Amal El-Mohtar

Two new books consider the complicated world of bees: Laline Paull's debut novel The Bees imagines humble worker bee's hive adventures, and A Sting in the Tale considers focuses on the bumblebee.

Poet Najwan Darwish's first collection to appear in English muses on identity, history and heartbreak. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar says it's passionate, yet "so matter-of-fact that it stops the breath."

Kim Harrison's Hollows series is drawing to a close after ten years of supernatural shenanigans. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar says the books are fun reading with a solid core of strong female characters.

Siri Hustvedt's latest uses fragmented documents to tell the story of an artist who chooses men to present her work. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls the book complex, harrowing, playful and engrossing.

Isabel Allende dips a toe in the waters of genre fiction with her new novel Ripper — about a girl who puts her online gaming group to work tracking down a serial killer who's targeted her mother. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar says the book would function just as well as a character study, without the crime plot.

Travel Light is an unjustly forgotten fairy tale about a wandering princess who goes from bears and dragons to the real world of medieval Constantinople — and back again. Writer Amal El-Mohtar says she encountered the book as an adult and "felt, very powerfully, that I had been waiting for it."

Nicola Griffith's immersive tale of a seventh-century seer is a rare gift in a genre that often lacks women in leading roles. Critic Amal El-Mohtar has fallen in love with the titular character, praising Griffith's "startlingly beautiful" prose and her thoughtful, meticulously-detailed approach to the world of the Middle Ages.