Though the literary vs. genre battle wages on in some parts of the world of books, smart readers know that you don’t have to choose. Why choose between the challenging prose and thematic depth of a literary novel and the pleasure of a fantastical story when you can have both? 2013 was a great year for literary sci-fi and fantasy—giving us Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam, Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni, and Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane—and 2014 is shaping up to be just as good, if not better.
Here, in no particular order, are just a few of the titles that are making 2014 an awesome year for tales of the fantastical that can (and should!) go toe-to-toe with the literary-est of the literary for best novels of the year:
1. Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road. Not to brag, but the book we chose for our first Stake Reading Club is one of the best reads of the year so far. This tale of two women—one African, one Indian, each on their own journey—is complex and challenging in all the right ways. Set in a near-future that looks a lot like our present, The Girl in the Road does what the best science fiction should do: by showing us another world, it forces us to reflect on our own. It’s Monica Byrne’s first novel—and she’s going to be a writer to watch in the years to come.
2. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. All three books in this trilogy were published in 2014—Annihilation and Authority released earlier in the year, and the third, Acceptance publishes today—so it’s possible to think of the series as a single novel extending over three volumes. However you think of it, it’s surely one of the most fascinating science fiction releases of the year. The premise is fairly simple: in some unspecified future (or alternate present?), a government agency known as the Southern Reach is tasked with exploring Area X, a part of the continent mysteriously abandoned by humans and reclaimed by nature. What follows, however, is anything but simple: a meditation on madness, power, manipulation, the implacable wildness of nature, the depths of the human psyche, and the ways that people respond to unknowability. It’s cerebral and creepy and the prose, at times, is so powerful and mysterious that it practically vibrates on the page.
3. Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land. “Harry Potter for grownups,” read the promotional copy for The Magicians—but over two more books, Lev Grossman’s genre-defying trilogy has become something more than that: a genuine fantasy epic bolstered by psychological realism and themes of disappointment and self-loathing more common in the work of John Updike than C.S. Lewis. Read it.
4. David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. David Mitchell. A globe-hopping narrative. Two groups with psychic powers. An ancient war between good and evil. Longlisted for the Booker Prize. Do I have to say anything more? This book releases today, and it’s going to be one that people talk about. You want to be one of them, right?
5. Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. Michel Faber is the author of Under the Skin, the sci-fi/horror/thriller that became a polarizing Scarlett Johansson movie earlier this year. He’s also responsible for The Crimson Petal and the White, a novel of Victorian England that read like Dickens filtered through a postmodern lens. Now, more than 10 years later, he’s coming back with this novel about a Christian minister who travels across the galaxy to the aliens of Oasis while his wife stays on Earth and faces what certainly seems like the Apocalypse. None other than David Mitchell called it “Michel Faber’s second masterpiece,” after Crimson Petal—and Kirkus raved too, asking “What would Jesus do if he wore a space helmet?” I don’t know, but I want to find out. The book comes out in October.
