Amal El-Mohtar

Becky Chambers comes down to earth for her new series, about a world where humans and robots diverged so long ago that now each group is just a myth to the other, and robots propagate themselves.

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.

Erin Morgenstern's long-awaited followup to The Night Circus imagines a world of magical doors leading to a literal underground sea — surrounded by layers of pleasurable mystery and mythography.

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.

Jo Walton's new novel imagines the Florentine friar Girolamo Savonarola, living life over and over again in an attempt to change his course, save his city, his friends — and himself from damnation.

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.

P. Djèlí Clark's novella about about two supernatural investigators on the trail of a malign spirit in a magical alternate Cairo packs wonderful characters into a thoughtfully-built world.

Our critic likens reading Marlon James' new epic fantasy to being slowly eaten by a bear that occasionally cracks jokes — painful and strange, but upsettingly beautiful for all that.