Amal El-Mohtar

Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out a year ago and quickly became the game of the pandemic era, offering a candy-colored fantasy world where the occasional bug bite is the worst that can happen.

Nino Cipri's magical multiworld adventure is set in a Swedish big box furniture store — no, not that one — where the showroom floor is prone to interdimensional wormholes that swallow shoppers.

Erin Morgenstern's long-awaited followup to The Night Circus imagines a world of magical doors leading to a literal underground sea — surrounded by layers of pleasurable mystery and mythography.

A new anthology invites Palestinian writers to imagine their homeland in 2048 — 100 years after the creation of Israel. The stories are inventive, dextrous, painful, and even sometimes playful.

G. Willow Wilson's luminous new novel is set during the last days of Muslim Granada, and follows a royal concubine and her mapmaker friend as they flee the Inquisition for a place that may not exist.

Our critic likens reading Marlon James' new epic fantasy to being slowly eaten by a bear that occasionally cracks jokes — painful and strange, but upsettingly beautiful for all that.

Edward Carey's new novel is about the life of wax museum pioneer Madame Tussaud — but it's also about the French Revolution, about humans, bodies, art and loneliness, and it's deeply, painfully sad.

Kim Purcell's new novel is structured as a long, beautiful, despairing letter from a young woman to her missing boyfriend, written as she spurs her friends and neighbors into action to find him.

Nnedi Okorafor winds up her saga of a spacefaring Himba girl from Earth in Binti: The Night Masquerade — but she's warned readers not to expect a neat conclusion, and the book bears out her warning.

Emily Suvada's debut novel — a high-tech young adult dystopia — is bursting with ideas (and exploding viruses). And while it might seem like a conventional thriller, it's got a twist to reckon with.