The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (Picador, £16.99)
The narrator of this thrillingly ambitious literary chiller is London-based Anisa, who dreams of being a successful translator. But there’s no demand for novels translated from Urdu, so she spends her time subtitling Bollywood movies. Given the chance to attend the mysterious “Centre” for 10 days, she emerges from its immersive regime fluent in German. During a second stay to acquire Russian, she becomes close to its manager, Shiba, and seizes the opportunity to snoop, trying to figure out how the unusual learning process works. What she discovers is a shocker. This unusually accomplished debut is about much more than a surprise ending; the novel balances the light with the profound, combining humour and horror as it takes on issues of power and privilege, class, identity, assimilation and more.
Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs (Century, £16.99)
Since the death of her father, killed by contact with a magical book, Joanna has been guardian and effective prisoner of the family library, while her sister Esther has been warned never to spend more than a year in the same place. People want their spellbooks and will stop at nothing to possess them. The connection between books and magic runs deep in the human psyche, providing the basis for many classic tales. This debut novel is an absolute delight, weaving a convincing occult underground into real-world settings, with engaging characters and a compelling storyline sure to make it a lasting favourite with fantasy readers of all stripes.
Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff (Tinder, £20)
The sequel to 2019’s apocalyptic dystopia Last Ones Left Alive continues the story of Orpen. Originally an outsider, she’s been accepted as a banshee, one of the female warriors dedicated to protecting the surviving citizens of Dublin. The city is under constant siege by the hideous skrake: once human, now ravenous undead creatures hungry for flesh. The harsh yet satisfying life of the warrior, the joys found through physical strength and sisterhood, are beautifully conveyed in stripped-down prose. But the banshees are being used to support a male-dominated hierarchy, and any perceived disloyalty may find them condemned to death. As anger grows in their ranks, they consider their own power, and the possibility of a revolution that could offer a fairer society for all. A moving, deeply feminist take on the ever-popular zombie apocalypse.
Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Jo Fletcher, £18.99)
Montserrat is a film sound engineer in Mexico City in the late 1980s when her best friend, Tristan, a handsome, down-on-his-luck actor, introduces her to his new neighbour, former film director Abel Urueta. A horror movie fan, she’s keen to learn what happened to Abel’s final “lost film”, Beyond the Yellow Door. The story he tells sounds like the plot of an old Hammer horror: the film was written and funded by a German occultist who intended it as a spell to secure his own immortality. But he died before it was finished, and since then things have gone badly for the other people involved. Abel tells his new friends the curse will only be lifted if the film gets a soundtrack, which Montserrat has the skills to provide. It seems like fun at first, but things soon take a dangerous turn in this gripping and unusual tale of supernatural horror.
Red Smoking Mirror by Nick Hunt (Swift, £14.99)
This debut novel by the travel writer imagines an alternate history in which the first European crossing of the Atlantic was achieved not by Christopher Columbus, but by a fleet of Moorish trading ships from the caliphate of al-Andalus. Twenty years later, a successful trading partnership operates between the caliphate and Moctezuma’s Tenochtitlan, but as a terrible sickness spreads through the city, and amid rumours of a band of religious warriors headed across the sea, it is clear that the fragile peace between the two cultures cannot last. A beautifully written evocation of a world that never was.
• Lisa Tuttle’s latest novel is The Curious Affair of the Missing Mummies (Jo Fletcher).
