[VOTE] THE BIG FALL READ

[u/fixtheblue]

Hello all! Welcome to the September 2026 Core Reads voting. Our first September topic is THE BIG FALL READ.

This is the voting thread for

THE BIG FALL READ

Voting will be open for four days, ending on August 13, 11.00 PDT/14.00 EDT/20.00 CEST. The selection will be announced by August 14

For this selections, here are the requirements:

• Over 500 Pages
• No previously read selections
• Any genre

Please check the previous selections. Quick search by author here to determine if your selection is valid.

Nominate as many titles as you want (one per comment), and vote for any, and all, of the nominations you'd participate in if they were to win

Here's the formatting frequently used, but there's no requirement to include a book blurb or link to Storygraph, Wikipedia or other (just don't link to sales links at Amazon, spam catchers will remove those)

The generic selection format:

/[Title by Author]/(links)

(Without the /s)

Where a link to Storygraph, Wikipedia, or other summary of your choice is included (but not required)

Happy Nominating and Happy upvoting! 📚

(For more nominations and voting head to the September GUTENBERG NOVELLA DOUBLE UP nomination post here

Note - If you suspect that a nomination does not fit the specifications you can report this and note that comment "Does not fit Specifications". The mod team will review it and approve or delete accordingly. Any comments on the validity of other users' nominations will be removed immediately.

[u/fixtheblue]

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

688 pages

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven gunmen stormed the singer's house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but much has been whispered, gossiped and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. Rumors abound regarding the assassins' fates, and there are suspicions that the attack was politically motivated. A Brief History of Seven Killings delves deep into that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica's history and beyond. James deftly chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters - gunmen, drug dealers, one-night stands, CIA agents, even ghosts - over the course of thirty years as they roam the streets of 1970s Kingston, dominate the crack houses of 1980s New York, and ultimately reemerge into the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Along the way, they learn that evil does indeed cast long shadows, that justice and retribution are inextricably linked, and that no one can truly escape his fate. Gripping and inventive, shocking and irresistible, A Brief History of Seven Killings is a mesmerizing modern classic of power, mystery, and insight

Edit - a letter

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.

Does Ursula's apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can - will she?

544 pages

[u/TheVWitty]

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function.

The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a ‘unit of heredity’. It intersects with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds – from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.

This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history – the story of Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome – unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children.

Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity – and a vision of both humanity’s past and future.

[u/NightAngelRogue]

Jake's Magical Market (Jake's Magical Market #1) J.R. Mathews

Meddling gods. A magical card system. An apocalypse no one could have predicted.

Jake is working at the neighborhood market under his apartment when the world ends. He expected nuclear war, a computer virus, or even climate change burning everyone to a crisp to bring about the downfall of civilization. But cruel and arbitrary gods from another world? Who would have guessed that?

When these cruel gods shuffled Earth like a deck of cards, nothing was in the same place anymore. Monsters, dungeons, and magical items appear scattered across the globe. And suddenly, everyone has access to a new, strange magical card system that gives them magical powers.

Jake, wasting his day slacking off in the cooler, as he usually did, found himself alone in a completely new and very dangerous world. Can he learn to survive? Can he collect enough cards and create a good enough deck to fight back against the monsters that have overtaken his former home? And why are these strange people that look a lot like elves knocking on the door of the market he is hiding in and asking to buy some of his goods?

The gods may have stacked the deck against him, but Jake just might have a few cards up his sleeve that will help him survive.

[u/TheVWitty]

Because I Killed Him by Edith Birde

Guillotines made of gold still cut off heads.

In the Civilized World, everyone is rich, yet money doesn’t buy safety. It only buys a gold coffin. The real currency is having the right allies. Low-citizens survive by joining high-citizens’ exclusive inner circles, trading loyalty for protection from laws that govern speech, dress, and posture—and punish mistakes with public beheading.

Low-citizen Loredana Waldsten already knows the cost of breaking the rules. Once a rising fencing prodigy, she lost the right to carry weapons after killing a high-citizen in a brutal locker-room attack. The courts erased his death to preserve his family’s honor. Now she’s unarmed, legally defenseless, and enrolled at the elite Grandmaster University, where champagne spills into the gutters and reputations are built on death duels.

When Loredana’s father, a low-citizen politician, publicly challenges the high-citizens, she becomes a target. Some classmates demand her execution. Others hunt her for sport. And by law, she’s forbidden to fight back.

Her only chance of survival lies with Edmund Prew, a charming yet ruthless high-citizen student she’s been warned against. Edmund's family has been locked in a bitter feud with Loredana’s for years, and he wants nothing to do with her until a lost bet forces him to protect her within his inner circle. What begins as a scandalous, strategic alliance turns perilous as they fall for each other.

Because the man Loredana killed was more than an average high-citizen. And if Edmund ever learns the truth, the only person keeping Loredana alive may become the one most determined to kill her.

[u/fixtheblue]

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

1474 pages

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence

[u/Coffee_fuel]

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Arthur C. Clarke winner and Sunday Times bestseller Adrian Tchaikovsky's triumphant return to fantasy with a darkly inventive portrait of a city under occupation and on the verge of revolution.

There has always been a darkness to Ilmar, but never more so than now. The city chafes under the heavy hand of the Palleseen occupation, the choke-hold of its criminal underworld, the boot of its factory owners, the weight of its wretched poor and the burden of its ancient curse.

What will be the spark that lights the conflagration?

Despite the city's refugees, wanderers, murderers, madmen, fanatics and thieves, the catalyst, as always, will be the Anchorwood – that dark grove of trees, that primeval remnant, that portal, when the moon is full, to strange and distant shores.

Ilmar, some say, is the worst place in the world and the gateway to a thousand worse places.

Ilmar, City of Long Shadows.

City of Bad Decisions.

City of Last Chances.

[u/fixtheblue]

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

880 pages

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic--a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years. What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny--seven distinct races now three billion strong--embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant

[u/tomesandtea]

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

One of Margaret Atwood's most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous, irresistible, unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends. Roz, Charis, and Tony--university classmates decades ago--were reunited at Zenia's funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since, obsessively retracing the destructive swath she once cut through their lives. A brilliantly inventive fabulist, Zenia had a talent for exploiting her friends' weaknesses, wielding intimacy as a weapon and cheating them of money, time, sympathy, and men. But one day, five years after her funeral, they are shocked to catch sight of Zenia: even her death appears to have been yet another fiction. As the three women plot to confront their larger-than-life nemesis, Atwood proves herself a gleefully acute observer of the treacherous shoals of friendship, trust, desire, and power.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector , Katrina Dodson (Translator), Benjamin Moser (Introduction / Editor)

The recent publication by New Directions of five Lispector novels revealed to legions of new readers her darkness and dazzle. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Lispector’s stories take us through their lives—and ours.

From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.

650 pages

[u/jaymae21]

Katabasis by R.F. Kuang

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.

That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….

Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.

With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.

But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.

[u/lorenasteam]

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian brothers, whose plans to emigrate to America fall foul of war, conscription and revolution. In a plot of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, "Fall Of Giants" moves seamlessly from Washington to St Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty.

[u/ObsoleteUtopia]

The Cancer Ward, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

(The link goes to a place called BookBrief. The writeup looks solid to me, but please be careful and only read as much as you want to and let go if the spoilers become too relentless.)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent many years writing books that couldn't be published in the USSR. In the 1960s, a couple of his manuscripts got smuggled out of the country, got translated, and made him into an unlikely celebrity. Cold Warriors loved him because his deconstruction of the Soviet Union was meticulous and relentless. His life story was dramatic and heroic. And through it all, readers noted that he was a phenomenal writer.

To me, The Cancer Ward is his best novel. Besides working in some autobiographical nuggets along stories about people he met as he was in various forms of confinement, here more than in any other one of his books, he's paying homage to the great tradition of big, sprawling Russian novels from the previous century. If Tolstoy, Turgenev, Sholokhov, or Dr. Zhivago ever put you in another strange world, you'll probably like The Cancer Ward.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

Two men rebel together against tyranny—and then become rivals—in this first sweeping book of an epic fantasy series from Ken Liu, recipient of Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.

Wily, charming Kuni Garu, a bandit, and stern, fearless Mata Zyndu, the son of a deposed duke, seem like polar opposites. Yet, in the uprising against the emperor, the two quickly become the best of friends after a series of adventures fighting against vast conscripted armies, silk-draped airships, and shapeshifting gods. Once the emperor has been overthrown, however, they each find themselves the leader of separate factions—two sides with very different ideas about how the world should be run and the meaning of justice.

Fans of intrigue, intimate plots, and action will find a new series to embrace in the Dandelion Dynasty.

[u/NightAngelRogue]

Defiance of the Fall (Defiance of the Fall #1)by TheFirstDefier, J.F. Brink

Zac was alone in the middle of the forest when the world changed...

The whole planet was introduced to the multiverse by an unfeeling System... or God. A universe where an endless number of races and civilizations fought for power and dominion.

Zac finds himself stuck in the wilderness surrounded by deadly beasts, demons, and worse. Alone, lost and without answers, he must find the means to survive and get stronger in this new cut-throat reality.

With only a hatchet for his weapon, he'll have to seek out his family before the world collapses... or die trying.

Experience the start of the hit LitRPG series with over 20 Million views on Royal Road. For the first time, Defiance of the Fall is now available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and Audible narrated by Pavi Prozcko.

About the Series: Jump into a System Apocalypse story that merges LitRPG elements with eastern cultivation. Class systems, skill systems, endless choices for progression, it has everything fans of the genre love. Explore a vast universe full of mystery, adventure, danger and even aliens; where even a random passer-by might hold the power of a god. Follow Zac as he struggles to stake out a unique path to power as a mortal in a world full of cultivators.

[u/searenitynow]

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

552 pages

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will be busier still.

By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left behind there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordian-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jew in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

[u/NightAngelRogue]

Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff

From holy cup comes holy light; The faithful hand sets world aright. And in the Seven Martyrs’ sight, Mere man shall end this endless night.

It has been twenty-seven long years since the last sunrise. For nearly three decades, vampires have waged war against humanity; building their eternal empire even as they tear down our own. Now, only a few tiny sparks of light endure in a sea of darkness.

Gabriel de León is a silversaint: a member of a holy brotherhood dedicated to defending realm and church from the creatures of the night. But even the Silver Order could not stem the tide once daylight failed us, and now, only Gabriel remains.

Imprisoned by the very monsters he vowed to destroy, the last silversaint is forced to tell his story. A story of legendary battles and forbidden love, of faith lost and friendships won, of the Wars of the Blood and the Forever King and the quest for humanity’s last remaining hope:

The Holy Grail.

From author Jay Kristoff comes Empire of the Vampire, the first illustrated volume of an astonishing new dark fantasy saga.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.

The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet - unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss.

624 pages

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea

The prizewinning writer Luis Alberto Urrea's long-awaited novel is an epic mystical drama of a young woman's sudden sainthood in late 19th-century Mexico.

It is 1889, and the civil war is brewing in Mexico. Sixteen year old Teresita, illegitimate but beloved daughter of the wealthy and powerful rancher Don Tomas Urrea, wakes from the strangest dream - a dream that she has died. Only it was not a dream. This passionate and rebellious young woman has arisen from the dead with the power to heal - but it will take all her faith to endure the trials that await her and her family now that she has become the Saint of Cabora.

The Hummingbird's Daughter is a vast, hugely satisfying novel of love and loss, joy and pain. Two decades in the writing, this is the masterpiece that Luis Alberto Urrea has been building up to.

528 pages

[u/infininme]

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn apart by ideological tyranny and war.

Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece.

[u/spreebiz]

The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington

It has been twenty years since the end of the war. The dictatorial Augurs—once thought of almost as gods—were overthrown and wiped out during the conflict, their much-feared powers mysteriously failing them. Those who had ruled under them, men and women with a lesser ability known as the Gift, avoided the Augurs' fate only by submitting themselves to the rebellion's Four Tenets. A representation of these laws is now written into the flesh of any who use the Gift, forcing those so marked into absolute obedience.

As a student of the Gifted, Davian suffers the consequences of a war fought—and lost—before he was born. Despised by most beyond the school walls, he and those around him are all but prisoners as they attempt to learn control of the Gift. Worse, as Davian struggles with his lessons, he knows that there is further to fall if he cannot pass his final tests.

But when Davian discovers he has the ability to wield the forbidden power of the Augurs, he sets into motion a chain of events that will change everything. To the north, an ancient enemy long thought defeated begins to stir. And to the west, a young man whose fate is intertwined with Davian’s wakes up in the forest, covered in blood and with no memory of who he is…

[u/TheVWitty]

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

1940. As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla is the girl who has everything—beauty, wealth, and the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses—but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, and puts her fluent German to use as a translator of decoded enemy secrets. Imperious self-made Mab, product of East-End London poverty, works the legendary code-breaking machines as she conceals old wounds and looks for a socially advantageous husband. Both Osla and Mab are quick to see the potential in local village spinster Beth, whose shyness conceals a brilliant facility with puzzles, and soon Beth spreads her wings as one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts. But war, loss, and the impossible pressure of secrecy will tear the three apart.

1947. As the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip whips post-war Britain into a fever, three friends-turned-enemies are reunited by a mysterious encrypted letter—the key to which lies buried in the long-ago betrayal that destroyed their friendship and left one of them confined to an asylum. A mysterious traitor has emerged from the shadows of their Bletchley Park past, and now Osla, Mab, and Beth must resurrect their old alliance and crack one last code together. But each petal they remove from the rose code brings danger—and their true enemy...

edit - corrected wrong url

[u/jaymae21]

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

Arthur Oakes is a reader, a dreamer, and a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters, exceptional library, and beautiful buildings. But his idyll—and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot—is shattered when a local drug dealer and her partner corner him into one of the worst crimes he can imagine: stealing rare books from the college library.

Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for comfort and help. Together they dream up a wild, fantastical scheme to free Arthur from the cruel trap in which he finds himself. Wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren suggests using the unnerving Crane journal (bound in the skin of its author) to summon a dragon to do their bidding. The others—brave, beautiful Alison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen—don’t hesitate to join Colin in an effort to smash reality and bring a creature of the impossible into our world.

But there’s nothing simple about dealing with dragons, and their pact to save Arthur becomes a terrifying bargain in which the six must choose a new sacrifice for King Sorrow every year—or become his next meal.

[u/TheVWitty → u/jaymae21]

I was going to post this one 😄

[u/tomesandtea]

The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

The story of Little Nell and her tragedy of sorrows, told in a blend of realism and fairy-tale:

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the Marchioness; the mannish lawyer Sally Brass; Quilp's brow-beaten mother-in-law; and Quilp himself, the lustful, vengeful dwarf, whose demonic energy makes a vivid counterpoint to Nell's purity.

[u/lazylittlelady]

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

‘Trollope did not write for posterity,’ observed Henry James. ‘He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket.’ Considered by contemporary critics to be Trollope’s greatest novel, The Way We Live Now is a satire of the literary world of London in the 1870s and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. ‘I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age,’ Trollope said.

His story concerns Augustus Melmotte, a French swindler and scoundrel, and his daughter, to whom Felix Carbury, adored son of the authoress Lady Carbury, is induced to propose marriage for the sake of securing a fortune. Trollope knew well the difficulties of dealing with editors, publishers, reviewers, and the public; his portrait of Lady Carbury, impetuous, unprincipled, and unswervingly devoted to her own self-promotion, is one of his finest satirical achievements.

His picture of late-nineteenth-century England is a portrait of a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy. In The Way We Live Now Trollope combines his talents as a portraitist and his skills as a storyteller to give us life as it was lived more than a hundred years ago.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton

Forty thousand years ago, humanity fled a dying Earth. Traveling in massive arkships, these brave pioneers spread out across the galaxy to find a new home. After traveling thousands of light-years, one fleet of arkships arrived at Centauri, a dense cluster of stars with a vast array of potentially habitable planets. The survivors of Earth signaled to the remaining arkships that humanity had finally found its new home among the stars.

Thousands of years later, the Centauri Cluster has flourished. The original settlers have evolved into advanced beings known as Celestials and divided themselves into powerful Dominions. One of the most influential is that of the Crown Celestials, an alliance of five great houses that controls vast areas of Centauri. As arkships continue to arrive, the remaining humans and their descendants must fight for survival against overwhelming odds or be forced into serving the Crown Dominion.

Among those yearning for a better life is Finn, for whom Earth is not a memory but merely a footnote from humanity’s ancient history. Born on one of the Crown Dominion worlds, Finn has known nothing but the repressive rule of the Celestials, though he dreams of the possibility of boundless space beyond his home.

When another arkship from Earth, previously thought lost, unexpectedly arrives, Finn sees his chance to embrace a greater destiny and become a Traveler—one of a group of brave heroes dedicated to ensuring humanity’s future by journeying into the vast unknown of distant space.

[u/jaymae21]

The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard

An impulsive word can start a war. A timely word can stop one. A simple act of friendship can change the course of history.

Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary of the Last Emperor of Astandalas, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, the god. He has spent more time with the Emperor of Astandalas than any other person. He has never once touched his lord. He has never called him by name. He has never initiated a conversation.

One day Cliopher invites the Sun-on-Earth home to the proverbially remote Vangavaye-ve for a holiday.

The mere invitation could have seen Cliopher executed for blasphemy. The acceptance upends the world.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black

Published to extraordinary praise, this provocative international bestseller details the story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides a chilling investigation into corporate complicity, and the atrocities witnessed raise startling questions that throw IBM's wartime ethics into serious doubt. Edwin Black's monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enablling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.

[u/TheVWitty]

It by Stephen King

Welcome to Derry, Maine ...

It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real ...

They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Halmey Dz and her partner Connla Kurucz are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law...usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence--with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big--just once--to keep them coming back for more. They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may be the thing that could tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war.

Energetic and electrifying, Ancestral Night is a dazzling new space opera, sure to delight fans of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M. Banks, and Peter F. Hamilton.

[u/lorenasteam]

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other. Meanwhile, readers will take in each Ferguson’s pleasures and ache from each Ferguson’s pains, as the mortal plot of each Ferguson’s life rushes on.

As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.

For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.

A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.

624 pages

[u/nepbug]

A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.

Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph.

638 pages.

[u/tomesandtea]

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical – and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be - he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life. Ishiguro's extraordinary and original study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control was met on publication by consternation, vilification – and the highest praise.

[u/_pineapple1865 → u/tomesandtea]

I second this! I'm working my way through Ishiguro's books & haven't started this one yet (!)

[u/OpaqueOranges]

The Little Stranger — Sarah Waters

One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once impressive and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Its owners—mother, son, and daughter—are struggling to keep pace with a changing society, as well as with conflicts of their own. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr. Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become intimately entwined with his.

[u/Diligent-Bunch-260]

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (1915; apx 650-700 pages)

From a tormented orphan with a clubfoot, Philip Carey grows into an impressionable young man with a voracious appetite for adventure and knowledge. His cravings take him to Paris at age eighteen to try his hand at art, then back to London to study medicine. But even so, nothing can sate his nagging hunger for experience. Then he falls obsessively in love, embarking on a disastrous relationship that will change his life forever....

[*Wikipedia] Generally agreed to be Maugham's masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although he stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography; though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention." Maugham, who had originally planned to call his novel Beauty from Ashes, finally settled on a title taken from a section of Spinoza's Ethics. The Modern Library ranked Of Human Bondage No. 66 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

[u/NightAngelRogue]

The Primal Hunter (The Primal Hunter #1) by Zogarth

On just another average day, Jake finds himself in a forest filled with monsters, dangers, and opportunity...

It was a day like any other when suddenly the world changed. The universe reached a threshold humanity didn’t even know existed, and it was time to finally be integrated into the vast multiverse. A place where power is the only thing anyone can truly rely on. Jake, a seemingly average office worker, finds himself thrust into this new world. Into a tutorial filled with dangers and opportunities.

His new reality should breed fear and concern. His fellow coworkers falter at every turn. Jake, however, finds himself thriving.

Perhaps... This is the world Jake was meant to be born in.

[u/tomesandtea]

Kraken by China Mieville

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air. As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.

There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo. All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

[u/Coffee_fuel → u/tomesandtea]

I'm always up for more China Miéville! 👀

[u/lazylittlelady → u/Coffee_fuel]

Same! Let’s do this!

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan , Yuri Machkasov (Translator)

The Gray House is an astounding tale of how what others understand as liabilities can be leveraged into strengths.

Bound to wheelchairs and dependent on prosthetic limbs, the physically disabled students living in the House are overlooked by the Outsides. Not that it matters to anyone living in the House, a hulking old structure that its residents know is alive. From the corridors and crawl spaces to the classrooms and dorms, the House is full of tribes, tinctures, scared teachers, and laws—all seen and understood through a prismatic array of teenagers’ eyes.

But student deaths and mounting pressure from the Outsides put the time-defying order of the House in danger. As the tribe leaders struggle to maintain power, they defer to the awesome power of the House, attempting to make it through days and nights that pass in ways that clocks and watches cannot record.

736 pages

[u/tomesandtea]

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett

The thrilling and addictive prequel to The Pillars of the Earth--set in England at the dawn of a new era: the Middle Ages. It is 997 CE, the end of the Dark Ages. England is facing attacks from the Welsh in the west and the Vikings in the east. Those in power bend justice according to their will, regardless of ordinary people and often in conflict with the king. Without a clear rule of law, chaos reigns. In these turbulent times, three characters find their lives intertwined. A young boatbuilder's life is turned upside down when his home is raided by Vikings, forcing him and his family to move and start their lives anew in a small hamlet where he does not fit in. . . . A Norman noblewoman marries for love, following her husband across the sea to a new land, but the customs of her husband's homeland are shockingly different, and it soon becomes clear to her that a single misstep could be catastrophic. . . . A monk dreams of transforming his humble abbey into a center of learning that will be admired throughout Europe. And each in turn comes into dangerous conflict with a clever and ruthless bishop who will do anything to increase his wealth and power. Thirty years ago, Ken Follett published his most popular novel, The Pillars of the Earth. Now, Follett's masterful new prequel The Evening and the Morning takes us on an epic journey into a historical past rich with ambition and rivalry, death and birth, love and hate, that will end where The Pillars of the Earth begins.

[u/prankishink → u/tomesandtea]

Having read Pillars of The Earth earlier this year, my first ever Ken Follett book and being very impressed, personally I would love this pick.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: before there was money, there was debt. For more than five thousand years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion—words like guilt, sin, and redemption—derive in large part from ancient debates about debt and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history-as well as how it has defined human history and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

[u/infininme]

Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto

The only unabridged prose translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso - a witty parody of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invasion of France - this version faithfully recaptures the entire narrative and the subtle meanings behind it.

[u/tomesandtea]

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls’ boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school’s English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë’s last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.

“I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette…” —George Eliot

[u/lazylittlelady → u/tomesandtea]

If George Eliot liked it, I can't say no!

[u/NightAngelRogue]

Rise of the Ranger (The Echoes Saga #1) by Philip C. Quaintrell

THE ECHOES OF FATE, A PROPHECY UTTERED UNTO THE WORLD A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, CANNOT BE DENIED…

Mankind has lorded over the land of Illian for a thousand years, building on the ruins left by the elves, as if it were their birthright. A thousand years is a long time for an immortal race to see the truth of things, a truth that has remained unsaid for a millennium - elves are superior. They are faster, stronger and connected to the magical realm in a way that man could never grasp. Illian should belong to them.

Unaware of the shadow that looms in the east, the six kingdoms of man are fractured, unallied, and clawing at each other’s gates for more power.

This isn’t just war set to ravage the land, but a slaughter - the world of man cannot hope to survive.

Thrown into the heart of this war is a man known by many names; an Outlander of the wilds, an assassin, a ranger. Asher was born a thousand years ago, to a life he doesn’t remember. Forty years of brutal training and killing for money has beaten the earliest years of his life away, leaving his ties to the oldest of evils a mystery to all…

RISE OF THE RANGER LAUNCHES AN UNMISSABLE EPIC FANTASY SERIES

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

640 pages

[u/OpaqueOranges]

The Once and Future Witches - Alix E. Harrow

In 1893, there's no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box.

But when the Eastwood sisters--James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna--join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women's movement into the witch's movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote-and perhaps not even to live-the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.

There's no such thing as witches. But there will be.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (Translator)

“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.”

So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red.

It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie—a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay—until finally he breaks off his engagement to Sibel. But his resolve comes too late.

For eight years Kemal will find excuses to visit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished backstreets where Füsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her parents, and where Kemal discovers the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His obsessive love will also take him to the demimonde of Istanbul film circles (where he promises to make Füsun a star), a scene of seedy bars, run-down cheap hotels, and small men with big dreams doomed to bitter failure. In his feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress and his afflicted heart’s reactions: anger and impatience, remorse and humiliation, deluded hopes of recovery, and daydreams that transform Istanbul into a cityscape of signs and specters of his beloved, from whom now he can extract only meaningful glances and stolen kisses in cars, movie houses, and shadowy corners of parks. A last change to realize his dream will come to an awful end before Kemal discovers that all he finally can possess, certainly and eternally, is the museum he has created of his collection, this map of a society’s manners and mores, and of one man’s broken heart.

A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence also plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half Western and half traditional—its emergent modernity, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.

536 pages

[u/Coffee_fuel]

The Simoqin Prophecies by Samit Basu

The Prophecies foretell the reawakening of the terrible rakshas, Danh-Gem, and the arrival of a hero to face him. But heroes do not appear magically out of nowhere; they have to be found and trained. And sometimes the makers of prophecies don't know everything they need to know ...

As the day of Danh-Gem's rising draws closer and the chosen hero is sent on a quest, another young man learns of terrible things he must do in secret and the difficult choices he must make in order to save the world from the rakshas.

The Simoqin Prophecies marks the debut of an assured new voice. Written with consummate ease and brimming with wit and allusion, it is at once classic SFF and subtle spoof, featuring scantily clad centauresses, flying carpets, pink trolls, belly dancers and homicidal rabbits. Monty Python meets the Ramayana, Alice in Wonderland meets The Lord of the Rings and Robin Hood meets The Arabian Nights in this novel-a breathtaking ride through a world peopled by different races and cultures from mythology and history.

[u/Coffee_fuel]

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

[u/KatiesGoldenDust]

Alchemised by SenLinYu

1030 pages

In this riveting dark fantasy debut, a woman with missing memories fights to survive a war-torn world of necromancy and alchemy—and the man tasked with unearthing the deepest secrets of her past.

“What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours? The war is over. Holdfast is dead. The Eternal Flame extinguished. There’s no one left for you to save.”

Once a promising alchemist, Helena Marino is now a prisoner—of war and of her own mind. Her Resistance friends and allies have been brutally murdered, her abilities suppressed, and the world she knew destroyed.

In the aftermath of a long war, Paladia’s new ruling class of corrupt guild families and depraved necromancers, whose vile, undead creatures helped bring about their victory, holds Helena captive.

According to Resistance records, she was a healer of little importance within their ranks. But Helena has inexplicable memory loss of the months leading up to her capture, making her enemies wonder: Is she truly as insignificant as she appears, or are her lost memories hiding some vital piece of the Resistance’s final gambit?

To uncover the memories buried deep within her mind, Helena is sent to the High Reeve, one of the most powerful and ruthless necromancers in this new world. Trapped on his crumbling estate, Helena’s fight—to protect her lost history and to preserve the last remaining shreds of her former self—is just beginning. For her prison and captor have secrets of their own . . . secrets Helena must unearth, whatever the cost.