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About us

**Please note that we DO NOT have a presence on Facebook. We will also NEVER contact you to ask for money.

We're a online speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, etc.) book club with an eye to inclusion and exploration of the wealth of amazing work out there. We read novels, novellas, and short stories, both new and old, and we read at least one work in translation each year. The works we choose are all available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

We meet once a month via Zoom on the third Sunday of every month with a few exceptions. We will host open book chats in June and July as well as town hall meetings in August.

We'd love to have you join us to talk about great writing!

Here's a list of what we'll be reading this year and what we've read in the past:
Current Year
2026

  • Siren Queen by Nghi Vo (she/her)
  • Esperance by Adam Oyebanji (he/him)
  • One Hundred Shadows by Hwang Jungeun (she/her), trans. Jung Yewon (she/her)
  • Early Riser by Jasper Fforde (he/him)
  • The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years: A Novel by Shubnum Khan (she/her)
  • Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction edited by Joshua Whitehead (he/him)
  • Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (he/him), trans. Jonathan Wright (he/him)
  • Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi (she/her)

Previous Years
2017

  • “Binti” by Nnedi Okorafor
  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
  • Beggars In Spain by Nancy Kress
  • Long Hidden, edited by Daniel José Older & Rose Fox
  • “Ghost Summer” by Tananarive Due (in the collection of the same name)
  • All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
  • The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
  • The Life Engineered by JF Dubeau
  • Infomocracy by Malka Older

2018

  • The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
  • Everfair by Nisi Shawl
  • Rosetta by Stephen Patterson
  • Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
  • Ready Player One by Earnest Cline
  • Contact by Carl Sagan
  • Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer
  • The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord
  • All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

2019

  • The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
  • Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
  • Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
  • Children of Blood and Bone by Toni Adeyemi
  • Red Rising by Pierce Brown
  • The Stone Raft by José Saramago
  • Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
  • The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
  • Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
    - We also did a trial of a writing group that didn’t take off, but the books were:
  • Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer

2020

  • All Systems Red by Martha Wells
  • Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang
  • An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King
  • Version Control by Dexter Palmer
  • The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo
  • If the Universe is Teeming with Aliens…Where Is Everybody? By Stephen Webb
  • How Long ’Til Black Future Month by N.K. Jemisin
  • Supernova Era by Cixin Liu
  • Sabriel by Garth Nix

2021

  • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
  • Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
  • The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
  • Honor Among Thieves by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre
  • The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
  • New Suns, edited by Nisi Shawl
  • The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
  • Of This New World by Allegra Hyde

2022

  • PET by Akwaeke Emezi (delayed from December 2021)
  • She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
  • The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  • An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
  • Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland
  • Victories Greater Than Death & Never Say You Can't Survive by Charlie Jane Anders
  • I'm Waiting For You & Other Stories by Kim Bo-Young
  • The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw
  • Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

2023

  • Sea of Rust by Robert C. Cargill
  • The City Inside by Samit Basu
  • Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Zelda Knight

2024

  • The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach
  • The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang
  • Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
  • The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
  • A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens by Raul Palmas
  • Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
  • Cursed Bunny: Stories by Bora Chuny, trans. Anton Hur
  • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

2025

  • Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (he/him) trans. Geoffrey Trousselot (he/him)
  • Noor by Nnedi Okorafor (she/her)
  • Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology edited by Shane Hawk (he/him) and Theodore C. Van Alst (he/him)
  • If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang (she/her)
  • A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle (he/him)
  • I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi (she/they)
  • Whalefall by Daniel Kraus (he/him)
  • The Bullet Swallower: A Novel by Elizabeth Gonzalez James (she/her)
[ONLINE] Let's Read Gingerbread

[ONLINE] Let's Read Gingerbread

·
Online
Online

Our November selection is Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi (she/her).

Our next meetings:

  • January: TBD

From Penguin Random House:
"Exhilarating...A wildly imagined, head-spinning, deeply intelligent novel." - The New York Times Book Review

"[W]ildly inventive…[Helen Oyeyemi's] prose is not without its playful bite." –Vogue

The prize-winning, bestselling author of Boy Snow Bird, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, and Peaces returns with a bewitching and imaginative novel.

Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories, beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe.

Perdita Lee may appear to be your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they might not be as normal as they think they are. For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventh-floor walk-up apartment with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there's the gingerbread they make. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it's very popular in Druhástrana, the far-away (or, according to many sources, non-existent) land of Harriet Lee's early youth. The world's truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread, however, is Harriet's charismatic childhood friend Gretel Kercheval —a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met.

Decades later, when teenaged Perdita sets out to find her mother's long-lost friend, it prompts a new telling of Harriet's story. As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value. Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi's inimitable style and imagination, it is a true feast for the reader.

Penguin Random House

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