1) The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar. Second paragraph of third chapter:
When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance—that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it. Folk said that when they sang together, you could feel grammar in the air. If they sang a stormy sky, the day clouded over. If they sang adventure, blood rose to the boil. If they sang a sweet sadness, everything looked a little silver from the corners of the eyes.
As I said previously, a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces. Get it here.
2) What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Certainly,” I said. I had made an attempt at folding my clothes back into my trunk, which Angus was in the process of correcting. “What’s on your mind?”
Great Lovecraftian tale of horrors in West Virgian coal mines, in the same sequence as What Moves the Dead (my 2023 vote) and What Feasts at Night (2025 finalist). Get it here.
3) The Summer War, by Naomi Novik. Second paragraph of third chapter:
But now Father was the one who had made the stupid mistake. Celia knew that Father didn’t care that Argent liked boys; nothing like that ever mattered to him. What he did care about was that if people knew that Argent liked boys, it would give the king an excuse to refuse to give him a royal princess for his wife, and maybe even to disinherit him. Father had just been trying to teach Argent not to get caught, and it had never occurred to him that Argent wanted love more than power.
Fantasy story of magic, sibling relationships, chivalry, and queer fairy-like races. A lot going on. Get it here.
4) Cinder House, by Freya Marske. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Ella didn’t have a will. And with two silent corpses it was easy for the living to dictate the timeline. Ella fell down the stairs, yes, such a terrible accident, and died first. And her father’s heart stopped from grief when it happened.
Reworking of Cinderella as a ghost story. Good and creepy. Get it here.
5) Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite. Second paragraph of third chapter:
Vast round windows in both bow and stern, like the domes of some sideways cathedral, now flickering with the green-and-purple auroras of magnetic disturbances. Ramps and lifts up and down between decks, abandoned from the storm and the lateness of the hour. The diamond patterns of the metal railings, turning shadows into stripes. Doors both simple and ornate, flanked by planters and chairs. Flats and home shops and small cafés, vanishing into the distance, an entire small city flowering as it sped through the great dark nothing.
There seems to be a real fashion for murders on spaceships these days, doesn’t there? Some good descriptive writing but I felt the body-swapping plot didn’t quite hang together. Get it here.
6) Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz. Second paragraph of third section:
The octobot may have been designed for search-and-rescue, but their real obsession had always been business. When the Army upgraded them with an olfactory-gustatory sensor array called NosyMouth—good for sniffing out dangerous chemicals!—they realized there was money to be made using the device’s “taster” features. Humans would pay almost anything for a good meal, especially in times of hardship. All the most successful entrepreneurs of the wartime era had been in the food business. Even in a wrecked post-war economy, you could always find a market for things that tasted delicious.
I hate cute robots, and this is a story about cute robots setting up a noodle store in San Francisco in a newly independent California. One of the cute robots is actually called ‘Sweetie’. Get it here.
The top four of these are all great stories, and it may just be my personal prejudices blinding me to the merits of the other two.
2026 Hugos: Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Dramatic Presentation, Short Form | Professional Artist | Poem
Best Novel: The Incandescent | Shroud | The Raven Scholar
Best Graphic Story or Comic: The Invisible Parade | three more finalists | A Wizard of Earthsea
Best Related Work: Colourfields | The Cuddled Little Vice | Inventing the Renaissance
Lodestar: Holy Terrors | Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe
Where to get them | Goodreads/Librarything/StoryGraph stats