by Sofia SamatarJevick, the pepper merchant's son, has been raised on stories of Olondria, a distant land where books are as common as they are rare in his home.
When his father dies and Jevick takes his place on the yearly selling trip to Olondria, Jevick's life is as close to perfect as he can imagine. But just as he revels in Olondria's Rabelaisian Feast of Birds, he is pulled drastically off course and becomes haunted by the ghost of an illiterate young girl.
In desperation, Jevick seeks the aid of Olondrian priests and quickly becomes a pawn in the struggle between the empire's two most powerful cults.
Yet even as the country shimmers on the cusp of war, he must face his ghost and learn her story before he has any chance of becoming free by setting her free: an ordeal that challenges his understanding of art and life, home and exile, and the limits of that seductive necromancy, reading.
A Stranger in Olondria is a skillful and immersive debut fantasy novel that pulls the reader in deeper and deeper with twists and turns reminiscent of George R. R. Martin and Joe Hill.
Sofia Samatar is an American of Somali and Swiss German Mennonite background. She wrote A Stranger in Olondria in Yambio, south Sudan, where she worked as an English teacher. She has worked in Egypt and is pursuing a PhD in African languages and literature at the University of Madison, Wisconsin.
Song of Kali
by Dan SimmonsThe World Fantasy Award winner by the author of the Hyperion Cantos and Carrion Comfort: An American finds himself encircled by horrors in Calcutta. Praised by Dean Koontz as &“the best novel in the genre I can remember,&” Song of Kali follows an American magazine editor who journeys to the brutally bleak, poverty-stricken Indian city in search of a manuscript by a mysterious poet—but instead is drawn into an encounter with the cult of Kali, goddess of death. A chilling voyage into the squalor and violence of the human condition, this novel is considered by many to be the best work by the author of The Terror, who has been showered with accolades, including the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Hugo Award.
Soldier of Sidon
by Gene WolfeFrom the book jacket: Latro forgets everything when he sleeps.
Writing down his experiences every day and reading his journal anew each morning gives him a poignantly tenuous hold on himself, but his story's hold on readers is powerful indeed. The two previous novels, combined in Latro in the Mist (Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete), are generally considered classics of contemporary fantasy.
At last we have a new book.
Latro now finds himself in Egypt, a land of singing girls, of spiteful and conniving deities, of mysterious dangers. Without his memory, he is unsure of everything, except for his desire to be free of the curse that causes him to forget.
The visions Gene Wolfe conjures of the wonders of Egypt and of the adventures of Latro as he and his companions journey south up the great Nile into unknown and legendary territory are truly unique and compelling.
Soldier of Sidon is a thrilling and magical fantasy novel and yet another masterpiece from Gene Wolfe.
The Shadow Year
by Jeffrey FordIn New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade.
Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them.
Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness-until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood.
Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police-while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas . . . and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.
Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and disquieting portrait of home and family-all balancing on a razor's edge separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable-The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.
Saint Death's Daughter
by C.S.E. CooneyNothing complicates life like Death.
Lanie Stones, the daughter of the Royal Assassin and Chief Executioner of Liriat, has never led a normal life. Born with a gift for necromancy and a literal allergy to violence, she was raised in isolation in the family’s crumbling mansion by her oldest friend, the ancient revenant Goody Graves.
When her parents are murdered, it falls on Lanie and her cheerfully psychotic sister Nita to settle their extensive debts or lose their ancestral home—and Goody with it. Appeals to Liriat's ruler to protect them fall on indifferent ears… until she, too, is murdered, throwing the nation's future into doubt.
Hunted by Liriat’s enemies, hounded by her family’s creditors and terrorised by the ghost of her great-grandfather, Lanie will need more than luck to get through the next few months—but when the goddess of Death is on your side, anything is possible.
Replay
by Ken GrimwoodJeff Winston, forty-three, didn't know he was a replayer until he died and woke up twenty-five years younger in his college dorm room; he lived another life. And died again. And lived again and died again -- in a continuous twenty-five-year cycle -- each time starting from scratch at the age of eighteen to reclaim lost loves, remedy past mistakes, or make a fortune in the stock market. A novel of gripping adventure, romance, and fascinating speculation on the nature of time, Replay asks the question: "What if you could live your life over again?"
Queen of the Conquered
by Kacen CallenderAn ambitious young woman with the power to control minds seeks vengeance against the royals who murdered her family, in a Caribbean-inspired fantasy world embattled by colonial oppression.
Sigourney Rose is the only surviving daughter of a noble lineage on the islands of Hans Lollik. When she was a child, her family was murdered by the islands' colonizers, who have massacred and enslaved generations of her people -- and now, Sigourney is ready to exact her revenge.
When the childless king of the islands declares that he will choose his successor from amongst eligible noble families, Sigourney uses her ability to read and control minds to manipulate her way onto the royal island and into the ranks of the ruling colonizers. But when she arrives, prepared to fight for control of all the islands, Sigourney finds herself the target of a dangerous, unknown magic.
Someone is killing off the ruling families to clear a path to the throne. As the bodies pile up and all eyes regard her with suspicion, Sigourney must find allies among her prey and the murderer among her peers... lest she become the next victim.
Queen of the Conquered reckons with the many layers of power and privilege in a lush fantasy world -- perfect for readers of S. A. Chakraborty, Ken Liu, and Tasha Suri.
The Prestige
by Christopher PriestTwo 19th century stage illusionists, the aristocratic Rupert Angier and the working-class Alfred Borden, engage in a bitter and deadly feud; the effects are still being felt by their respective families a hundred years later.Working in the gaslight-and-velvet world of Victorian music halls, they prowl edgily in the background of each other's shadowy life, driven to the extremes by a deadly combination of obsessive secrecy and insatiable curiosity.At the heart of the row is an amazing illusion they both perform during their stage acts. The secret of the magic is simple, and the reader is in on it almost from the start, but to the antagonists the real mystery lies deeper. Both have something more to hide than the mere workings of a trick.Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1996
The Physiognomy
by Jeffrey FordWinner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel: Cley has mastered the art of physiognomy--and now he is about to learn its ultimate truth In the Well-Built City, Master Drachton Below's power is absolute, and he will not hesitate to use it. His primary method of control is through his physiognomists, who are trained to read a person's face and body, perceiving that person's past and secrets--and even events yet to come. These seers are the judges and jury.
Now Drachton has found something that could extend his reign for eternity: a fruit that bestows immortality. To investigate its whereabouts, Below sends cold, collected physiognomist Cley to the remote mining town of Anamasobia. One at a time Cley interrogates the townspeople, performing his usual fact finding without issue. That is, until he meets the beautiful and bright Arla, who harbors a secret that could potentially turn Cley's world upside down--and topple the Well-Built City itself.
A Kafkaesque journey into the unknown, The Physiognomy is an award-winning trip through a land where the line between reality and imagination is constantly blurred.
Perfume
by Patrick SuskindAn acclaimed bestseller and international sensation, Patrick Suskind's classic novel provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man's indulgence in his greatest passion--his sense of smell--leads to murder. In the slums of eighteenth-century France, the infant Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift--an absolute sense of smell.
As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood.
Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"--the scent of a beautiful young virgin.
Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity. Translated from the German by John E. Woods.
Our Lady of Darkness
by Fritz LeiberA horror author is drawn into a mysterious curse in this World Fantasy Award–winning novel from the author of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series. Fritz Leiber may be best known as a fantasy writer, but he published widely and successfully in the horror and science fiction fields. His fiction won the Hugo, Nebula, Derleth, Gandalf, Lovecraft, and World Fantasy Awards, and he was honored with the Life Achievement Lovecraft Award and the Grand Master Nebula Award. One of his best novels is the classic dark fantasy Our Lady of Darkness, winner of the 1978 World Fantasy Award. Our Lady of Darkness introduces San Francisco horror writer Franz Westen. While studying his beloved city through binoculars from his apartment window, he is astonished to see a mysterious figure waving at him from a hilltop two miles away. He walks to Corona Heights and looks back at his building to discover the figure waving at him from his apartment window—and to find himself caught in a century‑spanning curse that may have destroyed Clark Ashton Smith and Jack London.
The Other Wind
by Ursula K. Le GuinThe sorcerer Alder fears sleep. He dreams of the land of death, of his wife who died young and longs to return to him so much that she kissed him across the low stone wall that separates our world from the Dry Land-where the grass is withered, the stars never move, and lovers pass without knowing each other. The dead are pulling Alder to them at night.
Through him they may free themselves and invade Earthsea.
Alder seeks advice from Ged, once Archmage. Ged tells him to go to Tenar, Tehanu, and the young king at Havnor. They are joined by amber-eyed Irian, a fierce dragon able to assume the shape of a woman.
The threat can be confronted only in the Immanent Grove on Roke, the holiest place in the world and there the king, hero, sage, wizard, and dragon make a last stand.
Le Guin combines her magical fantasy with a profoundly human, earthly, humble touch.
Osama
by Lavie TidharLavie Tidhar was in Dar-es-Salaam during the American embassy bombings in 1998, and stayed in the same hotel as the Al Qaeda operatives in Nairobi.
Since then he and his now-wife have narrowly avoided both the 2005 King's Cross and 2004 Sinai attacks--experiences that led first to his memorable short story "My Travels with Al-Qaeda" and later to the creation of Osama.
In a world without global terrorism Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante...
WINNER OF THE 2012 WORLD FANTASY AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL.
Only Begotten Daughter
by James MorrowThe World Fantasy Award–winning novel of a female deity trying to save a modern world gone mad—&“Invites comparisons with Vonnegut and even Rushdie&” (The Washington Post). Rejoice! A new messiah has come, and her name is Julie. Born to Murray Katz, the solitary (and celibate) keeper of an abandoned lighthouse on the Jersey shore, our protagonist arrives on Earth boasting supernatural abilities evocative of her divine half brother, Jesus. As a child, she revels in her talent for walking on water, resurrecting dead crabs, and treating fireflies as luminous alphabet blocks. But after she reaches adolescence, her life becomes as challenging and ambiguous as any mortal&’s. Not only is Julie Katz obliged to deal with a silver-tongued devil and self-righteous neo-Christian zealots, she must also figure out what sort of mission her mother—the female Supreme Being—has in mind for her. At once outrageous and affirming, this Nebula Award finalist is a magnificent work of contemporary satire that holds a mirror up to human nature, astutely reflecting our species&’ failings, foibles, and often misguided affections.
Lyonesse
by Jack VanceA prince is stranded on the Elder Isles, where he ventures through the magical islands and meets a beautiful but sad princess.
Little, Big
by John CrowleyJohn Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood-not found on any map-to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder.
Last Call
by Tim PowersEnchantingly dark and compellingly real, the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Last Call is a masterpiece of magic realism from critically acclaimed author Tim Powers. Set in the gritty, dazzling underworld known as Las Vegas, Last Call tells the story of a one-eyed professional gambler who discovers that he was not the big winner in a long-ago poker game . . . and now must play for the highest stakes ever as he searches for a way to win back his soul.