’Pemi Aguda, One Leg on Earth (Norton 5/26) Dark fantasy novel set in Lagos, a place of opportunity, but urban develop­ment has a price. Yosoye, 23 and eager to start her new job at an architectural firm in the shiny city, starts to notice things aren’t quite right. She gets pregnant and real­izes many pregnant women are drowning themselves, walking into water or throwing themselves off bridges. “One Leg on Earth lives up to its title. It is a bridge between the untameable present and an unknowable future.” [Niall Harrison]

 

 

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Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me (Tor 3/26) Fantasy novel, the first book in the Maggie the Undying series, about a woman who finds herself in a city she recognizes from the unfinished dark epic fantasy series she’s obsessed with; she figures out that she can get killed (in some horrible ways) but always comes back, and can’t resist trying to change things, with some unexpected results.

 

 

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Caroline Bicks, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth US 4/26) Bicks used her unprecedented access to King’s pri­vate archives and interviews with the man himself to explore what makes his writing work so well. Focusing on early drafts and handwritten revisions of five early books (The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, ’Salem’s Lot, and Night Shift), Bicks’s book was described, by King himself, as “the best book about my process that I have ever read.”

 

 

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Albertine Clarke, The Body Builders (Bloomsbury USA 3/26) An aspiring writer decides she and a man she con­nects with share one mind in two bodies; then she finds herself in an otherworldly artificial environment, where her every wish is made real. “The largest part of my enjoyment of The Body Builders came from the simple pleasure of encountering the first outing of a fresh and skillful voice, one that has an understanding of SF as both tool and project, and as a route to estrang­ing the society we have allowed to happen around us.” [Niall Harrison]

 

 

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Bar Fridman-Tell, Honeysuckle (Blooms­bury USA 3/26) Dark fantasy novel based on the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd. Human boy Royr is lonely, so his big sister makes him a playmate, Daye, out of twigs and flowers. Unfortunately, she has to be rewoven every season or she’ll fall apart; Rory starts to research ways to keep her blooming, but as he gets older his feelings change. A first novel.

 

 

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Sarah Gailey, Make Me Better (Tor 5/26) Horror novel full of psychological dread, with something of a folk-horror feel. Celia goes to the Salt Festival on a mysterious island surrounded by an impossible reef, where the secluded community promises healing and transformation. “Make Me Better is unsettling, mysterious, with all the bad parts of cults, and creepy in a ‘let’s get outta here and get away from these weirdos and all those bloody shoes’ sort of way.” [Gabino Iglesias]

 

 

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Fonda Lee, The Last Contract of Isako (Orbit US 5/26) From the author of Jade City, an SF novel about a legendary swordswoman on the merciless planet Aquilo as she takes a final mission in­volving her last (and worst) apprentice. It blends the discipline of martial arts with the sweeping scale of a corporate space opera.

 

 

 

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Hache Pueyo, Cabaret in Flames (Tordotcom) Dark fantasy novella set amidst Brazil’s political chaos. Ariadne, despite having lost her limbs to guls – vampire-like beings who eat meat – still as­sists guls at a clinic, and then gets help from a gul investigating how her mentor died. It was translated, expanded, and revised by the author from a 2020 story published in Brazilian Portuguese in Mafagafo magazine. “It’s a complex, layered portrayal worthy of a much longer work.” [Ian Mond]

 

 

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Ali Smith, Glyph (Hamish Hamilton UK 1/26; Pantheon 5/26) Fantasy novel, a com­panion to Gliff, about unreliable memory and the stories we tell. Sisters Petra and Patch, now grown and estranged, reunite after Patch finds a phantom horse destroy­ing her bedroom. “Glyph doesn’t contain an ugly sentence or a boring page – and has a reassuringly crisp moral urgency.” [Niall Harrison]

 

 

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Martha Wells, Platform Decay (Tor 5/26) Short SF novel (around 54,000 words) and the eighth book in the Murderbot Diaries series. Everyone’s favorite SecUnit Murderbot volunteers to run a rescue mission, despite it involving strangers, even human children, and possibly…eye contact. Balancing high-stakes adventure with snarky inner monologues.

#noinsta

 

 

 

 

 

Ahmad, The Age of Calami­ties (Holt 1/26) Original debut col­lection of nine stories (two reprints) with surreal, fantastic, and historical elements: Anne Boleyn keeps coming back to life whatever Henry does, a choose-your-own-apocalypse story set at the Manhattan Project, and a dinner party mystery with Nefertiti to Marilyn Monroe, among others. “Dazzlingly inventive…. These stories make it clear how ancient history and myths still linger in contemporary life….” [Kelly Link]

 

 

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Samantha Mills, Rabbit Test and Oth­er Stories (Tachyon 4/26) The author’s first collection with 13 stories, two new, originally published from 2018 to now; includes the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus Award-winning title story. Mills provides an afterword and notes on the inspirations for the stories. “In every story here, there is a twist on the familiar that is entirely unexpected.” [Abigail Nussbaum]

 

 

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Terry Dowling, Bedlam Rose and Wormwood (PS Publishing 3/26) Noted Australian author Dowling gets UK publication for his collection Wormwood (originally published by Aphelion in 1991, here with one added story previously collected elsewhere) of ten linked stories from a far-future Earth transformed in strange, mysterious ways by aliens; new novel Bedlam Rose returns to that setting for new adventures and discoveries. “The collection is a very good introduction to Dowling’s stylised, complicated, and also playful prose.” [Alexandra Pierce]

 

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Justin Feinstein, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored (Tachyon 4/26) Satirical near-future SF novel about a man train­ing a revolutionary advertising AI to write emotionally manipulative copy, told through “questionably obtained” company emails, chat transcripts, and more. “In an afterword to [the book], Feinstein notes that he was constantly revising the manuscript to stay ahead of the rapid acceleration of AI.” [Ian Mond] A first novel.

 

 

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Cecile Pin, Celestial Lights (Holt 3/26) “In the beautifully written and achingly realistic Celestial Lights, author Cecile Pin takes readers along on astronaut Oliver Ines’s deep space mission.” [Colleen Mondor] This novel follows a man born the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded who makes it his life’s ambition to become an astronaut, and ends up on a mission to Europa.

 

 

 

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Kim Samek, I Am the Ghost Here (Dial 2/26) A first collection, this offers 12 stories (six reprints) about women in strange yet familiar situations, often involving human connection through technology, in a mix of the weird, witty, and absurd. The collection con­tains elements of magical realism and examines trauma, illness, and grief.

 

 

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Jo Walton & Ada Palmer, Trace Ele­ments (Tor 3/26) Non-fiction collec­tion of 25 essays and five poems, sub­titled Conversations on the Projects of Science Fiction and Fantasy, in which Walton & Palmer share their scholarly and writerly thoughts on the genre, how it is written, how it works, how it has changed over the years, and how it is read. “It offers a lively and sometimes surprisingly personal appreciation of the field today by two of its most distinguished practitioners.” [Gary K. Wolfe]

 

 

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Michael Swanwick, The Universe Box (Tachyon 2/26) Collection of 19 stories, two new, in an eclectic variety of topics and styles. It blends magic and science to create new myths and legends. “For all his narrative ad­venturousness and sly wit, Swanwick can also be a master of evocative, graceful prose.” [Gary K. Wolfe]

 

 

 

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Sara Hashem, Where No Shadow Stays (Holiday House 3/26) Young-adult horror novel about an American-Egyptian homecoming queen who visits Egypt and comes back with a sinister presence following her, part of an old family debt. The story flows through different time periods and multiple points of view to reveal the terrifying truth of the generational curse.

 

 

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Andrew Ludington, Double Shadow (Minotaur 4/26) SF thriller novel, second in the Splinter Effect series about time-traveling archaeologist Rabbit Ward, who heads to first cen­tury Jerusalem to track down a deadly time-traveling thief. It contains romance, adventure, and a serial killer.

 

 

 

The post New & Notable, June 2026 appeared first on Locus.

 

 

Edward Ashton, After the Fall (St. Mar­tin’s 2/26) This humorous SF novel is set more than a century after Earth’s civiliza­tion collapses, some 100 years aliens took over. John is bonded to Martok Barden, one of the “good” alien grays, but things start to go wrong when John’s bond is put up as collateral for a messed up business deal. “Entertaining, smart, fast-paced, and funny, this is science fiction for people who like their alien stories with a side of chuckles but also profoundly human.” [Gabino Iglesias]

 

 

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Amal El-Mohtar, Seasons of Glass & Iron (Tordotcom 3/26) El-Mohtar’s new collec­tion offers 14 stories and four poems, all originally published between 2008 and 2023, including the title story, which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Inspirations range widely, from folklore and murder ballads to present day issue, united by a “stylistic thread that runs through all eighteen of these selections… a kind of intense lyricism, mediated by a degree of intellectual rigor.” [Gary K. Wolfe]

 

 

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Jeffrey Ford, Pandemonium Waltz (Lethe 2/26) Ford, an ever-surprising author with a distinctive knack for mixing the real world with the weird, is in fine form in his eighth collection, offering 17 stories, most from the last five years and one new, plus “a delightful and incisive interview with Kelly Link” [Gary K. Wolfe]

 

 

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Darkly Lem, Transmentation | Transgression (Blackstone 3/26) This follow-up to Transmentation | Transience picks up soon after, following people body-hopping between universes, all with their own agendas, not all of them clear. Notably, those of Burel Hird want to bring order to all worlds, but predictably face some opposition. This volume digs a bit deeper into the mechanics of body-hopping, but leaves much still to be investigated. “This series is doing bold and clever new things with many-worlds narratives and anyone with an interest in such ideas needs to be reading it.” [Alexandra Pierce] Lem is a writ­ers’ collective consisting of Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm.

 

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Richard K. Morgan, No Man’s Land (Del Rey 3/26) Morgan’s latest novel is a stand­alone hardboiled fantasy, set just after WWI was ended by a fae invasion (with accom­panying magical reforestation) in Britain. Ex-soldier Duncan Silver, scarred by the war and furious, is determined to recover the children the fae have stolen. “A reader expecting a retread of Altered Carbon or The Steel Remains may be disap­pointed in No Man’s Land; no outrageous technology, no great prophecies. I, however, loved it.” [Alexandra Pierce]

 

 

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Francis Spufford, Nonesuch (Faber & Faber UK 2/26; Scribner 3/26) Spufford returns to London and the Blitz for his latest literary fantasy novel, where an independent young woman must thwart time-traveling fascists trying to change history. “As much as I loved the spectacle – which at one point has Iris hundreds of feet in the sky as German bombers ham­mer London – it’s the authentic moments, grounded in history, that hit home.” [Ian Mond]

 

 

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A.D. Sui, The Iron Garden Sutra (Ere­whon 2/26) Sui’s first novel mixes philoso­phy and an involving SF mystery, as Vessel Iris, a death monk of the Starlit Order, sets out to do rites for the long-dead crew of a recently recovered spaceship, only to find something stalking the academic explorers in the vegetation-covered ship interior.

 

 

 

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Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife (Orbit US 3/2026) This far-future SF novel, fourth in the acclaimed Children of Time series, combines new ideas with series history and some familiar characters, from terraformers playing god who accidentally produce something terrible that destroys them; generations later, a research vessel rediscovers that lost world, but soon most of the crew disappears, leaving a single human, the uplifted mantis shrimp captain, and an AI to figure out what’s going on. “Tchaikovsky ends on that note of Roddenberry excitement and optimism that promises many new Children books to come.” [Paul Di Filippo]

 

 

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Sheree Renée Thomas, Mojorhythm (Third Man 11/25) Thomas introduces The Root and Sky series, a trio of collections that opens with this volume of 14 stories (eight new), a multi-genre mix focusing on Hoo­doo, fantasy, myths, and folklore. “Thomas wields literary tools to induce a heady sense of wonder… in the amalgamation of multiple ideas, styles, conventions, histories and forms into a vibrant, beautiful collage that connects past, present and future, and makes reality feel more magical, full of the potential for change.” [Wole Talabi]

 

 

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Makana Yamamoto, The Obake Code (Harper Voyager US 2/26) Yamamoto returns to the world of their popular first novel Hammajang Luck for this entertaining standalone heist novel. Set for life after the big heist, Malia has retired as the notorious hacker, the Obake – only she gets bored and crosses some gangsters, who demand she take down a crooked politician, which gets her embroiled in a conspiracy that might be too big for her.

 

 

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