As usual, these are books that showed up on my doorstep, more or less unexpectedly, and they're all coming out in the near future from some of my nation's finer publishing firms. I have not read any of them, but here's what I can tell you anyway:
Sea Change
is a first novel, some kind of odd fantasy -- the main character, Lilly, befriends a talking kraken and makes a frightening deal with a witch when he's sold to a circus, which can give you a sense of what kind of odd -- by S.M. Wheeler. She's probably no relation -- though we share a connection with upstate New York, for whatever that's worth -- but she's a Wheeler, which means her books are by definition better than most. Sea Change is a Tor hardcover, which hit stores a few days ago.
, a literary coming-of-age novel set in 1971 in a small Canadian town (and originally published under his real name, Steve Lundin). It is not a fantasy novel -- certainly not along the lines of his bloody, complex epic fantasies that began a couple of years later with Gardens of the Moon -- but it's being published now in the US (for the first time, I think) by his fantasy publisher, Tor, in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback the first week of July.
Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series -- in which a WW II destroyer wanders via one of those convenient light-show temporal rifts into an alternate world in which a civilization of talking lemurs is caught up in a gigantic war with a civilization of talking lizards -- reaches its eighth book with Storm Surge
, coming as a hardcover from Roc on July 2nd. I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure that the cute furry aliens are the good guys and the cold-hearted clammy forked-tongues are the evil ones, as required.
And last is a big book of the art of Atsushi Ohkubo, best known (to me, at least) as the creator of the Soul Eater series, with the unsurprising title Soul Eater Soul Art
. It's coming from Yen Press this month -- which means it's probably out in all the places you might want to buy it -- and it has a neat clear plastic slipcase and lots of nice Ohkubo art (though not so much in the way of captions or text of any kind).
