In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to better the family's social position. What begins as simple amusement for the bored nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain's king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England's heretic queen--and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king's favor. Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the lines between magic, science, and fraud are never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition's wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive--even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santangel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both.

"In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life's few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village's children. Ina's gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina's home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place. Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people's desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord's family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year's end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed"--

"Richly nuanced and beautiful. . . . An immersive and magical tale of loneliness, love, and finding hope." (Buzzfeed) "A layered novel of many complex characters...To keep their worlds safe, Chava and Ahmad must access both their greatest supernatural powers and their deepest human impulses." (Historical Novels Review) In this enthralling historical epic, set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading to World War I-- the long-awaited follow-up to the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Golem and the Jinni--Helene Wecker revisits her beloved characters Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world. Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, who can hear the thoughts and longings of those around her and feels compelled by her nature to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a restless creature of fire, once free to roam the desert but now imprisoned in the shape of a man. Fearing they'll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and try to pass as human--just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Brought together under calamitous circumstances, their lives are now entwined--but they're not yet certain of what they mean to each other. Both Chava and Ahmad have changed the lives of the people around them. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets Dima, a tempestuous female jinni who's been banished from her tribe. Back in New York, in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem they name Yossele--not knowing that she's about to be sent to an orphanage uptown, where the hulking Yossele will become her only friend and protector. Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other Or will their opposing natures and desires eventually tear them apart--especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other beings like themselves

"On a clear December morning in 1937, at the famous gold clock in Grand Central Terminal, Joe Reynolds, a hardworking railroad man from Queens, meets a vibrant young woman who seems mysteriously out of place. Nora Lansing is a Manhattan socialite whose flapper clothing, pearl earrings, and talk of the Roaring Twenties don't seem to match the bleak mood of Depression-era New York. Captivated by Nora from her first electric touch, Joe despairs when he tries to walk her home and she disappears. Finding her again--and again--will become the focus of his love and his life. Nora, an aspiring artist and fiercely independent, is shocked to find she's somehow been trapped, her presence in the terminal governed by rules she cannot fathom. It isn't until she meets Joe that she begins to understand the effect that time is having on her, and the possible connections to the workings of Grand Central and the astrological phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge. As thousands of visitors pass under the famous celestial blue ceiling each day, Joe and Nora create a life unlike any they could have imagined. With infinite love in a finite space, they take full advantage of the "Terminal City" within a city, dining at the Oyster Bar, visiting the Whispering Gallery, and making a home at the Biltmore Hotel. But when the construction of another historic landmark threatens their future, Nora and Joe are forced to test the limits of freedom and love. Delving into Grand Central's rich past, Lisa Grunwald crafts a masterful historical novel about a love affair that defies age, class, place, and even time"--

"With the acclaimed Temeraire novels, New York Times bestselling author Naomi Novik has created a fantasy series like no other, combining the high-flying appeal of Anne McCaffrey's Pern saga and the swashbuckling derring-do of Patrick O'Brian's historical seafaring adventures. Now, with League of Dragons, Novik brings the imaginative tour de force that has captivated millions to an unforgettable finish. Napoleon's invasion of Russia has been roundly thwarted. But even as Capt. William Laurence and the dragon Temeraire pursue the retreating enemy through an unforgiving winter, Napoleon is raising a new force, and he'll soon have enough men and dragons to resume the offensive. While the emperor regroups, the allies have an opportunity to strike first and defeat him once and for all--if internal struggles and petty squabbles don't tear them apart. Aware of his weakened position, Napoleon has promised the dragons of every country--and the ferals, loyal only to themselves--vast new rights and powers if they fight under his banner. It is an offer eagerly embraced from Asia to Africa--and even by England, whose dragons have long rankled at their disrespectful treatment. But Laurence and his faithful dragon soon discover that the wily Napoleon has one more gambit at the ready--one that that may win him the war, and the world. Praise for Naomi Novik and her Novels of Temeraire "Novik's influences run the gamut from Jane Austen to Patrick O'Brian, with a side trip through Anne McCaffrey. Her books are completely involving and probably addictive, their central conceit explored in clever detail with a great deal of wit and historical insight."--San Francisco Chronicle "These are beautifully written novels: not only fresh, original, and fast-paced, but full of wonderful characters with real heart."--Peter Jackson "A gripping adventure full of rich detail and the impossible wonder of gilded fantasy."--Entertainment Weekly "A new writer is soaring on the wings of a dragon."--The New York Times "A glorious series whose future status as a genre classic is now assured."--SF Reviews "If you've never read these novels, now is the time to start."--io9 "Enthralling reading."--Time"--

"The bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels Under Heaven and River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay is back with a new novel, Children of Earth and Sky, set in a world inspired by the conflicts and dramas of Renaissance Europe. Against this tumultuous backdrop the lives of men and women unfold on the borderlands--where empires and faiths collide. From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request--and possibly to do more--and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman posing as a doctor's wife but sent by Seressa as a spy. The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he's been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif--to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming. As these lives entwine, their fates--and those of many others--will hang in the balance when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world..."--

From award-winning author Guy Gavriel Kay, who "stands among the world's finest fantasy authors" (Montreal Gazette), comes a sweeping tale evocative of the Celtic and Norse cultures of the ninth and tenth centuries, filled with the human passion and epic adventure he is noted for.

Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon is set in an imaginative recreation of Elizabethan London, a rich, intense city overflowing with life and action, a city of spies and booksellers, alchemists and playwrights, poets, witches, plague and salvation. A series of strange events links the lives of an ordinary woman, a bookseller in St. Paul's, and the great writer Christopher Marlowe, as the Faerie Queen and her court invade London in search of the Queen's son, the reborn King Arthur. Marlowe must become in effect a detective, and Alice, strangely favored by the fairies, must become a heroine in a struggle against evil forces. The culmination of this extraordinary fantasy, a battle between the opposing dragons of good and evil, is certainly one of the most weird and enchanting events in all contemporary fantasy. Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon is a big, delicious fantasy adventure filled with strange creatures and ordinary people, famous characters, and mysterious historical doings. It is a triumph of entertainment and one of the finest fantasy novels of the decade.

Persephone loses her innocence in the Underworld, but finds herself. She is Everywoman coming through darkness, betrayal and disillusion to discover a new life, a new sense of herself. And she is many women in Jenny Joseph's extraordinary novel, which retells the Greek myth of spring and winter, of good and evil.Demeter the earth goddess is every worried mother struggling to understand her daughter. Hades is the reckless man, brutal, possessive, but mellowed by the girl he takes for himself, the woman who goes back to him.In Persephone, Jenny Joseph has created a new kind of novel, a story made up of many stories, our stories, using poetry, narrative, parody and many other kinds of writing. Like the myth itself, Persephone is unforgettable. The book won her the 1986 James Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

"A duchess's beauty matched only by her cunning; her husband's dangerous affair with a handsome scholar; a foreigner in a playground of swordplay and secrets; and a mathematical genius on the brink of revolution. Suddenly long-buried lies threaten to come to light and betrayal and treachery run rampant in this story of sparkling wit and political intrigue."--Amazon.com.

The new collection from Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of Transcendent 2 offers plenty of thrills for readers of LGBTQ-focused speculative literature. The stories range from magical space opera to cheerful body horror and historical fantasy, always with a sense of hope amid adversity.