Categories: Science fiction, queer romance
Published by Stelliform Press (Aug 2021)
After the Dragons by Cynthia Zhang
Dragons were fire and terror to the Western world, but in the East they brought life-giving rain…
Now, no longer hailed as gods and struggling in the overheated pollution of Beijing, only the Eastern dragons survive. As drought plagues the aquatic creatures, a mysterious disease—shaolong, or “burnt lung”—afflicts the city’s human inhabitants.
Jaded college student Xiang Kaifei scours Beijing streets for abandoned dragons, distracting himself from his diagnosis. Elijah Ahmed, a biracial American medical researcher, is drawn to Beijing by the memory of his grandmother and her death by shaolong. Interest in Beijing’s dragons leads Kai and Eli into an unlikely partnership. With the resources of Kai’s dragon rescue and Eli’s immunology research, can the pair find a cure for shaolong and safety for the dragons? Eli and Kai must confront old ghosts and hard truths if there is any hope for themselves or the dragons they love.
Category: Dystopia, Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, India
Published by Gollancz (out now)
As Mother India approaches her centenary, nine people are going about their business–a gangster, a cop, his wife, a politician, a stand-up comic, a set designer, a journalist, a scientist, and a dropout. And so is Aj–the waif, the mind reader, the prophet–when she one day finds a man who wants to stay hidden.
In the next few weeks, they will all be swept together to decide the fate of the nation.
River of Gods teems with the life of a country choked with peoples and cultures–one and a half billion people, twelve semi-independent nations, nine million gods. Ian McDonald has written the great Indian novel of the new millennium, in which a war is fought, a love betrayed, a message from a different world decoded, as the great river Ganges flows on.
Category: Dystopian future, Thriller
Published by Canongate (out now)
A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother’s neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry. Hesketh has never been good at Asperger’s Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioral patterns and an outsider’s fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh’s Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh’s Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father. Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.
Category: Dystopia, Cyberpunk
Published by Tor (out now)
Mimi is a ‘waste girl’, a member of the lowest caste on Silicon Isle.
Located off China’s southeastern coast, Silicon Isle is the global capital for electronic waste recycling, where thousands like Mimi toil day and night, hoping one day they too will enjoy the wealth they’ve created for their employers, the three clans who have ruled the isle for generations.
Luo Jincheng is the head of one of these clans, a role passed down from his father and grandfather before him. As the government enforces tighter restrictions, Luo in turn tightens the reins on the waste workers in his employ. Ruthlessness is his means of survival.
Scott Brandle has come to Silicon Isle representing TerraGreen Recycling, an American corporation that stands to earn ungodly sums if they can reach a deal to modernize the island’s recycling process.
Chen Kaizong, a Chinese American, travels to Silicon Isle as Scott’s interpreter. There, Kaizong is hoping to find his heritage, but finds more questions instead. The home he longs for may not exist.
As these forces collide, a dark futuristic virus is unleashed on the island, and war erupts between the rich and the poor; between Chinese tradition and American ambition; between humanity’s past and its future.
Category: Science Fiction, Dystopia, Cyberpunk, Fantasy
Published by Night Shade Books (out now)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen’s Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok’s street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history’s lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko…
Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman, but now abandoned to the streets of Bangkok. Regarded as soulless beings by some, devils by others, New People are slaves, soldiers, and toys of the rich in a chilling near future in which calorie companies rule the world, the oil age has passed, and the side effects of bio-engineered plagues run rampant across the globe.
What Happens when calories become currency? What happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits, when said bio-terrorism’s genetic drift forces mankind to the cusp of post-human evolution? Award-winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers one of the most highly acclaimed science fiction novels of the twenty-first century.
Spellcasters by Rajat Chaudhuri
BUSINESS REPORTER BY DAY,
DREAMCATCHER BY NIGHT
Chanchal Mitra wakes up in a far-off desert town, sharing a dingy hotel room with the flamboyant Mr. Kapoor, who is planning to abduct a billionaire. Kapoor insists that the billionaire tycoon is an impostor. Chanchal is unwittingly drawn into the plot. Soon they are joined by the mystery woman Sujata, her eyes dark like murder; and then a crutch-clutching ex-sailor, who is quick with a gun.
In the smog-swathed capital city of Aukatabad, an organic chemist engaged by the tycoon to design a mind-altering drug, is found dead from an overdose. Elsewhere, the billionaire industrialist’s chocolate factory is contaminated by salmonella while Sujata fights a fiery death at the hands of hired killers. As weird weather overtakes the land and Kapoor sets out with his accomplices to kidnap the businessman, the flimsy lines between friend, foe and lover begin to quickly disappear.
Categories: Literary fiction, thriller
Published by Niyogi Books (out now)
Michikusa House by Emily Grandy
After enduring a complicated recovery from eating disorders, Winona Heeley is struggling to return to normal life. Her mother recommends a change in scenery and arranges for Winona to stay with friends in rural Japan, at Michikusa House.
The centuries’ old farmhouse hosts residents who want to learn about growing their own food and cooking with the seasons. Jun Nakashima, an aspiring kaiseki chef, is one such resident. Like Winona, Jun is a recovering addict and college dropout. While the two bond over culinary rituals, they change each other’s lives by reconstructing long-held beliefs about shame, identity, and renewal.
But after Winona returns to her Midwest hometown, and despite her best efforts to keep in touch, Jun vanishes.
Two years pass, and Win is about to drop out of university for a second time, a decision that irreparably fractures her relationship with her partner of nearly a decade. Refusing to accept permanent failure and disappointment, Winona once again seeks revival through gardening. Much to the chagrin of her parents, she accepts a job as a groundskeeper at a local cemetery and begins searching for Jun Nakashima once more.
Categories: Literary fiction
Published by Homebound Publications (out now)
Fairhaven: A novel of climate optimism by Steve Willis and Jan Lee
What will it take to fix the climate crisis?
Grace Chan, born in Penang, Malaysia, has experienced the dire consequences of climate change personally and is taking action borne both of hope and desperation.Her story explores the implications, both at the global scale and and on a deeply personal level, of our common dilemma and the possibilities that are open to us.
Unlike most ‘cli fi’ novels, which present apocalyptic scenarios for the future, Fairhaven envisions in an engrossing, readily-accessible story for general readers how a range of practical climate adaptation and mitigation solutions could work when fully implemented.Fairhaven opens in 2036 as Grace is days away from assuming office as the President of the newly-formed Ocean Independent State. Driving along the edge of a Penang dyke to clear her mind, her truck crashes and she comes close to death as the tide rises. As she reviews her life, the reader comes to understand what has brought her (and the world) to this point, how she will move forward, and the surprising role that ordinary individuals can play.
Categories: contemporary adult fiction, optimism
Published by Habitat Press (out now)
The River, The Town by Farah Ali
In the rural town in Pakistan where Baadal grows up, children are named like talismans to sustain life and ward off unhappiness. At seventeen, Baadal has come to understand why his parents named him “Cloud,” with hopes that their Big River will one day flow wide and blue again, and their thirst will be quenched after years of drought. But in the final year of his schooling, abundance seems impossibly far away. As his parents’ marriage–full of rage, despair, and often violence–reaches a breaking point, the only comfort Baadal can afford is a budding kinship with Meena, a divorced older woman he meets on the banks of the drying river.
Meena has only just escaped her abusive husband, but her resistance to remarry soon gives way to the promise of stability and companionship that Baadal offers. Together, they leave the Town in search of greater fortunes in the City. But even strong-willed, independent Meena finds herself bowed by the strain of Badaal’s punishing work schedule, her struggling beauty parlor, and the tension with Baadal’s mother, Raheela, who fights for control of her son as she seeks to leave behind a life of disappointments and discover a freedom she’s never known.
Told in rotating perspectives spanning from 1966 to 1998, THE RIVER, THE TOWN is an intimate portrait of a family unraveling in the throes of indigence, and a tribute to the wounded love that keeps them tethered to each other. With stark and candid prose, Farah Ali traces one family’s fortunes to illuminate the relentless cycle of inequity, juxtaposing the tragic and grueling realities of poverty with the enduring struggle for compassion and humanity.
Categories: literary fiction
Published by Dzanc Books (out now)
The 86th Village by Sena Desai Gopal
Throughout Southern India, eighty-six villages are set to completely submerge due to a government-sanctioned dam across the Krishna river. Nilgi, one such village on the banks of the mighty River Krishna, has so far escaped unscathed from the illegal iron-ore mining and floods that have ravaged the rest of the district for decades. The village believes itself to be indestructible and incorruptible despite residents warn of impending doom. With whole mountains disappearing from the mining around Nilgi over time, the threat of a big flood submerging the entire village is imminent.
One night, Reshma, a young orphan girl appears in the village, alone and without any possessions. The villagers, not knowing what else to do, take her to Raj Nayak―the patriarch of the leading family in the village who has been organizing and leading anti-dam movements. For several years he’s been lobbying the corrupt government for fair compensation to be paid to the people who will lose their livelihoods and property to the mines and the flood. But Reshma’s presence, and the mystery of her origins, sets off a chain of events threatening the protests, the family, and Nilgi itself. Soon, secrets and corruption flood the village along with the waters.
In this poignant and beautiful debut, the reader discovers the damage―both to people and the environment―wrought by human hubris and greed, and asks whether it is ever too late to right a wrong?
Categories: cli-fi, crime fiction, poltiical thriller
Published by Polis/Agora (out now)
In Dreamtime Venetia Welby paints a terrifying and captivating vision of our near future and takes us on a vertiginous odyssey into the unknown. A thrilling work of speculative fiction for our times.
‘So, where is he then, your dad?’
The world may be on a precipice but Sol, fresh from Tucson desert rehab, finally has an answer to the question that has dogged her since childhood. And not a moment too soon. With aviation grinding to a halt in the face of global climate meltdown, this is the last chance to connect with her absentee father, a US marine stationed in Okinawa.
To mend their broken past Sol and her lovelorn friend Kit must journey across poisoned oceans to the furthest reaches of the Japanese archipelago, a place where sea, sky and earth converge at the forefront of an encroaching environmental and geopolitical catastrophe; a place battered by the relentless tides of history, haunted by the ghosts of its past, where the real and the virtual, the dreamed and the lived, are ever harder to define.
Categories: Literary fiction, Speculative
Published by Quartet Books (out now)
Set in the Indonesian rainforest, Blind Eye is a fast-paced political environmental thriller exploring moral predicaments and personal choices. Ben is an economist whose life is falling to pieces. The last thing he needs right now is to compile a report for the government on sustainable exportation of timber from Indonesia. But he has got to keep the pennies rolling in. Everyone seems to have an angle. The Government want trade, the businessmen want low-cost products, the environmentalists want to maintain endangered habitats and one young woman, Yulia, is determined to protect communities. Ben rushes through the report, but then tragedy hits. A community is shattered, and Ben realises, there is no staying neutral. He has a part to play in the global picture.
Categories: environmental political thriller
Published by The Book Guild (out now)
Three Ways to Disappear by Katy Yocom
Leaving behind a nomadic and dangerous career as a journalist, Sarah DeVaughan returns to India, the country of her childhood and a place of unspeakable family tragedy, to help preserve the endangered Bengal tigers. Meanwhile, at home in Kentucky, her sister, Quinn–also deeply scarred by the past and herself a keeper of secrets–tries to support her sister, even as she fears that India will be Sarah’s undoing.
As Sarah faces challenges in her new job–made complicated by complex local politics and a forbidden love–Quinn copes with their mother’s refusal to talk about the past, her son’s life-threatening illness, and her own increasingly troubled marriage. When Sarah asks Quinn to join her in India, Quinn realizes that the only way to overcome the past is to return to it, and it is in this place of stunning natural beauty and hidden danger that the sisters can finally understand the ways in which their family has disappeared–from their shared history, from one another–and recognize that they may need to risk everything to find themselves again.
With dramatic urgency, a powerful sense of place, and a beautifully rendered cast of characters revealing a deep understanding of human nature in all its flawed glory, Katy Yocom has created an unforgettable novel about saving all that is precious, from endangered species to the indelible bonds among family.
Categories: Historical, Literary Fiction, Asia
Published by Ashland Creek Press (out now)
The Year Without Summer by Guinevere Glasfurd
In 1815, a supervolcanic eruption led to the extraordinary ‘Year Without Summer’ in 1816: a massive climate disruption causing famine, poverty and riots. Lives, both ordinary and privileged, changed forever.
1815, Sumbawa Island, Indonesia
Mount Tambora explodes in a cataclysmic eruption, killing thousands. Sent to investigate, ship surgeon Henry Hogg can barely believe his eyes. Once a paradise, the island is now solid ash, the surrounding sea turned to stone. But worse is yet to come: as the ash cloud rises and covers the sun, the seasons will fail.
1816.
In Switzerland, Mary Shelley finds dark inspiration. Confined inside by the unseasonable weather, thousands of famine refugees stream past her door. In Vermont, preacher Charles Whitlock begs his followers to keep faith as drought dries their wells and their livestock starve. In Britain, the ambitious and lovesick painter John Constable struggles to reconcile the idyllic England he paints with the misery that surrounds him. In the Fens, farm labourer Sarah Hobbs has had enough of going hungry while the farmers flaunt their wealth. And Hope Peter, returned from Napoleonic war, finds his family home demolished and a fence gone up in its place. He flees to London, where he falls in with a group of revolutionaries who speak of a better life, whatever the cost. As desperation sets in, Britain becomes racked with riots – rebellion is in the air.
Categories: Historical, Literary Fiction
Published by Two Roads Books (out now)
The Case of the Missing Water by Shalini Srinivasan
When the tank in Ranj’s village dries up, she puts on her detective hat and sets out on a mission to find the missing water.
Categories: picture books, realism, water crisis
Published by Pratham Books (out now)
Climate Fiction Writers League 