2020 is coming, and a new year means new books!

2020 anticipated reads includes sequels to books read and loved in 2019 and books barely heard of before.

Voices in the Snow by Darcy Coates

Expected Publication:
January 7 2020

In 2019, I enjoyed several of Darcy Coates’ books, including Craven Manor and Hunted.

In 2020, she comes out with another book: Voices in the Snow.

Clare knows she was running from something–she just can’t remember what. When she wakes, aching and injured, in a stranger’s gothic nightmare of a home, she can’t help but feel something is after her. She’s desperate to keep going, but a vicious snowstorm has blanketed the world in white, and there’s nothing she can do but wait it out.

At least the stranger seems kind…but Clare doesn’t know if she can trust him. He promised they were alone here, yet she sees and hears things that convince her something else is in the rambling old house with them, lurking in the shadows, watching. Waiting. Between the claustrophobic storm and the feeling of being stalked, Clare is on edge…and as her memories of the hours before her accident begin to return, the things she saw and heard leave her with one terrible question:

What is The Stillness, and why is she so afraid?

The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2) by Melissa Albert

Expected publication:
January 7th 2020

I LOVED The Hazel Wood, so the minute I heard there was to be a sequel, I preordered it.

Plus, the cover is beautiful!

In The Night Country, Alice Proserpine dives back into a menacing, mesmerizing world of dark fairy tales and hidden doors. Follow her and Ellery Finch as they learn The Hazel Wood was just the beginning, and that worlds die not with a whimper, but a bang.

With Finch’s help, Alice escaped the Hinterland and her reclusive grandmother’s dark legacy. Now she and the rest of the dregs of the fairy tale world have washed up in New York City, where Alice is trying to make a new, unmagical life. But something is stalking the Hinterland’s survivors―and she suspects their deaths may have a darker purpose. Meanwhile, in the winking out world of the Hinterland, Finch seeks his own adventure, and―if he can find it―a way back home…

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

Expected publication:
January 7th 2020

Half-Fae, half-human Bryce Quinlan loves her life. By day, she works for an antiquities dealer, selling barely legal magical artifacts, and by night, she parties with her friends, savouring every pleasure Lunathion—otherwise known as Crescent City— has to offer. But it all comes crumbling down when a ruthless murder shakes the very foundations of the city—and Bryce’s world.

Two years later, her job has become a dead end, and she now seeks only blissful oblivion in the city’s most notorious nightclubs. But when the murderer attacks again, Bryce finds herself dragged into the investigation and paired with an infamous Fallen angel whose own brutal past haunts his every step.

Hunt Athalar, personal assassin for the Archangels, wants nothing to do with Bryce Quinlan, despite being ordered to protect her. She stands for everything he once rebelled against and seems more interested in partying than solving the murder, no matter how close to home it might hit. But Hunt soon realizes there’s far more to Bryce than meets the eye—and that he’s going to have to find a way to work with her if they want to solve this case.

As Bryce and Hunt race to untangle the mystery, they have no way of knowing the threads they tug ripple through the underbelly of the city, across warring continents, and down to the darkest levels of Hel, where things that have been sleeping for millennia are beginning to stir…

Dark and Deepest Red by Anna-Marie McLemore

Expected Publication:
January 14th 2020

Summer, 1518. A strange sickness sweeps through Strasbourg: women dance in the streets, some until they fall down dead. As rumors of witchcraft spread, suspicion turns toward Lavinia and her family, and Lavinia may have to do the unimaginable to save herself and everyone she loves.

Five centuries later, a pair of red shoes seal to Rosella Oliva’s feet, making her dance uncontrollably. They draw her toward a boy who knows the dancing fever’s history better than anyone: Emil, whose family was blamed for the fever five hundred years ago. But there’s more to what happened in 1518 than even Emil knows, and discovering the truth may decide whether Rosella survives the red shoes.

With McLemore’s signature lush prose, Dark and Deepest Red pairs the forbidding magic of a fairy tale with a modern story of passion and betrayal. 

Zed by Joanna Kavenna

Expected January 14, 2020

One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm . . . now what to do with all these messy people?
Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle’s supposedly omniscient ‘lifechain’ don’t work, or, they’ve been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle’s technotopia and life as we know it.

Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment—the ugliness and the beauty—perfectly. Kavenna is a prophet who has seen deeply into the present—and thrown back her head and laughed.

Dreamland by Nancy Bilyeau

Expected Publication:
January 16th 2020

The year is 1911 when twenty-year-old heiress Peggy Batternberg is invited to spend the summer in America’s Playground.

The invitation to the luxurious Oriental Hotel a mile from Coney Island is unwelcome. Despite hailing from one of America’s richest families, Peggy would much rather spend the summer working at the Moonrise Bookstore than keeping up appearances with New York City socialites and her snobbish, controlling family.

But soon it transpires that the hedonism of nearby Coney Island affords Peggy the freedom she has been yearning for, and it’s not long before she finds herself in love with a troubled pier-side artist of humble means, whom the Batternberg patriarchs would surely disapprove of.

Disapprove they may, but hidden behind their pomposity lurks a web of deceit, betrayal and deadly secrets. And as bodies begin to mount up amidst the sweltering clamour of Coney Island, it seems the powerful Batternbergs can get away with anything…even murder.

Extravagant, intoxicating and thumping with suspense, bestselling Nancy Bilyeau’s magnificent Dreamland is a story of corruption, class and dangerous obsession. 

The Deep by Alma Katsu 

Expected Publication: March 10th 2020

Someone, or something, is haunting the Titanic.

This is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the passengers of the ship from the moment they set sail: mysterious disappearances, sudden deaths. Now suspended in an eerie, unsettling twilight zone during the four days of the liner’s illustrious maiden voyage, a number of the passengers – including millionaires Madeleine Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, the maid Annie Hebbley and Mark Fletcher – are convinced that something sinister is going on . . . And then, as the world knows, disaster strikes.

Years later and the world is at war. And a survivor of that fateful night, Annie, is working as a nurse on the sixth voyage of the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic, now refitted as a hospital ship. Plagued by the demons of her doomed first and near fatal journey across the Atlantic, Annie comes across an unconscious soldier she recognises while doing her rounds. It is the young man Mark. And she is convinced that he did not – could not – have survived the sinking of the Titanic . . .

Brilliantly combining fact and fiction, the historical and the horrific, The Deep reveals a chilling truth in an unputdownable narrative full of unnerving moments and with a growing, inexorable sense of foreboding.

All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban

Expected Publication:
March 17th 2020

Welcome to dinner, and again, congratulations on being selected. Now you must do the selecting.

What do the queen bee, star athlete, valedictorian, stoner, loner, and music geek all have in common? They were all invited to a scholarship dinner, only to discover it’s a trap. Someone has locked them into a room with a bomb, a syringe filled with poison, and a note saying they have an hour to pick someone to kill … or else everyone dies.

Amber Prescott is determined to get her classmates and herself out of the room alive, but that might be easier said than done. No one knows how they’re all connected or who would want them dead. As they retrace the events over the past year that might have triggered their captor’s ultimatum, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding something. And with the clock ticking down, confusion turns into fear, and fear morphs into panic as they race to answer the biggest question: Who will they choose to die? 

Untitled (An Ember in the Ashes #4) by Sabaa Tahir

Expected Publication:  April 18th 2020

Sabaa Tahir. Need I say more?

Sabaa Tahir has more battles planned for her heroine Laia in the best-selling fantasy series “An Ember in the Ashes.”

Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it had a deal for books 3 and 4. The author’s first novel, “An Ember in the Ashes,” came out last year and was an immediate critical and commercial hit, with Paramount Pictures acquiring film rights. The sequel, “A Torch Against the Night,” is scheduled for publication at the end of this month. Book 3 is expected in 2018.

The series is set in a world inspired by ancient Rome and tells of young Laia’s fight, which leads her to disguise herself as a slave, against the tyrannical Martial Empire.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Expected Publication:
May 19th 2020

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will revisit the world of Panem sixty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Tenth Hunger Games.

The Iron Season by Helene Wecker

Expected Publication:  xxx 2020

The Golem and the Jinni #2.

Helene Wecker’s debut, The Golem and the Jinni is, by far, one of my favorite books of all time. Its sequel, I’m sure, will be just as devourable.

The novel is set during the World War I era and continues the story of Chava (the golem) and Ahmad (the jinni) who encounter other beings of their own kind, only to realize that their close ties to human beings have forever altered them.

*Cover image from 123RF