Amal El-Mohtar

Kim Harrison bids farewell to her long-running Hollows series of urban fantasies in spectacular fashion; reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls Witch "a rollercoaster ride of interlocking shenanigans."

Saeed Jones' visceral, affecting new poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, centers on the experience of Boy, an African-American child negotiating gender, sexuality and family in the South.

Jess Row's provocative Your Face in Mine uses the rhetoric of transgender experience to imagine a world where race can be changed; reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls it a grating meditation on white guilt.

Graphic novelist Emily Carroll's gorgeous new collection of horror stories entwines words and pictures to deliver delicious, twisted-fairy-tale chills. Strange things come and go in these woods.

Get your comic fix this week with Bryan Lee O'Malley's Seconds and The Shadow Hero, by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew. Both books take up the idea of re-writing the past — but in very different ways.

Rainbow Rowell's new adult novel follows a successful sitcom writer struggling to balance work and family — and to patch up her struggling marriage with the aid of a semi-magical old landline phone.

In A.M. Dellamonica's new Child of a Hidden Sea, a marine scientist discovers her secret heritage in an alternate, watery version of Earth — a place which adamantly doesn't want to be discovered.

Genevieve Valentine's new novel, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, uproots the classic fairy tale of the 12 dancing princesses and replants it in the speakeasies of Prohibition-era New York City.

In Jo Walton's elegant, heartbreaking new novel, an elderly woman remembers two distinct lives and families, in parallel timelines splitting off from one crucial decision: to marry, or not to marry?

Mary Rickert's new magical realist novel stars women often pushed to the edges of narrative: the elderly. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls it a lovely, uplifting book of friendship, sadness and healing.