Lucas Stoffel

The Book of Dust (La Belle Sauvage) is a prequel. Lyra is a baby, placed in the care of the nuns at Godstow Priory. Malcolm Polstead is eleven, the son of innkeepers, curious and brave and utterly ordinary in the way that Pullman's best characters are ordinary — which is to say, not at all. Malcolm's daemon Asta hasn't settled yet. He works at the inn, spies on the scholars who drink there, and becomes increasingly aware that the Magisterium's Consistorial Court of Discipline

Lazlo Strange is a librarian who dreams of a lost city whose name was stolen from the minds of everyone who ever knew it. He calls it Weep, because that's all anyone can say when they try to remember. And from that single image — a city-shaped hole in the world's memory — Laini Taylor builds something breathtaking. Book Review

I'm going to review Atlas Shrugged as a novel, not as a philosophy textbook, because that's what it is — a novel — and it deserves to be engaged with on those terms even if the philosophy has consumed every conversation about it for sixty years. Book Review.

If The Martian was Andy Weir proving he could make science entertaining, Artemis is Weir proving he could build a whole city and then blow parts of it up. It's not as tight as The Martian. The protagonist isn't as universally lovable as Mark Watney. But it's a blast, and the lunar city of Artemis is one of the most well-engineered pieces of science fiction worldbuilding in recent years. Book Review

Dave Eggers wrote a novel about a tech company that wants to make everything transparent, track everything, share everything, and eliminate all privacy — and the most disturbing thing about The Circle is that it was published in 2013 and reads like a documentary now. Book Review...

City of Girls is Elizabeth Gilbert's love letter to women who refuse to apologize for wanting pleasure. Set in 1940s New York City, it follows Vivian Morris, a wealthy young woman who gets kicked out of Vassar for failing her classes and is sent to live with her Aunt Peg, who runs a crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. What follows is a headlong plunge into the world of showgirls, nightclubs, and sexual freedom that Vivian never knew existed.

I read this book in Bali, riding a motorbike down the same roads Elizabeth Gilbert made famous, and the tropical world she writes about in this novel was literally surrounding me — the humidity, the density of green, the way plants take over everything if you let them. It was the perfect place to fall into this book, and I fell hard. Book Review

New York 2140 is Kim Stanley Robinson's vision of Manhattan after the oceans have risen fifty feet, and it's the rare climate fiction novel that understands the catastrophe won't end capitalism — it'll just create new markets.

2312 is Kim Stanley Robinson at his most expansive and his most strange. This is a novel set three hundred years from now, when humanity has colonized the entire solar system, and Robinson treats that premise not as spectacle but as habitat. He wants to know what it actually feels like to live inside a hollowed-out asteroid that's been terraformed into a rolling landscape. He wants to know what gender and embodiment look like when you can redesign your body at the cellular le

Of course I loved this book. It's about a rogue AI, and I love a rogue AI. LOL. Origin is Dan Brown doing what Dan Brown does best: taking a genuinely interesting intellectual question and building a page turning sprint around it. This time the question is the big one — where do we come from, and where are we going? — and the sprint takes Robert Langdon through the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Royal Palace of Madrid, and Gaudí's Sagrada Família in Barcelona.

Magical children, a grumpy bureaucrat finding love, and a six-year-old Antichrist named Lucy who collects buttons and just wants people to like him. That's The House in the Cerulean Sea, and I'm not even slightly embarrassed by how much I loved it. TJ Klune — who won the Alex Award for this novel — writes the kind of fantasy that feels less like escapism and more like therapy.

The Impossible Fortress is set in 1987, and it absolutely nails it. Jason Rekulak wrote a coming-of-age novel about a fourteen-year-old boy named Billy Marvin whose initial goal — stealing a copy of Playboy from the local convenience store — accidentally leads him into a friendship with the store owner's daughter, Mary, who is the best computer programmer he's ever met. What follows is a novel about first love, betrayal, and the Commodore 64 that is far better than it has any

If you've seen anyone screaming about Jacks the Prince of Hearts on BookTok or bookish Twitter, this is where the damage starts. Once Upon a Broken Heart is the first book in Stephanie Garber's series that leads to The Ballad of Never After and A Curse for True Love, and it's the doorway into one of the most addictive romantasy ships in recent memory. Evangeline Fox is desperate. The love of her life is about to marry someone else, and in her desperation she does the one t

Book two of the Once Upon a Broken Heart series, and the tension between Evangeline Fox and Jacks the Prince of Hearts just keeps building until you want to physically shake the book and scream at both of them. Evangeline is trying to break a curse — one of several that keep stacking up in this series like the worst kind of fairy-tale compound interest — while Jacks is doing that infuriating thing where an immortal Fate who has murdered people with a kiss tries very hard to p

Let me tell you something about Stephanie Garber: she understands that the best fairy tales are the ones where love might actually kill you. Not metaphorically. Not in a "love hurts" pop song kind of way. In a "the person you're falling for might literally be cursed to destroy you" kind of way. A Curse for True Love is the finale of the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy, and it delivers on that promise with theatrical flair. If you haven't read the first two books, stop here

R.F. Kuang is, at this point, operating on a level that should be illegal. After the Poppy War trilogy proved she could write epic military fantasy that would make your soul hurt, she pivoted to contemporary literary satire and somehow got even sharper. Yellowface is a book about the publishing industry written like a thriller, and it cuts so deep that everyone who reads it feels personally attacked. That's the point. Here's the setup, and it's brilliantly simple: June Haywar

Justinian Huang's debut spans 2,000 years of queer love and obsession across three timelines. Lush, explicit, and unforgettable. Justinian Huang's debut novel asks a question that sounds like it belongs on a late-night conversation with someone you're falling for: What if love isn't chance? What if your soul has been finding the same person across lifetimes, again and again, unable to stop, unable to look away? And what if that love keeps ending in tragedy?

M.L. Wang's self-published fantasy about a warrior-turned-mother is devastating, cinematic, and criminally underrated. Every once in a while, a book shows up with no hype, no big publisher backing, no marketing machine—and it just quietly destroys everyone who reads it. The Sword of Kaigen is that book. M.L. Wang originally self-published it, and it spread the old-fashioned way: one wrecked reader telling the next person "you need to read this, I can't explain why, just trust

Here is the pitch: aliens show up, flatten every building on Earth, and kill everyone who was outside. The survivors get dropped into a massive underground dungeon — a multi-floor death game broadcast live to the entire galaxy for entertainment. Carl, our guy, was outside in a bathrobe walking his ex-girlfriend's cat when the world ended. The cat, Princess Donut, gains the ability to talk. She immediately becomes the most famous celebrity in the known universe and demands to

Let me just say it: I was nervous about this one. Prequels to beloved series have a lousy track record, and even The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes had its skeptics. But Suzanne Collins walking back into the Hunger Games arena to give us Haymitch Abernathy's story? That's either going to be brilliant or it's going to break something sacred. It's brilliant. It might also break you, but that's a different problem. Sunrise on the Reaping is set during the fiftieth Hunger Game