Who better to trust for book recs than your favorite writers? Add these to your TBR immediately.
Sandy Parsons
My favorite science fiction book was Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
My favorite fantasy book was The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricica McKillip, a very old book but really intriguing.
Vanessa Jae
My favorite speculative read of the year was Rose/House by Arkady Martine.
Angela Acosta
I loved Grace Curtis's Floating Hotel, a really great read with interesting characters.
Renan Bernardo
Club Contango, by Eliane Boey, a fierce cyberpunk novel about waging your own future.
A. P. Thayer
As for book of the year for me, I'm going to go for Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. There are so many reasons why I'm choosing this book, but I'll say that it challenged me physically while reading with its style and emotionally with its content, both in a very satisfying and life-affirming way (even though the themes of the book were bleak).
Laura Holt
My best speculative read of 2024 was definitely The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young. Time travel + Adrienne's writing = pure magic in book form.
Ai Jiang
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa because it's such a beautiful, reflective, and meditative piece on the importance of memory and the role it plays in our lives.
Aimee Ogden
Asunder, by Kerstin Hall. I love the world evoked here, I love the characters, and I love every twist of the knife that Hall gets in before the story is over. (Also, I want a sequel immediately.)
Ursula Whitcher
Lady Eve's Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow is great fun, with a snappily choreographed plot and a keen eye for the material detail of its space-station high society.
Emma Campbell
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. The novel was beautifully written, and I felt instantly drawn to the characters. It felt literary, mysterious, and speculative all at once.
P.A. Cornell
It was hard to narrow it down, but I wanted to highlight a book that isn't already getting tons of hype, so with that in mind my fave read of 2024 pick is: Signals in the Static by A.T. Sayre, which is his speculative short story collection. I loved this book and wrote a blurb for it that was easy to write because every story in it is great.
Z.V. Anjali
Probably Tai Sui, by Priest, which I read in translation (I believe it was initially written in Mandarin)--a long, immersive fantasy set in a steampunk version of ancient China, with a system of magic I hadn't seen before and that intersected interestingly with socioeconomic and political systems.
Second place: The Lotus Empire by Tasha Suri, a long-awaited (for me) conclusion to a trilogy set in fantasy medieval/ancient India and featuring a well-drawn f/f romance, with one of the main characters in particular being a wonderfully ruthless political operator.
Tina S. Zhu
My favorite speculative read of the year was Uranians by Theodore McCombs.
