Where Will Your Next Book Take You?

The magic of reading is that you can travel the world from the comfort of your own home! Many fantasies are influenced by real places and time periods, with authors weaving these inspirations into their unique magic systems, world building, and character backstories to add depth and authenticity to their plots. 🗺️✨

From ancient kingdoms to Victorian streets, there’s an entire world waiting for you between the pages of a book. Perhaps you’re ready to explore a reimagined realm of somewhere familiar, or maybe you’re seeking to adventure somewhere completely new? Wherever you’re hoping to go, here are some recommendations to help you choose your next setting and destination! 📖

Graceless Heart by Isabel Ibañez begins in 15th century Volterra, where sculptress Ravenna Maffei enters a competition hosted by an immortal family offering an invaluable boon to the victor. Desperate to win so she can save her brother, Ravenna reveals her rare magical talent, resulting in her up being kidnapped by the family and taken to Florence, a city of breathtaking beauty and cutthroat ambition. There, she is forced into an impossible task where failure means certain death.

The Girl With a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean is set in a historical, ghost-infested Kowloon. Mercy Chan washes up on the shore there with no family, no money, and no memories. She rebuilds her life, becoming a ghost talker for the local triad, but the past she can’t remember isn’t done with her. A powerful ghost infests Kowloon’s waterways and drowns innocents, and it claims to know Mercy, drawing her into a deadly cat-and-mouse game.

The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden follows Anne of Brittany, the sovereign duchess to an occupied realm. France means to crown their conquest by marrying her to their king, but such an alliance would put her title, her lands, and her body forever in the hands of her enemies. Her only hope is another alliance sealed with marriage, and while pretending compliance with France, Anne plans a unicorn hunt in the ancient forest of Brocéliande; a bit of pointless pageantry, a diversion, so she can wed in secret.

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow follows Eastwood sisters James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna as they join the suffragists of New Salem. They peruse the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women’s movement into the witch’s movement. There’s no such thing as witches. But there used to be, and there will be.

Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco is set in 1888 London, where seventeen-year-old Audrey Rose Wadsworth is a lord’s daughter. But between the social teas and silk dress fittings, she leads a forbidden secret life, often slipping away to her uncle’s laboratory to study the gruesome practice of forensic medicine. Audrey’s work on a string of savagely killed women drags her into the investigation of the Whitechapel serial murderer.

The FairyLoot Mortal Editions of the Stalking Jack the Ripper series are available to purchase here.

The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood by H. G. Parry takes place in 1941. As the Second World War ravages the globe and bombs fall from the sky, people all over the world begin to dream of King Arthur. The dreams spread like a fantastical plague, flooding people’s sleep night after night, and self-proclaimed prophets claim they are heralding Arthur’s return. But Elaine Ambrose has never dreamed of Arthur. A librarian at the British Museum, she wants only to protect the museum’s collection from the Blitz, and is frustrated to be sent instead to catalogue a reclusive professor’s private library on the coast of North Wales. But all is not what it seems…

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty follows Amina, who after a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean’s most notorious pirates, retires peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural. But when she’s tracked down by the obscenely wealthy mother of a former crewman, she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse: the chance to have one last adventure with her crew to retrieve her comrade’s kidnapped daughter for a kingly sum.

The Diviners by Libba Bray begins with Evie being exiled from her boring old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of 1926 New York City. The only catch is that she has to live with her uncle Will and his unhealthy obsession with the occult. Evie worries her uncle will discover her darkest secret: a supernatural power that has only brought her trouble so far. But when the police find a murdered girl branded with a cryptic symbol, Evie realises her gift could help catch a serial killer.

Where will your next book take you? Let us know where you’ll be heading to next!📍