Alternate Universe Fiction

Brought to you by Penguin. The most surprising thriller of the year Who would you trust with the future? The year is 2050. In the teeth of a climate catastrophe, the world is left with a drastic solution: one global leader to steer it through the coming apocalypse. The final two candidates are...

“Deviously clever and emotionally rich. I devoured it.” —Chandler Baker, New York Times bestselling author of Whisper Network Which would you choose: kiss, marry, or kill? When three best friends and founders of a health and wellness app on the verge of hitting the big time play a spin on...

What would you do if you woke up to a different life? Because that’s what happened to me. I woke up in a hospital bed with my family and friends telling me everything I knew was nothing more than a coma-induced dream. The girl I love. The baby we’re having…all of it ripped away. In their place is a house I don’t recognize and a girl I’ve never seen before who’s claiming she’s my fiancée. To everyone around me, it’s clear my mind twisted around my real life to create a false one. As weeks pass and a few crucial memories return, it’s easy to see they’re right.

"With impeccable inflections and tones, El-Attar's narration embodies the quirky investigator and those who surround her. She personifies both the place and the people, making them come alive. Listeners will imagine they're traversing Cairo through the deep, dark night. This is a perfect listen...

Set in Appalachia in the years before World War II, Velva Jean Learns to Drive is a poignant story of a spirited young girl growing up in the gold-mining and moonshining South. Before she dies, Velva Jean's mother urges her to "live out there in the great wide world." Velva Jean dreams of...

Young Alvin returns to the town of his birth and begins his apprenticeship with Makepeace Smith, committing seven years of his life in exchange for the skills and knowledge of a blacksmith. But Alvin must also learn to control and use his own talent, that of a Maker, or else his destiny will be unfulfilled.

To save humanity from being consigned to oblivion and to prevent war between elves and men, Eltanin, the first and greatest wizard there ever was, performed a terrible ritual that shattered the one world into two. For 20,000 years the two dimensions, unknown to each other, existed side by side. Aralia, home to the elfin race known as the Ferrishyn, and Earth, home to humanity, are both weakening. On Aralia, Magick is fading and will extinguish unless the two worlds are reunited.

The sky is not the limit. From an alley in New York to an interstellar wormhole, the path to the future looks different for everyone. These cosmic short stories from some of today’s most influential Black authors reveal a universe of possibilities.

Roy Court and his crew are taking the trip of a lifetime—several lifetimes in fact—duplicated and dispatched across the galaxies searching for Earthlike planets. Many possibilities for the future. Yet for Roy, no matter how many of him there are, there’s still just one painful, unchangeable past. In what world can a broken relationship be reborn? The universe is so vast, there’s always room for hope.

One night in Lagos, two former friends reunite. Obinna is a dutiful and unsophisticated stay-at-home husband and father married to a powerful businesswoman. Eze is single, a cautious rebel from his university days whose arrival soon upsets the balance in Obinna’s life. In a world where men are constantly under surveillance and subject to the whims of powerful women, more than Obinna’s ordered and accustomed routine might be on the line.