Happy Friday, shipmates! It’s Alex, and I’ve got new releases and a couple of sci-fi thrillers for you to check out today. I hope everyone has had a good week — and hopefully one with slightly less weird and temperamental weather than we’ve had in Colorado. (April, amirite.) May you have a good weekend in store, one that is relaxing and full of books! Stay safe out there, space pirates, and I’ll see you on Tuesday!
Looking to elevate your reading life? Tailored Book Recommendations is here to help with handpicked recommendations. Tell the Bibliologists at Tailored Book Recommendations about what you love and what you don’t. You can get your recommendations via email or receive hardcovers or paperbacks in the mail. And with quarterly or annual plans available, TBR has something for every budget. Plans start at just $18! Subscribe today.
Let’s make the world a better place, together. Here are two places to start: Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, which provides medical and humanitarian relief to children in the Middle East regardless of nationality, religion, or political affiliation; and Ernesto’s Sanctuary, a cat sanctuary and animal rescue in Syria that is near and dear to my heart.
Bookish Goods
Shelf-sitting Ghost With Tea Cup by CreateFantasyCrafts
This little ghost figure caught my fancy because of the video game Dredge, I’ll be honest. But this ghost wants just a nice cuppa, rather than a raw fish in exchange for cursed knowledge. Probably a better deal when you come down to it. $8
New Releases
Immortal Pleasures by V. Castro
Centuries ago, Malinalli was known as La Malinche, a Nahua woman cursed as a traitor because she worked as a translator for Cortés. With the death of her people’s empire, she was reborn an immortal vampire and made herself into their avenger, with a mission to retrieve their stolen artifacts. Her mission cannot replace her human desires for pleasure and love, though she may finally have found a way to satisfy those in the form of two very different men.
The Three Lives of St. Ciarán by Inés Gregori Labarta
Is Saint Ciarán an un-alive girl brought to Spain and made into the savior of Madrid? What about a nun who is behind a bombing in Neo-Dublin in an attempt to start a people anew? Perhaps a boy drowning in the Loughmichnois and trusted with the secrets of civilization? Or perhaps all these lives are true.
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
I’m super excited to finally be starting Micaiah Johnson’s new book, so today I am recommending that — and another sci-fi thriller for good measure!
Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson
Scales is a skilled mechanic and fighter, an enforcer for the Emperor of Ashtown, and the only person he trusts. The tenuous peace she has sweated to keep is wholly destroyed when a woman is horribly murdered in front of her…except there seems to be no murderer. Any hope it was a strange accident of fate is quickly ended when more bodies begin to show up, both in Ashtown and in the wealthy, walled-off Wiley City. Scales is tasked with finding and ending the threat by any means necessary, though she will have help from Ashtown and the city both — but the answers they find and the secrets they dredge up will be more anyone can handle.
Recursion by Blake Crouch
What first appears to be a disease — a disturbing epidemic sweeping across the world and leaving madness and memory loss in its wake — is something far worse: the fabric of time itself has torn. A New York City cop and a neuroscientist team up to try to stop the event that will break reality before the world disintegrates into chaotic loops.
See you, space pirates. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.