Genre: Science Fiction Published: Erewhon Books, February 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars “First there was the fear of being. Fear of being became fear of not-being. Those are the two original fears.” Consider this a PSA to all sci-fi-fans: mark February 28th on your calendars to go out and pick up this novel upon release. You won’t regret it! A.D. Sui blends a beautiful, meditative and philosophical science-fiction story with a closed-room-murder-mystery in space, and although tha

Genre: Eco-fiction, novella Published: Quercus Books by Riverrun, February 2026 My Rating: 4/5 stars “Nature doesn’t give a fuck.” Eradication is an apt eco-novella with a strong undercurrent of grief and morality, both personal and with regard to the larger world around us. We follow Adi, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher, as he accepts a curious “eco-conservation” job on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora. Here, armed with nothing but survival gear

Genre: literary horror, gothic, queer Published: Little Brown and Company, January 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars, first favourite of 2026 "Because no matter how far you run, she knew—no matter how hard you try to shed your old skin and become something else—the place you come from stays with you. It always calls you back." The second I finished Hemlock , I realized two things. First, this was going to be a marmite-book that I won’t be able to recommend to just any wide audience.

Genre: literary fiction Published: Henry Holt and Co, February 2026 My Rating: 2/5 stars Framed as a story within a story, Sarah Bruni has crafted a tale of motherhood and power disparity, that unfortunately didn’t click with me. We follow A., an unnamed translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. She is still recovering from a medical trauma that took her reproductive organs, and spends her days nannying for another woman’s boy and her nights out

Genre: Horror Published: Erewhon Books, January 2026 My Rating: 2/5 stars On a semi-objective level, Allison Mick’s eco-horror debut deserves about 3/5 stars, so that’s the rating I settled on for now. However, on a personal level, I had more of a 2-star experience with it. This is not a bad book, but it’s a type of horror that’s not for me. Unfortunately, I would’ve known to avoid this beforehand, had the marketing been a little different. More on this later in the review.

Genre: sci-fi, detective/murder-mystery Published: Grand Central Publishing & Brilliance Audio, January 2026 originally independently published by the author, November 2023 My Rating: 4.5/5 stars Small-town police-procedural meets cosmic sci-fi in this fantastic genre-bender that had me hooked from start to finish. If you're in the marked for something in the vein of True Detective , or Sleeping Giants meets a Blake Crouch -style mystery: consider this one to add to your TB

Genre: Literary Fiction Novella, Magical Realism, Post-apocalyptic. Published: New Directions (US)/ Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) , March 2024 My Rating: 1/5 stars "That was the future. This is now. The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same." I wanted to love this novella so bad. A magical realism story of an undead woman, tracking across a desolate landscape with a crow living inside her chest, explori

Genre: Science Fiction Published: Mariner Books, November 2025 My Rating: 2/5 stars “I knew that she was right. She would forget me. but perhaps I could make sure of it; even long after she was gone, the world would never forget her.” It took me a while to put my thoughts to paper, as this book gave me the biggest whiplash I’ve experienced in a long time. For the first half or so, it was on a five-star-course. I absolutely loved the ideas this book engaged with, and was hook

Genre: Cozy horror/fantasy Published: Titan Books, November 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars "'It was a small kindness you did' they said. 'But you and I are both small creatures, are we not?' So the kindness feels larger.'" In the afterword, T. Kingfisher herself describes Snake-eater as “The platonic ideal of a Kingfisher horror novel”, and honestly, I have nothing to add... Neither to that description of the essence of this book, nor to the formula of cozy-horror that is synonym

Genre: Cozy Fantasy Published: Tor UK, July 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars “People were cruel to you, and it didn’t make you bitter. What else would you call that?” “Naïve? Needy? Pathetic?” “Strong,” he insisted.”   For the longest time, I felt left out of the hype of cozy fantasy. I desperately wanted to like it, but somehow just couldn’t find one I truly loved. Last year, The Spellshop made my Most Surprising-list of the year, for changing that, and this year its sequel cemen

Genre: Fantasy Published: DAW, August 2025 Original publication : HarperCollins India, September 2023 My Rating: 3.75/5 stars “So we wander down the giant corridors in search of what we didn’t know we were missing. We seek to become whole”. I’m starting this review off bold by comping this “ Piranesi meets The Spear Cuts Through Water ”. You're going to have to hear me out on that one, though, because it's not as straigh-forward of a comparison as that may seem. Ambitious, o

Genre: Literary Fiction, Disability/Illness Published: October 2025 My Rating: 2/5 stars ‘I was fearful of disturbing it, like the disorder was some animal that would go berserk if it realised it was confined in the cage of my body.’ One day at work, a young newspaper reporter is suddenly struck with a mysterious pain in her hands that renders her unable to type. A string of doctors offer her a string of diagnoses, ranging from carpal tunnel, to arthritis, to her body’s way o

Genre: Horror Published: Zando Press, September 2025 My Rating: 4.5 stars "Leave the dead. Look after the living." The Story: A woman wakes up inside a wooden coffin six feet underground, with no memory of her identity or supposed “death”. She desperately claws her way to freedom, emerging on the frozen ground of Inishbannock - an island just off the coast of Ireland. Not everyone in the small isolated island-community welcomes Mara’s return though... With the help of a han

Genre: Historical fantasy, Western Published: Quirk Books, November 2025 My Rating: 4.5/5 stars “Romantic love was a clear-cut institution, bolstered by orthodoxy and ritual. When a man lost his wife, it was expected that his world would unravel. But friendship… friendship was a wilderness with no guide. There were no courting rituals one might follow to pursue it, and little sympathy for the gut-wrenching horror of its loss.” Who would have thought that I could enjoy a weste

Gerne: Dark Academia, Mystery, Fantasy Published: St. Martin's Press, October 2025 My Rating: 3/5 stars "The philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as the hesitation between the supernatural and a mundane explanation of an occurrence. In a work of fiction, when a woman in the woods sees a monster and turns out to be crazy, then that is realism. If it turns out that there really is a monster in those woods, then that is horror. But if one can make an argu

A reading-blog in which I attempt to beat my readingslump by reading recently released horror-novella's until I find a 5-star...

Genre: Contemporary Fiction with Speculative element Published: ECW-Press, October 2025 My Rating: 4/5 stars “If I were to tell someone...

Genre: Literary Fiction, Magical Realism Published: Grove Press, August 2025 My Rating: 5/5 stars ‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘goodbye isn’t...

Genre: Fantasy Published: Del Rey, January 2025 My Rating: 4/5 stars "Life is about finding joy in the space between where you came from...

Genre: Middle-grade fantasy Published: Quirk Books, January 2025 My Rating: 3/5 stars The Story: Nick and her mother Theo are traveling...