(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Ann Skea reviews...
 

The Familiar
by Leigh Bardugo

Luzia is a complex, likeable character. Santángelo remains a dark, threatening mystery until halfway through the book, when he reveals his secrets to Luzi. Aunt Hualit, too, has secrets, and Luzia is not always sure of her motives. And Liza's rival competitors have amazing and fascinating skills, which may be genuine, or they may be very sophisticated trickery. At least one of them attempts to kill Luzia, and she does not know who can be trusted.
 

Why Do Horses Run?
by Cameron Stewart

He thinks of "continental drift," the breakup of Gondwanaland, and the time when "Tasmanian tigers, or thylacines, roamed the entire region." And he remembers the last known Tasmanian tiger, held in captivity until, "On 7 September 1936," it died in its concrete cage. His memory of the exact date hints at his knowledge of extinct species and the career he once had documenting extinction and "the collapse of life." His daughter, Lotte, whose voice Ingvar hears as he walks, reminds him of things they did together, and how he would come home from field trips and bring her something "like a fossil or a piece of quartz."
 

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years
by Shubnum Khan

By 2014, when most of this story takes place, the djinn is still living in Akbar Manzil, but the family has gone. The house has changed hands many times, and when it falls into neglect and disrepair, the local municipality converts it into apartments. People move in and quickly move out, saying the house doesn't feel right. There is "scratching at doors" and it is "like the house (is) watching." The house itself is still alive. It "creaks and groans and shifts on its foundations" as its rooms remember past times; smells in the kitchen "look down drowsily" and "whisper to each other"; and it, like the djinn, reacts to everything the people inside it do.
 

Hungry Ghosts
by Kevin Jared Hosein

In interviews, Hosein has said that many of the domestic details of life in Trinidad in the 1940s came from conversations with his grandfather and other elders. These were the ordinary things of life, but it was a time of war. The colonial powers were leaving, and the Americans had begun to take over small villages to set up naval bases. It was a time of change, of independence, and of dreams a better life.
 

Thunderhead
by Miranda Darling

Winona is a compelling character, full of life and humor, and Miranda Darling draws you into her life so thoroughly that Thunderhead becomes a powerful and gripping experience of the insidious and subtle effects of coercive control. Only when I had finished the book did I wonder about Wife#1, who quietly made an escape to Bali to teach "muscular yoga," and Wife#2 who ended up, "sweet" but "vacant," in an "assisted living home." Had they, like Winona, challenged the script that "He" was writing for them, or had Wife#2, been destroyed by it?