New year, new genre: reading recommendations to ease you out of your comfort zone

Broaden your sci-fi horizons with this fantastic piece of literary fiction which shares a similar space (pun partially intended).

Emily St. John Mandel reached new levels of success in 2020 when her 2014 pandemic-set dystopia Station Eleven became a lockdown favourite. Sea of Tranquility sees her move even further into science fiction. Lives separated by time and space have collided, and an exiled Englishman, a writer trapped far from home, and a girl destined to die too young, have each glimpsed a world that is not their own. Travelling through the centuries, between colonies on the moon and an ever-changing Earth, together their lives will solve a mystery that will make you question everything you thought you knew to be true.

If Poe wrote about parasites. . . Add a bit of Gothic science fiction into your reading mix with this atmospheric dystopian horror. In an isolated, icebound community, a doctor kills himself. The replacement, sent by the Interprovincial Medical Institute, discovers a parasite living in the corpse. But how did it survive, when the doctor was already possessed? And who exactly are the Interprovincial Medical Institute?

For a deeply involving love story where the happy-ever-after feels less than guaranteed, try Alone With You in the Ether.

Obsessive, eccentric personalities Aldo and Charlotte struggle to be without each other from the moment they meet, but they’re struggling in other ways too. Aldo is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel. Charlotte is a bipolar counterfeit artist undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. And whilst they’re deeply in love, their reliance on each other is increasingly troubling.

Further proof that YA fiction should not be dismissed by Older Adults, Promise Boys is an exquisitely taut thriller about three teen boys of colour who must investigate their principal’s murder to clear their own names. This a brilliant, tense mystery which shines a glaring light on how the system too often condemns Black and Latinx teen boys to failure before they’ve even had a chance at success, and a great introduction to a whole new arena of publishing.

Let PI and World War Two veteran Aloysius Archer take you around 1950s LA in this heady combination of a glittering historical setting and the edge-of-your-seat thriller writing David Baldacci is famous for. It is New Year’s Eve and PI Aloysius Archer is dining with his friend and rising Hollywood actress Liberty Callahan when they’re approached by Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter who wants to hire him, as she suspects someone is trying to kill her. . .

If you’d like to make your lit fic more riotous in 2023, try Becky: Vanity Fair meets Succession in nineties tabloid-era London. Scoop after scoop, Becky's downfall looms as she becomes more and more involved in every scandal her newspaper publishes and cares less and less about the lives she ruins in the process. A sharply intelligent and funny interrogation of how far society has really come since Thackeray's nineteenth-century Becky Sharp.

This is true crime meets literary fiction, based on a real case from the 1920s. It's the story of Beatrice, one of the thousands of nameless and invisible unmarried women trying to make lives for themselves after the First World War, and Kate, the wife of the man Beatrice has fallen in love with. When fantasy and obsession turns to murder, two women who should never have met are connected forever.