Second paragraph of third section:

Human formalwear was a deep research hole. Some of this stuff went back four or five hundred years. Avi decided to give Andy a new interest in life and started saving images to his feeds. Could he get a cravat? No. A tie, though? Did he want a tie? Avi stopped and read on some zunimmer hobbyist’s page a brute-force machine translation of what had probably been an article in T-Standard to start with, all about the origin of the necktie. Of fucking course it was a military thing. Station popped up in the corner of his vision with a cheery little message: It looks like you’re researching human history! This is a controversial topic, so would you like to hear from an expert?

This is a short (22 pages) postscript to the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory, written for those of us who attended Novacon last month. Emily Tesh writes, “It follows the thread of the parallel-reality engineer Avicenna, who is both a secondary protagonist and a major antagonist in Some Desperate Glory. I have to confess he was always my favourite character, and it was a pleasure to write about him again.” It is a nice little story of redemption, with some cracking good lines. Hopefully it will get published more widely eventually.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Kenning was right underneath their new visitor. What was she doing?

Emily Tesh again shows her extraordinary versatility, with a story of a queer teacher in charge of safeguarding vulnerable pupils at a magical boarding school against dark forces while securing her own back against bureaucratic enemies. This is contemporary Britain, but with demons and a professional structure for the magically talented people who control them; it’s also a Britain where our friends class and race are alive and well, especially in a school where some of the scholarship pupils are also orphans. There’s cracking emotional chemistry as well between Sapphire Walden, the damaged but still idealistic protagonist, and her love interests; and finely observed dynamics of how a small group of gifted teenagers interact with the outside world.

It’s brilliant stuff, and really it makes you realize how few of the well-known magic school stories, from Roke to Hogwarts to the Scholomance, tell the story from the viewpoint of the teachers rather than the pupils. (There’s Unseen University in Discworld, but it’s a third-level institution rather than school and it also seems to have very few students.) Of course there’s always mileage in a rite-of-passage story, but the children’s point of view sees only the part of the educational iceberg that is above the surface. If you see what I mean.

Anyway, you can get The Incandescent here, and you should.

After the success of Emily Tesh’s first novel, Some Desperate Glory, at last year’s Hugos, I went back and reread her previous two publications, the Greenhollow Duology, a pair of fantasy novellas published in 2029 and 2020. (Actually I got them for Anne for Christmas, in the confident and correct expectation that she would enjoy them too.)

The second paragraph of the third section of the first of the two chapters of Silver in the Wood is:

The cry was coming from somewhere outside. Tobias groaned softly as time sped up again to let him hear it. The wound in his thigh was aching, and not with the dull throb of healing pain. Who was disturbing him now? Hell, who was there left who even knew his name?

I wrote of it in 2021:

Short and sweet. Lovely fantasy story of contemporary England with m/m romance told from the point of view of the Green Man himself.

To expand on that a bit, it’s really very magical in several ways. Tobias, the Green Man protagonist, forms a deep and understatedly romantic friendship with a folklorist called Silver who moves into his woods (hence the title); when Silver mysteriously vanishes, his mother comes on the scene and we move into sorcerous retrieval.

The second paragraph of the third section of Drowned Country is:

The silence lengthened. Silver knew this tactic intimately but crumpled anyway. “Well, what?” he said.

Two years later, Silver and Tobias are no longer on good terms, for reasons that gradually become clear; and Silver’s mother summons them to a blasted English seaside resort, which people who know more than me tell me is rather similar to Whitby, to investigate the disappearance of a young woman. But it turns out that the young woman herself has her own agenda, and the story becomes a surprising twist on the standard vampire narrative.

This is all very different from Some Desperate Glory, but what all three share is a strong yet clear-eyed sympathy for her characters by the author, combined with a tremendous sense of place. Tobias’s woods, Silver’s home, and the various seaside locations are all vividly and economically realised, and the two novellas tell quite big stories in a small number of pages. You can get Silver in the Wood here, and Drowned Country here. And Tesh’s second full novel, The Incandescent, comes out in May.

I rather cheated on my lists by bumping Silver in the Wood to the top of my pile of unread books by women, even though I had already read it. Next on that pile is Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott.