17 new SFF books to get nice and cozy with this September

Kingdom of Souls – Rena Barron

Kingdom of Souls is inspired by tales of folk magic, and though it clearly has many things in common with several other recent novels that have featured magical West African settings in recent years, most notably Children of Blood and Bone. But it’s the story’s strong heroine and highly detailed world-building that make this novel stand out from the pack.

It follows the story of Arrah, a young girl who is heartbroken to discover she doesn’t possess any magic, despite being descended from two different, powerful lineages. As a result she throws herself into discovering who is behind a series of recent child abductions in her kingdom.

For this reasons, and several others, Arrah eventually makes a dangerous bargain – to trade several years of her life for magic – a decision that brings about devastating and complicated consequences.

The official synopsis describes the story in more detail.

"Arrah is a young woman from a long line of the most powerful witch doctors in the land. But she fails at magic, fails to call upon the ancestors and can’t even cast the simplest curse. Shame and disappointment dog her. When strange premonitions befall her family and children in the kingdom begin to disappear, Arrah undergoes the dangerous and scorned process of selling years of her life for magic. This borrowed power reveals a nightmarish betrayal and a danger beyond what she could have imagined. Now Arrah must find a way to master magic, or at least buy it, in order to save herself and everything she holds dear."

Kingdom of Souls is available on September 3.