12 Genre-Bending Books To Read After Watching Behind Her Eyes

One of 2020’s most celebrated books, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Parakeet follows an unnamed Bride who begins to have second thoughts about her impending marriage when her dead grandmother returns — in the form of the titular bird — to tell her not to go through with her nuptials.

It’s 1998 and high-school junior Jess Flynn has big dreams of leaving her tiny hometown to see the wider world. But when a small Apple device falls out of her BFF’s bookbag, Jess begins to realize that there may be more to Swickley than meets the eye.

A celebrated young astronaut is haunted by the mysterious disappearance of an entire spacecraft in Kate Hope Day’s In the Quick. June’s famous uncle developed the fuel cells used aboard the Inquiry — fuel cells that failed and left the spacecraft and its crew adrift in the ether. Everyone else seems to think that the Inquiry crew are done for, but June believes they may be alive out there, and she’s determined to bring them home.

It’s been three years since Sia’s mother was deported. The teenager maintains a monthly religious ritual meant to bring her mom home, but she’s slowly losing hope of ever seeing her again. That is, until the spaceship carrying her mother crash-lands in the desert, leading to a revelatory reunion, in Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything.

In Olga Grushin’s dark take on the classic Cinderella story, the fairy-tale heroine has an unusual method of bringing the spark back to her foundering marriage. The Witch she meets outside the palace walls usually crafts love potions for wives like Cinderella, but the princess has something a little more fatal in mind.

Based in part on the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, Ilze Hugo’s The Down Days centers on Faith, a woman whose job is to collect the corpses of those who died of a mysterious plague, one that causes hallucinations and paranoia. When she meets an orphan whose baby brother has gone missing, Faith dedicates herself to the search for the boy. But as the hunt continues, she begins to wonder whether the child ever existed at all.

When an ancient evil awakens in New York City, five avatars representing the city’s boroughs awaken to protect it. They’ll need to join forces if they hope to save New York, but when one of them finds it difficult to work with the others, the fate of the city slips further into jeopardy.

A space-fantasy murder mystery featuring lesbian necromancers and swordplay? Gideon the Ninth is all that and a bag of memes. When Harrowhark, sorceress and heir to one of the universe’s noble houses, receives a summons to appear in the domain of her God-Emperor, she has no choice but to bring along her lifelong enemy, Gideon, to serve as her swordswoman. Together, they make up one of eight teams competing for eternal honor and glory, but the field of competitors begins to thin out shortly after their arrival, as combatants go missing... and turn up dead.

Alice’s whole life changed in 1999, when two boys drove her home from a party. Everyone in town heard the rumors about what happened that night. Sixteen years later, she works up the courage to finally tell her side of the story... but how do you write about something you can’t remember?

The first novel in a new epic fantasy trilogy based on life in the pre-Columbian Americas, Black Sun tracks the events leading up to a prophesied clash between a newly minted priest and the heretical cult his predecessor tried to wipe out. A solar eclipse on the winter solstice has all eyes on the skies, but an ancient and neglected power may be making its return to the world on this fateful celestial occasion.

In this retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” a girl named Nuawa puts her life on the line in a deadly competition, all for the chance to save her homeland from the Winter Queen’s magic. But the Winter Queen’s top military officer, General Lussadh, knows Nuawa’s secret — that the girl has a shard of glass in her heart, just like Lussadh.

Full disclosure: Winterglass is published by Apex Book Company. K.W. Colyard is a slush reader for Apex Magazine.

After a terrorist attack left her with medical bills she had no hope of paying, Hester took a job working as an onsite investigator for a mining operation. When a message arrives from an old friend claiming to have information on the attack that disrupted their lives and livelihoods, Hester’s interest is piqued. But when the friend is suddenly killed, she finds herself working the case of a lifetime, in Kali Wallace’s Dead Space.