Tricia Narwani’s
Top Science Fiction
& Fantasy

This is my favorite sort of murder story, one whose wit is even sharper than the heroine’s murder weapons. It’s the story of a deadly sibling rivalry: Korede has always been jealous of her beautiful older sister Ayoola… and resentful of having to clean up after her sister’s inconvenient habit of murdering her many boyfriends. A Her prose is etched as if by an exquisite knife, and the events observed by her even keener mind. Her eye for the darkness of the human heart is so acute, you may feel its gaze penetrating your own.

One of the best science fiction debuts in years, graceful, intelligent—and explosively personal-political. Micaiah Johnson is a poet, not only in her language, but in her ability to turn speculative concepts into metaphors for identity, privilege, and belonging. Her dystopian vision of a world riven by class strife and exploitation is also unexpectedly hopeful and beautiful…because she’s also envisioned a world where her brown queer heroine’s marginalization becomes her superpower.

Japan’s queen of noir writes brutal, addictive crime fiction with boundless dark depths; they are also unsparing, ruthless works of social critique, particularly of the ways that the world undervalues and savages women. And her characterization is acute, flaying open her character’s frail, dark, wounded hearts. In Grotesque, two women who graduated from the same prestigious high school are murdered by the same man—and their classmate becomes obsessed with uncovering the secret truth about their lives.

Sometimes you a read a book and have the feeling that you’re reading a future classic that will shape the genre and begin an extraordinary career.

Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds is the first time I felt that when reading the first chapter. That chapter alone is richer and more extravagantly inventive than some entire novels. And it’s just the beginning of this extraordinary time-twisting, heart-shaking, radically queer science fiction epic.