Amal El-Mohtar

Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out a year ago and quickly became the game of the pandemic era, offering a candy-colored fantasy world where the occasional bug bite is the worst that can happen.

Darcie Little Badger's warm, spooky debut novel is set in a world just slightly off our own, where ghosts and fairies are real, and an Apache girl can pal around with the spirit of her childhood dog.

Nino Cipri's magical multiworld adventure is set in a Swedish big box furniture store — no, not that one — where the showroom floor is prone to interdimensional wormholes that swallow shoppers.

A.R. Moxon's surreal, inexplicable novel is a literary puzzle box that takes place across at least four levels of reality, in at least five typefaces — and yet, it's compulsively readable.

A new anthology invites Palestinian writers to imagine their homeland in 2048 — 100 years after the creation of Israel. The stories are inventive, dextrous, painful, and even sometimes playful.

G. Willow Wilson's luminous new novel is set during the last days of Muslim Granada, and follows a royal concubine and her mapmaker friend as they flee the Inquisition for a place that may not exist.

Nisi Shawl's new alternative history novel imagines a group of socialists and missionaries who found a new nation — Everfair — as a safe haven for those fleeing Belgian atrocities in the Congo.

The second volume of Jo Walton's trilogy about the creation of a real-world Republic picks up 30 years after events of the first book. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar says it's an expectation-shattering read.

Finnish sci-fi author Hannu Rajaniemi's new collection spans everything from haunted spacesuits to the HMV logo. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar says her only criticism is that not every story is perfect.

First-time novelist Sabaa Tahir creates Capital Letter Fantasy in An Ember in the Ashes, with rebel Scholars battling an ancient, brutal Empire. Critic Amal El-Mohtar calls it "frequently riveting."