Donald Maass Literary Agency

Kirkus: Nicky Drayden’s debut novel The Prey of Gods is a surprising cornucopia of genres and characters taking place in a futurist South Africa and with seemingly disparate, multi-layered storylines that slowly progress toward each other­–just as the characters do. It’s a little bit surreal, a little bit weird, a lot of fun and wholly impressive. In a world that is constantly bombarding me with evil and awful news, reading something so queer, so beautiful, so hopeful, so cool­–well, do you wonder why I wanted more?

B&N SFF Blog: This is one of those books that can’t be adequately described; better to silently hand it to someone and nod sagely, implying with your expression that this is the book that will change everything. Describing the universe Lee creates here isn’t easy, but here’s a go at it: it’s a consensus reality, shaped by the shared and very rigid belief of the inhabitants, belief is controlled by numbers, equations, and other mathematical processes. Reality itself is therefore governed […]

Booklist: Ireland delivers a necessary, subversive, and explosive novel with her fantasy-laced alternate history. America is changed forever when the dead begin to prowl battlefields during the Civil War. A smart, poignant, thrilling novel that does the all-important work of exploring topics of oppression, racism, and slavery while simultaneously accomplishing so much more. From page one, Jane is a capable, strong heroine maneuvering through a world that is brilliant and gut-wrenching. Dread Nation will take readers on a breathless ride from beginning […]

Congratulations to Elizabeth Bear on The Stone in the Skull making Kirkus’ list of Best Fiction of 2017!

Congratulations to the DMLA clients who made Amazon’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2017! All Systems Red by Martha Wells Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett  

Kirkus: Annalise Williams, 24, is obsessed with an unsolved crime: the disappearance and presumed murder years earlier of a 16-year-old girl with the same first name: Annalise Wood—”the kind of girl you look at and think, of course someone would want to take her.” An intriguing, suspenseful, and briskly paced story with complex characters, evocative descriptions of England’s Cambridgeshire, plenty of clever misdirection, and a satisfying ending.

Locus Magazine: With Elizabeth Bear’s previous novels in the same world: the Eternal Sky trilogy of Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars, and Steles of the Sky. That trilogy is one of the best – most deeply thought, carefully structured, and elegantly finished – epic fantasies of the last decades. Bear’s worldbuilding is, as ever, a richly detailed delight, rendered tangible in cut-glass prose. The precision and care with which she employs language make the landscapes through which her characters move come powerfully to life – and gives those […]

Washington Post: With over 200 color and black-and-white illustrations, six appendixes and nearly 1,000 annotations, this edition of “Frankenstein” is a cornucopia of background information … Klinger’s edition allows readers to understand the complexities of the novel as well as the difficulties endured by its author. Only then can one be truly inspired by Mary Shelley’s genius and her bravery.

Publishers Weekly: This solid mystery from Slaughter (While I Danced) opens with the murder of Clara Seibert’s twin sister, Moura, a piano prodigy. Clara’s voice and internal conflict feel authentic, and the contentious relationship between the sisters is equally believable. Fans of the genre will find much to enjoy in this thriller.

Publishers Weekly: After an eight-year hiatus, Landon (The Dark Reaches) returns with a complex fourth novel that combines dystopian and first-contact themes. Vika Jai, a young female xenobiologist, wakes from 40 years of cryogenic sleep to a ravaged ship and crew. Only three humans survive to make landfall on Shothef Erau, an inhabited planet known to have been bombed by an alien force. This is a quiet, tense book, saturated with dread. Vika, barely out of adolescence, is convincingly depicted as […]