Hello, my little hidden structures! In today’s round-up of recent sci-fi and fantasy links, I am excited to share a new story by Isabel Yap, info about the new Cassandra Clare audiobook, peeks at novels by Robert de la Chevotière and Veronica Roth, and more!
My SFF reads for this week are The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (just announced on the Booker Prize longlist) and The Fall of Elvenesse by Kai Ashante Wilson.
Read an Excerpt from The Twelfth House by Robert de la Chevotière!
The author of We Were Not Kings and Tall Is Her Body is releasing a historical speculative novel at the end of August!
The Twelfth House by Robert de la Chevotière is a historical novel with touches of magical realism set on an 18th-century slave ship sailing to the Caribbean island of Dominica. Aboard the ship, the angry spirit of an unborn child, an ogbanje, motivates her father to action.
The Twelfth House by Robert de la Chevotière is out August 25, 2026, from Erewhon Books, and Reactor shared an excerpt from the novel. Here’s a peek:
Dominica, 1794
What became clear to them was that another coffin would have to be made, and two burials happen the next day. As for me, I began to worry that perhaps the long night was better left in darkness, that it was better to let deaf men sleep, for their savagery was infinite. I wondered then if I had caused all of it, but in truth, it did not matter. It was the sort of fate that even I could not see nor have imagined. So, I did the only thing I could have—I sang. But they did not hear my song. To them, who had just witnessed a hanging, what they heard was an unfamiliar whistling through the trees, an unusual sound at a ghostly hour, the devil himself rising to meet them. Sleeping birds abruptly awoke and took flight in the night, their flapping wings crashing against the silence of a moonlit sky’s sombre hue, unlike the men who stood in fright, planted like the whitewood tree, from which their friend’s lifeless body hung.
I was not born yet when I watched my father walk the beach in Dahomey for the last time. I had willed him into the ire of hell, and no star, no matter how luminescent its dust, could protect him. He kept looking over his shoulder to where the sand met the trees, his hands bound in front of him, expecting that his father and brothers would appear, hoping it was just a dream and not his worst nightmare come true. No one appeared. A day earlier, he had sheltered in his father’s obi, that part of the compound where guests were entertained, as the seasonal dusty harmattan winds rolled through his village.
“A harmattan will not stop thieves,” his father had said. “Our neighbours are selling us to these white men. They betray us for the price of gunpowder and trinkets.”
He remembered his father’s face, forlorn with sunken eyes, as if the old man foresaw what was to come, asking him to heed the high bushes and stay clear of the savannah. His father’s voice came back to him, echoing loudly in his mind: Make no mistake, Bako, the enemy is already here minding this very same cloud of dust. He was momentarily lost in reflection, then coming back to himself, strained his eyes harder towards the trees. He wished for the shadows to take on life forms and step out from the thick bush and vegetation. He could not imagine how he had been captured, how just a few days before as he hunted birds, he foolishly followed the drumming of a woodpecker, only to realise it was a ruse. He had been led into the forest and pounced upon by men from another village.
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