FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

Some Amazon UK daily deals. Kobo still shows the original prices for all except Annie Bot, but maybe that will change later today.

Bee Speaker (Dogs of War #3) by Adrian Tchaikovsky is £1.3 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

The Great When (Long London #1) by Alan Moore is £2.3 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

A propulsive tour through a fantastical London, where history and myth collide, murder stalks the streets and the mundane becomes very magical indeed…

The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital is Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen-year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How?

Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks bizarre and disastrous repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out (or worse).

So begins a journey delving deep into the city's occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers – some from legend, some all too real, and all with plans of their own. Soon Dennis finds himself at the centre of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons forever.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

Europe stares into the abyss.

Plague and famine stalk the land, monsters lurk in every shadow and greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions. Only one thing is certain: the elves will come again, and they will eat everyone.

Sometimes, only the darkest paths lead towards the light. Paths on which the righteous will not dare to tread . . .

And so, buried beneath the sacred splendour of the Celestial Palace, is the secret Chapel of the Holy Expediency. For its congregation of convicted monsters there are no sins that have not been committed, no lines that will not be crossed, and no mission that cannot be turned into a disastrous bloodbath.

Now the hapless Brother Diaz must somehow bind the worst of the worst to a higher cause: to put a thief on the throne of Troy, and unite the sundered church against the coming apocalypse.

When you're headed through hell, you need the devils on your side.

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer is £1 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

WINNER OF THE 2025 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD

Annie is the perfect girlfriend. She has dinner ready for Doug every night, wears the outfits he buys for her, and caters to his every sexual whim. Maybe her cleaning isn’t always good enough, but she’s trying really hard.

She was designed that way, after all.

Because Annie is a robot. But what happens when she starts to rebel against her stifled existence and imagine the impossible – a life without Doug?

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

A bunch of Japanese Honkaku murder mystery translations are on sale in the US and the UK.
By Yukito Ayatsuji (Kobo GB)
By Seishi Yokomizo (Kobo GB)

I'm confused. Are these hybrid-genre books?

If there is an element of fantasy/science fiction, then I will buy them.

But if they're just mystery novels, then I'll pass on them. (But iff they're literary mysteries with a hint of Haruki Murakami, then I'll buy them. I'm always on the look-out for something with some 'Murakami' in it.)

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

I'm confused. Are these hybrid-genre books?

Sorry, posted in the wrong forum

[salty-horse]

Cross-posted to Horror.
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou is $2 on Amazon.com (only there, and it's a "digital list price" discount, so no Kobo price matching)
A Bluebeard retelling. Debut novel by a prolific short story writer.

“Harrowing…a fairytale for the ages, subverting the tale of Bluebeard to deconstruct the systems of gender, power, and the excuses people make for bad men.” —Chicago Review of Books

“A murder ballad sung in a dark room — it’s slow, haunting and strangely beautiful.” —The New York Times Book Review

The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.