What if you could step out of this world, the “real” world, and into another? All the books on this list imagine just that, in their own way.
1. Roses and Rot, Kat Howard
At a retreat for artists, where other worlds are explored through visual art, music, writing, Imogen discovers that there is another world waiting just beyond the borders of the property, and is confronted by the question of what she would do, when offered the chance at not only a glimpse of this world, but success beyond her dreams.
2. A Daughter of No Nation, A.M. Dellamonica
This one is actually the second in a series, but somehow managed to slip past my orderly reading practices. Sophie returns to the world of Stormwrack, made up of brief archipelagos of land among the wilds of the oceans. Magic is involved, and a lot of nautical journeying.
3. A Darker Shade of Magic, V.E.Schwab
Follow Kell and his magical coat as he moves between red, gray, and white London, smuggling magical items between worlds, until he meets with Lila in grey London and is confronted by true darkness.
4. A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki
This isn’t really a novel about slipping between parallel worlds, but about the parallelisms that happen when artifacts of one life bleed into another’s, when life in one’s personal world becomes more than they can bear and only slipping into someone else’s life offers and succor.
5. Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho
Cho moves the faery story into the 21st century with this novel of magic and sorcery in early empire Great Britain, in which a new Sorcerer Royal, former African slave Zacharias Wythe, is tasked with finding the reason for the decline of magic in Britain who runs head on into a young woman, Prunella Gentleman, determined to make her way in the world and learn the true story of her parentage and magical inheritance.
