M. Baker

Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.

As the newly risen and fiercely determined head of the Agency, Grim must unite the squabbling factions of Liwokin to save the city from the evolving Benefactor threat. But bad blood runs deep in the city, and Grim struggles with his own descent into madness. How can he save his home when he's not even certain he can save himself?

The Towers of Nine School of Magic Study and Practice is an institution rich with ancient traditions and secrets. Serafina Stewart has grown up on stories of this place, passed to her by her witch mother. Now Serafina is finally old enough to attend. But getting in is the easy part. And Mother's stories never included ghosts or deadly spiders.

It's the first and greatest rule Inkwell Featherfield ever learned. It's also the only way he knows how to survive—besides picking pockets, dodging the law, and using every ounce of his plucky charm. But none of this will be enough to save him now. If only he'd never snooped around a dead man's house. If only he'd never found that pocket watch full of strange magic. If only he'd known the old man had snuffed it at the hands of the ghostly Spektors, or that such dark spirits even existed, because now they're after him.

Charismatic and innovative, Oklas Sayve has risen to prominence in Apidecca, the moon's capital city. A politician and college director, he has the resources to effect the changes he envisions for the world. But the sovereigns he serves oppose him at every turn and his status cannot protect the low-strata students attending his college. After a young knyad is wrongly linked to insurgent activity, Oklas must find a way to smuggle her out of the city while hiding his involvement from the authorities.

Survival is never easy, but it’s never been harder for Grim, the last bounty hunter in Liwokin. He survived the Great Riot that killed Liwo by the thousands, endured the bloody chaos that ruled the city in its aftermath, and avoided the crushing fist of the Agency created to quell the unrest. The rule of law has returned, but following the rules doesn’t put food in your belly.

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

Leiyn “Firebrand” is no stranger to a fight. A brash ranger of the Titan Wilds, she takes up her bow to ward against the colossal spirit creatures known as titans, ever a threat to the colonies she has sworn to protect. But no amount of skill can guard against treachery. When tragedy strikes the rangers’ lodge, Leiyn vows to avenge the fallen. But if she is to succeed, she must embrace a power within her she has long denied. Power to move mountains and rivers. Power over life and death.

You never want to ruin a really good dramatic exit. When you flee home on a cyborg horse the exact second you turn eighteen, you don’t really expect to go back to the place you fled from, you know? But sometimes your old life hits you from behind. Sometimes you spend years away from home, killing dangerous people who had the bad luck to get infected by a lungful of ghostfog, only to find out that your dad, the king, is dead, and now your siblings are ordering you back home for a high stakes family reunion.

The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women. Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe. For Nassun, her mother's mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: That sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.