Realm Breaker by Victoria Aveyard

Realm Breaker by Victoria Aveyard 

A strange darkness grows in Allward. Even Corayne an-Amarat can feel it, tucked away in her small town at the edge of the sea. She soon discovers the truth: She is the last of an ancient lineage—and the last hope to save the world from destruction. But she won’t be alone. Even as darkness falls, she is joined by a band of unlikely companions: A squire, forced to choose between home and honor. An immortal, avenging a broken promise. An assassin, exiled and bloodthirsty. An ancient sorceress, whose riddles hide an eerie foresight. A forger with a secret past. A bounty hunter with a score to settle.

Together they stand against a vicious opponent, invincible and determined to burn all kingdoms to ash, and an army unlike anything the realm has ever witnessed.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
  • Blood & gore depiction
  • Murder
  • Fire

SPQR by Mary Beard

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard

By 63 BCE the city of Rome was a sprawling, imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants. But how did this massive city—the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria—emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy?

In S.P.Q.R., Beard changes our historical perspective, exploring how the Romans themselves challenged the idea of imperial rule, how they responded to terrorism and revolution, and how they invented a new idea of citizenship and nation, while also keeping her eye open for those overlooked in traditional histories: women, slaves and ex-slaves, conspirators, and losers.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Slavery
  • Rape
  • Murder

Machine by Elizabeth Bear

Machine by Elizabeth Bear

Meet Doctor Jens. She hasn’t had a decent cup of coffee in fifteen years. Her workday begins when she jumps out of perfectly good spaceships and continues with developing treatments for sick alien species she’s never seen before. She loves her life. Even without the coffee. But Dr. Jens is about to discover an astonishing mystery: two ships, one ancient and one new, locked in a deadly embrace. The crew is suffering from an unknown ailment and the shipmind is trapped in an inadequate body, much of her memory pared away. Unfortunately, Dr. Jens can’t resist a… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Ableism
  • Misogyny
  • Homomisia
  • Chronic pain

Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

Haimey Dz thinks she knows what she wants. She thinks she knows who she is. She is wrong.

A routine salvage mission uncovers evidence of a terrible crime and relics of powerful ancient technology. Haimey and her small crew run afoul of pirates at the outer limits of the Milky Way, and find themselves on the run and in possession of universe-changing information.

When authorities prove corrupt, Haimey realizes that she is the only one who can protect her galaxy-spanning civilization from the implications of this ancient technology—and the revolutionaries who want to use it for terror and war… Read more.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Abusive relationship recounted
  • Post Traumatic Stress Disorder & trauma

I am J by Cris Beam

I am J by Cris Beam

J always felt different. He was certain that eventually everyone would understand who he really was: a boy mistakenly born as a girl. Yet as he grew up, his body began to betray him; eventually J stopped praying to wake up a “real boy” and started covering up his body, keeping himself invisible – from his family, from his friends…from the world. But after being deserted by the best friend he thought would always be by his side, J decides that he’s done hiding – it’s time to be who he really is. And this time he is determined not to give up, no matter the cost.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Self harm

A Respectable Girl by Fleur Beale

A Respectable Girl by Fleur Beale

It is 1859 in the raw township of New Plymouth where Hannah Carstairs walks between two worlds. She finds that both her worlds are changing. First there are the disturbing hints about her dead mother’s past. Then, the tensions between the Maori tribes and the settlers boil over into war.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Racism
  • Childbirth

Black Widow by Carol Baxter

Black Widow by Carol Baxter

‘Never before in the hundred year history of Australia has a female prisoner become so notorious as Louisa Collins.’ – Evening News..Two inquests, four trials, three hung juries and the executioner…but was Louisa Collins really a husband killer? Was she the callous adulteress, drunkard and liar known as the Botany Bay Murderess and the Lucrezia Borgia of Botany Bay? Or was this mother of seven a spirited and defiant woman who was punished for breaching society’s expectations of womanly behaviour?..Compelling, freshly told and richly detailed, Black Widow uncovers the truth of a story that challenged the morality, the politics and the notion of law in an Australia on the edge of nationhood…

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Graphic emesis
  • Death of a child
  • Death of a spouse
  • Murder
  • Poisoning

Within These Walls by Robyn Bavati

Within These Walls by Robyn Bavati

Whatever is coming, we’ll face it together, as a family. As long as we’re together, we’ll be okay.

For Miri and her family, life in Warsaw is full of simple joys. The smell of freshly baked challah, the promise of summer holidays, and Fridays when everyone comes together to celebrate the Sabbath. But when the Germans march into Warsaw with their campaign of hatred against the Jews, Miri and her family must move to the ghetto. One by one her family are taken from her, and Miri finds herself alone. Can she survive, and will she even want to?

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antisemitism
  • Death of a parent
  • Death of a sibling
  • War themes & the Holocaust

The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister

The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister

Emmeline lives an enchanted childhood on a remote island with her father, who teaches her about the natural world through her senses. What he won’t explain are the mysterious scents stored in the drawers that line the walls of their cabin, or the origin of the machine that creates them. As Emmeline grows, however, so too does her curiosity, until one day the unforeseen happens, and Emmeline is vaulted out into the real world—a place of love, betrayal, ambition, and revenge. To understand her past, Emmeline must unlock the clues to her identity, a quest that challenges the limits of her heart and imagination.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Domestic violence
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent
  • Bullying
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Through the Skylight by Ian Baucom

Through the Skylight by Ian Baucom and illustrated by Justin Gerard

When Jared, Shireen, and Miranda are each given one glittering gift from an old Venetian shopkeeper, they never fathom the powers they are now able to unleash; they never expect that their very reality is about to be utterly upended. And the adventure has hardly begun.

For in another time, centuries earlier, another trio—Rashid, Maria, and Francesca—have been thrown together under terrible circumstances: They have been kidnapped and, along with hundreds of other children, will be sold into child slavery. Unless, that is, they can find some way to save them all.

But all their fates lie in the hands of Jared, Shireen, and Miranda. The future—and the lives—of these three very modern children become entirely intertwined with those of the children from the past. Danger, it seems, has a way of spanning centuries.

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Trigger & Content Warnings:

  • Antisemitism
  • Islamomisia
  • Smoking mentioned
  • Imprisonment
  • Animal injury
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