Vampires, Selkies, Familiars, and More! April’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

April is showering us with two excellent SFF collections right at the start of the month, which both feel like poking around in the brains of their respective authors (Cixin Liu and Ann Leckie). If you’re more in the mood for a novel to get lost in—maybe even, weather permitting, at a café or the park—Leigh Bardugo and R.A. Salvatore are charting new territory in familiar worlds, while Thomas Olde Heuvelt finds a new way to chill us, V. Castro a new way to thrill us, and Elaine U. Cho rockets us into space. And let’s not forget the other exciting April titles featured in our 2024 preview, including John Wiswell’s monster romance debut.

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Cixin Liu, A View from the Stars
(Tor Books, April 2)

Despite his own assertion that “the nature of science fiction is to shine brightest in the present, then to be quickly forgotten,” Galaxy Award-winning author Cixin Liu has nonetheless amassed an impressive body of work that certainly seems to hold up after three decades. This new collection spans from 1987-2015 and features both engaging short stories from the Three-Body Problem author as well as incisive nonfiction commentary on the genre, especially from his position as a Chinese sci-fi author. Translations from a variety of authors and scholars including S. Qiouyi Lu and Emily Jin provide another layer of what feels like a fascinating, multi-timeline conversation about both the fictional and nonfictional facets of the genre.

Ann Leckie, Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction
(Orbit Books, April 2)

You would be forgiven for being most familiar with Ann Leckie as a novelist (especially for her Hugo Award-winning Ancillary Justice), but over the years she has built up an impressive library of short fiction. This new collection plays to that familiarity with her expansive SFF worlds, with explorations into the thousand gods of The Raven Tower as well as depictions of key historical events in the Imperial Radch universe. But there are also plenty of standalone stories that allow the author to play with various styles and ideas, from lobster dogs to epistolary SFF.

Leigh Bardugo, The Familiar
(Flatiron Books, April 9)

If you’re still grieving Netflix’s cancellation of the Shadow and Bone TV series, may you experience a small consolation in the form of a new Leigh Bardugo book. Set during the Spanish Inquisition, this historical (and romantic) fantasy centers on Luzia, a scullery maid whose knack for creating “little miracles” attracts the attention of her noble employers and earns her training from a reluctant immortal. The eponymous familiar, Guillén Santángel is surprised to discover his growing attraction to this human, as they develop her powers to go up against fake psychics and the like. But Luzia’s spells rely on “refranes,” or Hebrew-Spanish proverbs, which puts her in constant danger of being targeted by the Inquisition itself.

Rose Sutherland, A Sweet Sting of Salt
(Dell, April 9)

In this folkloric debut, Rose Sutherland recontextualizes the fairy tale “The Selkie Wife” within 1830s Nova Scotia, through the eyes of a midwife who happens upon a strange woman in labor. Jean Langille has resigned herself to being a spinster midwife at 24 (!) until the night she meets Muirin, the mysterious new wife of forbidding neighbor Tobias. But Jean quickly realizes something is off about their marriage, including this hidden pregnancy, and feels compelled to abandon her solitary life in order to offer friendship to Muirin. As her feelings grow, and her new friend reveals more about her strange origins, Jean must decide to what lengths she’ll go to protect Muirin from Tobias as well as the other townsfolk.

R.A. Salvatore, Pinquickle’s Folly
(Saga Press, April 16)

R.A. Salvatore presents a new trilogy set in his beloved DemonWars fantasy world, intended to be both an entry point for new readers as well as a way for longtime readers to explore uncharted corners of Corona. Which is to say, all aboard for this swashbuckling adventure, the first in the Buccaneers saga, following the adventures of the Crocodile, helmed by Captain Aketz and his crew of dwarven powrie pirates and human merchants. When the usurping Xoconai Empire seeks to control the waters, the Crocodile crew must assert their right to sail freely, even if that self-defense turns violent.

V. Castro, Immortal Pleasures
(Del Rey, April 16)

V. Castro’s latest Gothic horror sounds like a decadent vampire tale steeped in the bloody history of Mesoamerican conquest: Mallinalli is an immortal vampire, but several lifetimes ago she was La Malinche, a Nahua woman forced to translate for the conquistador Hernán Cortés yet branded a traitor. Yet despite surviving to the present day, her search for two ancient skulls in Dublin suspends her between past and future. There’s her unexpected romance with Collin, a mortal horror writer who sees the woman behind her infamous persona; and the dangerous bloodlust that ties her to the vampire who turned her long ago.

Elaine U. Cho, Ocean’s Godori
(Hillman Grad Books / Zando Books, April 23)

One of the first titles from Hillman Grad Books, actor/director Lena Waithe’s new imprint with Zando Books, is getting a lot of Firefly comparisons. But I’d say it sounds more akin to Space Sweepers, the delightful sleeper hit Netflix space opera from 2021: Focusing on the ragtag crew of the Ohneul, especially second-in-command Ocean Yoon. Descended from Earth’s haenyeo (Korean divers) yet disgraced for being too trigger-happy, Ocean is still figuring out her place in the universe and especially in Korea’s Alliance space agency. The opportunity for redemption comes when her best friend Teo (younger son of the Anand Tech empire) is targeted, but Ocean will have difficulty convincing her crew—including new medic Haven, who has an eerie relationship to death—to follow her into yet another firefight. Assuming the title is a riff on the Ocean’s Eleven heist movies, I’m willing to roll the dice on this quirky space adventure.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Oracle
(Tor Nightfire, April 30)

Dutch horror author Thomas Olde Heuvelt has a knack for crafting uncanny tales out of sinister settings: There’s the haunted town in Hex, the possessed mountain peak in Echo, and now the abandoned shipwreck that serves as a dark Oracle luring the curious into its impossible depths. When two high schoolers discover this wreck inexplicably stranded in the middle of a field, the first to go through the hatch never emerges again. But as the government descends upon the makings of a modern urban legend, occult specialist Robert Grim comes out of retirement to find the missing girl and figure out what dark dimension this ship is (metaphorically) sailing to.