They met as children in the middle of the Sri Lankan civil war. Later, in a demon-haunted wood, an act of violence linked them and propelled their souls on a journey through the ages. As they reincarnate ever deeper into the future, a truth emerges: Some stories take more than one lifetime to tell.
Running Close to the Wind by @ariaste
In this queer pirate fantasy, Avra Helvaçi has accidentally stolen the single most expensive secret in the world. To avoid capture, he flees to the open sea, where only his on-again, off-again ex aka pirate Captain Teveri az-Ḥaffār can help him survive, profit, and become a legend.
Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body and wears your skin. Welcome to Camp Resolution, a queer conversion center where everyone leaves a different person. In 1995, seven queer teens were abandoned here by their parents, but survived. Sixteen years later, they’re scarred and broken, but back to face an evil that threatens the world.
Kinning by Nisi Shawl
In this alternate history where barkcloth airships soar and former colonies claim freedom from imperialist tyrants, the identity of the island of Everfair still wavers. Victorious in the wake of the Great War, a new threat looms. Can Everfair continue to serve as a symbol of hope for anticolonial movements around the world, or will it fall to forces within and without?
Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by @rebeccathornewrites
Can one of the Queen’s private guard and the most powerful mage in existence leave their lives behind to settle down in their new bookshop that serves tea? This cozy fantasy is steeped in sapphic romance and nestled on the edge of dragon country.
The Fragile Threads of Power by V. E. Schwab
Once there were four worlds, nestled like pages in a book, each pulsing with fantastical power and connected by a single city: London. After a desperate attempt to prevent corruption and ruin in the four Londons, there are only three. Now the worlds are going to collide anew—brought to a dangerous precipice by the discoveries of three remarkable magicians.
Now available in paperback!
The Archive Undying by @emcandon
This is a story about misplaced faith, complicated love, so much self-loathing, and yeah—giant robots. Plugged into his AI god when its apocalyptic corruption renders him unfortunately immortal, sad gay disaster Sunai takes a die-again-or-die-trying approach to things. Unending life’s tough when intimacy is somehow scarier even than either of the warring police states set on turning you into a weapon or the rogue undead mecha-fragment of your old god that wants to eat you.
Now available in paperback!
The Bell in the Fog by Lev AC Rosen
A dazzling historical mystery that dives into the shadowy, closeted world of the Navy, emerging in the gay bars of the city. It’s a whirlpool of missing people, violent strangers, and scandalous photos in 1952 San Francisco.
Now available in paperback!
Celebrate Pride with more titles from Tor Publishing Group here!
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2026 Book Review #18 – Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
I picked this up (at some delay) on the strength of Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, one of the best books I’ve read in the past few years. Rakesfall was his debut novel (so far as I can tell) and, as is often the case, wilder, more rough-edged, and bursting at the seams with more ideas than it knows what to do with. It is profoundly not a book for everyone, and is pretty actively hostile both to treating it as brainless entertainment and to meticulously trying to keep track of and understand every particular. Taking a middle ground between them, I found it an absolutely joyous fever dream.
The book opens with a chorus of children’s ghosts spending a chapter discussing and analyzing their favourite TV show, and then for a time follows one of the main characters from it (after his costar murders him in a ritual that propels them into reality. Well, a reality). It gets steadily weirder and harder to explain from there, jumping back and forth across epochs, universes, and entire metaphysical systems. At one point it’s a political assassination in 20th century Sri Lanka. At another it’s a transhuman murder mystery on the post-post-post-post-apocalyptic remains of Earth. And at still another it’s the script of a play about Portuguese conquistadors torturing captured villagers for the location of nonexistent treasure, and also how the discovery of how to restore past lives’ memories centuries later really screwed up the friendship between future iterations of torturer and victim. It is mostly about the relationship between those two first entwined souls, as each haunts and is haunted by the other across uncountable infinities of lives, but it often takes some time in each vignette before you have any hope of figuring out how.
Which is to say, this is not a book that’s especially concerned with tight and linear plotting. Several different chunks of it were, according to a note in the front, originally published as standalone short stories and only later integrated into the larger narrative. This is absolutely unsurprising, but it’s not as if they’re outliers in how esoteric their connections to the rest of the book are – if not for that note, I wouldn’t have guessed there was anything unusual about them in particular. The book is very thinly sliced, with some larger sections forming little clumps of more conventional narrative and others being closer to an anthology organized by theme. Chandrasekera clearly enjoys plunging the reader into a wholly alien scene and letting them build up an image of what’s happening from context clues over several pages, which would rapidly become insufferable if he wasn’t also extremely good at it.
The writing itself is an absolute delight, playing with different idioms, perspectives, narrative genres and even formats as the mood takes it. Playful is a good way to describe the voice overall, I suppose? Jumping from grand and weighty symbolism and poetic turns of phrase to casual slang, intentionally childlike prose or the affect of an overly online group chat and back again without ever changing subject, that sort of thing. This was the pleasant surprise of a book that was really reliably enjoyable to read on a sentence-to-sentence level, and one with more than a few lines which I went back to and reread after finishing the page for the sheer pleasure of it.
It’s difficult to talk about the book’s themes and overarching symbolism in great detail just because there is so much of it. At the simplest level, you could describe its vision of reincarnation as ‘like in Cloud Atlas, if Cloud Atlas was good,’ but that’s leaving a painful amount of nuance on the cutting room floor. Someone willing to put in the effort could mine the book for a great many different essays worth of analysis and comparison, but I’m not that person.
So, a beautiful, oft-confusing mindfuck of a book. Highly recommend.
I believe I promised my near-annual queer SF reclist…ages ago. You may have already seen this list on my newsletter (which you can subscribe to here!), but I wanted to make a Tumblr specific post as well.
Hope you enjoy. I’ve already talked about a good handful of these books, but hopefully some of them will be new. Go forth and read.
And now, in no particular order, 10 books that I’ve read and loved in the past year.
1. The Archive Undying - Emma Mieko Candon
Well, we all know you’ve heard about this one, if not from here then from me rambling about it online or in person. The Archive Undying is about a world full of cities that are both the bodies of and governed by vast AIs, and about the fallout when one of those AIs corrupts. It follows a wonderful cast of characters, some who made me want to strangle them, some who made me want to cry for them. Full of complex relationships, humour, and grief, I have perhaps listened to the audiobook version three times in the past twelve months.
2. Saint Death’s Daughter - C.S.E Cooney
I recently saw a post saying how much they loved stories where Death is presented as kind and loving, and thought immediately of this book. Saint Death’s Daughter is a brilliant funny and joyful book, full of colour, horrendous puns, and footnotes that made me laugh out loud. This book follows a young necromancer who is—literally—allergic to violence and her extended family of murderers, assassins, and executioners. More than that, it’s a lyrical and bizarre book that isn’t afraid of playing with your expectations set in a lush world that utterly pulled me in (and made me read the sequel).
3. Where Echoes Die - Courtney Gould
Two sisters grieving their mother, an illicit trip, a town with a secret. After their mother’s death, Beck and Riley find themselves in a decaying town she visited regularly. Slipping through memories, their exploration circles around the mysterious treatment centre set in the hills high above the town. As they dig up truths about thetown and the people who live there, Beck must face the things she has kept buried. I grabbed this book from the library on a whim, and was swept along in the story of these two girls and their strange town.
4. The West Passage - Jared Pechaček
This is one of those books that I finished and then immediately had to run to a friend to recommend. Two young people raised in thecrumbling remains of the grey tower must take on ancient responsibilities to save their world from an ancient evil, meeting beekeepers, librarians and strange and powerful Ladies. Additionally, the author is also an excellent illustrator, and this book is done nearly in the fashion of an illuminated manuscript. Both the story and illustrations are full of charm and a bizarre fairy tale logic that swept me through the pages. If you’ve enjoyed books like Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin or Honeycomb by Joanne Harris, I’d highly recommend The West Passage. This is a book that creates a world unlike any I’ve seen and explores it with child-like wonder and horror.
5. Rakesfall - Vajra Chandrasekera
You’re trapped inside a story, someone else’s story, one you didn’t get to write for yourself. The only way out is to peel yourself, bloody and screaming, from your world and into a new one. Rakesfall is a story that breaks past the fourth wall and crumbles away everything you thought you knew about the book. hopping between universes, time twists on itself and unravels as two people tear their way through each other, as siblings, as enemies, as something else. How do you tell your own story when you’re wearing someone else’s skin? Racing between Sri Lanka during political disruption, the world we remember from The Saint of Bright Doorsand the far future, Rakesfall is a book that tears its way through the world.
6. Catherine House - Elizabeth Thomas
Another book I keep recommending to people, sometimes for dark academia, sometimes for the kind of dreamlike literary fiction I’m always chasing after. Students are offered places at the prestigious Catherine House college, on the condition that they spend the next three years completely isolated from the outside world, existing only within the gates and walls of the house. This is one of those books that you need to have thecorrect expectations going in to truly enjoy. This is a book that doesn’t answer questions, that locks you away in Catherine House with our narrator, and pulls you through all of its dusty rooms in a dream-like haze.
7. The Tiger Flu - Larissa Lai
The Tiger Flu ranks right up there with books that make me go ‘well then’. Parthenogenic women, a vast pandemic that largely affects men, psychedelics and artificial satellites filled with the memories of the dead. a narrative that weaves in and out of itself, looping back and regenerating itself. Theprose veers between poetic and crass, and thecharacters are visceral and unsettling. This book definitely falls on the more bizarre endof the spectrum of these recommendations. I recommend it whole-heartedly.
8. Pluralities - Avi Silver
Pluralities is a novella following two separate but intersecting stories—one of a person slowly slipping out of the gender roles they’ve always held themself inside, one of an alien prince and his spaceship on a journey across the stars. If those sound like a bizarre combination, believe me when I say it works masterfully. This is a book that made me feel incredibly seen, and explored gender, gender expectations and coming to terms with being non-binary in ways that might not fit other’s expectations. Also, fun spaceship character.
9. Frontier - Grace Curtis
Lesbian space western!!! LESBIAN SPACE WESTERN!!! A woman crash-lands on a devastated earth and travels among the people still living there, passing through and touching the lives of all those she meets. Thebooks is set up as a series of vignettes, each from a new perspective, each showing us another scrap of these people's lives, each showing us a lonely woman desperately searching for something—or someone. Theofficial description lists ‘love, loss, and gunslinging’, and if that doesn’t pull you in, i don’t know what could.
10. Empress of Salt and Fortune - Nghi Vo
A young empress caught up in court politics, her handmaiden who tells the story to thecleric who has come to view the empty palace the empress’ death has left behind. For so long I’d been seeing Nghi Vo’s work floating around, and Empress of Salt and Fortune did not disappoint. As this is a novella, it’s hard to describe the plot without spoiling the story, but it was, as is the case with all of these books, truly excellent.
Honorable Mentions
These are a handful of books that didn’t quite make the list for whatever reason (usually for being too popular) but I wanted to include them anyway
The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera
Chain-Gang All Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (this was my first 5 star read of this year PLEASE read it)
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June Book Reviews: Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
Reread, book club book. In Rakesfall, the souls of Leveret and Annelid plunge through dimensions in a series of vignettes spanning fantastical worlds, the not-so-distant past, and even the far future. Tied together through friendship and vengeance, the two grapple with the witches of the red web, the long-ago gods of Rakesfall, and the alien human consciousnesses of the far future.
Chandrasekera's debut, Saint of Bright Doors, was a standout for me in 2023, but I find Rakesfall a little thornier. I'm not sure it makes more sense on the reread, but I did follow the throughline of the plot better. Even as someone who greatly enjoys challenging SFF where you stumble through the plot, Rakesfall is a bit beyond me. I loved some of the vignettes--Sri Lanka in 2003 featuring an Annelid wearing Leveret's skin, the story set in the same Luriat of Saint of Bright Doors where the dead walk the streets of the city, a murder mystery set on a vertiginously far-future Earth. The chapter "Running the Gullet", about Earth's uploaded digital billionaire-gods trying to scam their way off a dying planet, was a particular standout for me. But there were some chapters where I understood all of the words but not in that order, like particularly obscure poetry. Several of the chapters were published separately as short stories, and while the overall narrative does cohere, the structure is distinctly episodic.
I'm not sure I can recommend the experience for everybody, but there certainly isn't anything else like Rakesfall. Brilliantly sharp where the prose is lucid, intriguingly occluded where it isn't. I'm glad there's someone out there publishing and writing challenging and utterly original SF like this.
