It is nearly the end of January 2020 and I am still frantically catching up on my 2019 reading! Here is my (still growing) list of favorites, grouped by length in case you’re the award-nominating sort.

Novels:

Desdemona and the Deep by C.S.E. Cooney. Beautiful and strange, in the way I always want faerie stories to be beautiful and strange. I wish it had been longer.

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. A timey-wimey military scifi. The end comes together so satisfyingly I literally did a finger kiss.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. It’s on everyone’s list AND WITH REASON. Come for the skeleton memes, stay for the surprisingly emotional character arcs and well-fleshed cast (pun intended).

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow. A late nineteenth century portal fantasy, and story about stories, and story about family, and colonialism!

Novellas:

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather. It’s about an order of nuns in space and it holds SO much heart, just read it, all right??

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Another one that’s everywhere with good reason. Two agents on opposing sides of a time war…fall in loooorve.

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh. Very quiet and sweet. The Wild Man of Greenhollow has to reckon with his past when the land’s new owner arrives.

Novelettes:

“Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark” by Aimee Ogden. A scientist in a fantasy world intent on eradicating death goes to extreme lengths for her next discovery. In Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Short Stories:

“We Are Here to Be Held” by Eugenia Triantafyllou. All I have to say is: “The first time your mother swallows you whole you don’t really see it coming.” In Strange Horizons.

“Boiled Bones and Black Eggs” by Nghi Vo. In which the owner of an inn that serves the living and the dead is trying to get rid of a difficult customer. In Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

“Due By the End of the Week” by Brandon O’Brien. A super cute superhero story AND ALSO an entertaining unreliable narrator story. In Fireside Magazine.

“The Lie Misses You” by John Wiswell. A story about a family secret, told from the point-of-view of the Lie itself. YEAH I CRIED. In Cast of Wonders.

“The Horrible Deaths of Helga Hrafnsdóttir” by Christine Tyler. In a village where every girl chooses her own death from the blossoms of an Ævilok tree, Helga finds nothing but horrible options. In PodCastle.