11 exciting SFF book releases to kick off your New Year right this January

Tales from the Hinterland – Melissa Albert

Books within books seems to be all the rage this year – see also Leigh Bardugo’s The Lives of Saints, which recreates the grisly religious text so often referenced by the characters in her Grishaverse. (Spoiler alert: It’s haunting – and great!) Now, the author of the fabulously atmospheric The Hazel Wood and The Night Country is here to offer us the creepy tales of the fictional characters who come to life in her first two novels.

In Melissa Albert’s books, the Hinterland is a magical, fairy-like realm occupied by Story figures who repeatedly live out their own fictional existences over and over again. Within the world of the novel, their stories become public thanks to a woman named Althea Proserpine, who writes a book known as Tales from the Hinterland, which includes such dark characters as Alice-Three-Times and Twice-Killed Katherine. This novel, sporting the same title, is meant to be a real version of Prosperine’s fictional work, and now, finally, we can read these dark tales for ourselves.

(Considering this is pretty much exactly what I wanted to read as soon as I finished The Night Country, which introduces many of these figures, I’m pretty stoked!)

The official synopsis describes the story as follows.

"Before The Hazel Wood, there was Althea Proserpine’s Tales from the Hinterland… Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice–and still lives."

Tales from the Hinterland is available on January 12.