Morgenstern's luminescent, whimsical prose not only tells an absorbing, magical story, but creates a world readers won't want to leave. At its center is Zachary, who recognizes his own, unfinished story in a copy of The Starless Sea, a book in which a boy finds a painted door he decides not to open. Intrigued and unsettled by this uncanny parallel, Zachary is drawn into a mystery involving a masquerade, a handsome man, and the place he never expected to find--embarking on an adventure that blurs the lines of what he thought was possible.
Fans of The Martian won't want to miss Weir's long-awaited return to his trademark action-packed, first-person narrative. When Ryland Grace awakens as the only surviving member of a last-chance interstellar mission, he must try to save the Earth with no memories of the threat he faces or how he came to be there. Offering a new spin on first contact, this book is weird, funny, and full of intriguing scientific mysteries and on-the-fly problem-solving.
A human and an alien on opposing sides of a galactic conflict while away their days selling alien liquor at a pub in a technophobic British enclave--but that's only the beginning of Skyward Inn, a book that over the course of its 200-some pages finds room for meditations on Brexit, colonialism, difficult parent-child relationships, fraught male adolescence, freakish body horror, and an endgame scenario that rivals Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End in scope, while having it beat for prose style and characterization. If you're a fan of Le Guin, Butler, or Vandermeer, or even have a soft spot for Du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, this is the best recent SF novel you likely haven't read.
