Donald Maass Literary Agency

Congratulations to our clients appearing on the Locus 2023 Recommended Reading List! NOVELS – SCIENCE FICTION System Collapse, Martha Wells (Tordotcom) NOVELS – FANTASY Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom) NOVELS – HORROR The Reformatory, Tananarive Due (Saga; Titan UK) FIRST NOVELS The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom) COLLECTIONS The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, Tananarive Due (Akashic) No One Will Come Back For Us, Premee Mohamed (Undertow) Skin Thief, Suzan Palumbo (Neon Hemlock) NOVELLAS The Salt Grows Heavy, […]

Bookpage: Dickinson’s obsession with detail greatly enriches the atmosphere of Exordia, which rockets across many points of view and locations as various team members look for clues to unravel the mystery. Dickinson has crafted a number of very human stories in a book ostensibly about aliens. Trauma, morality in the face of disaster, forgiveness, guilt, lost love and the bond between parents and children all find their way to the page. …there’s no question that it will be many sci-fi fans’ […]

French rights to Martha Wells’ SYSTEM COLLAPSE, the newest installment in the New York Times bestselling Murderbot Diaries series, to L’Atlante, by Sarah Dray at Anna Jarota Agency in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson. German rights to New York Times bestselling author Martha Wells’ SYSTEM COLLAPSE, the seventh installment in the Murderbot Diaries series, to Heyne, by Sarah Knofius at the Thomas Schlueck Agency in association with Michael Curry for Jennifer Jackson. German rights to USA Today bestselling author […]

Kirkus: Sherlock Holmes meets Game of Thrones. Call Bennett’s latest a drawing-room mystery, albeit the drawing room is the size of a small otherworldly kingdom. It begins, natch, with a corpse. “You were informed that the nature of his death was an alteration, yes, sir?” So asks a military officer of young Signum Dinios Kol, a.k.a. Din, who’s noted that a tree has torn the unfortunate victim apart. Din works for an oddball private detective, Immunis Anagosa Dolabra, a.k.a. Ana, […]

Publishers Weekly: In this enticing domestic thriller, Thompson (All the Dirty Secrets) zeroes in on the wealthy Calhoun family, who live in the exclusive Somerwood neighborhood of Chevy Chase, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C. It’s springtime, and Ginny and Thom Calhoun are hosting their annual cherry blossom party with their three grown children on hand: Trey, who works for Thom’s real estate development business; Nate, a marine biologist who lives in California; and lifestyle influencer Ellie Grace. When someone’s […]

Kirkus: Two generations before the events of Elatsoe (2020), Shane, a 17-year-old Lipan Apache girl, helps her mother, Lorenza, perform volunteer search-and-rescue operations. Familiar both with tracking to survive in the wilderness and counting change to survive under capitalism, Shane possesses the resourcefulness of an irresistible protagonist. Her practicality also provides the perfect foil for her extraordinary ability—inherited from her four-great-grandmother—to summon dead creatures, adding texture to her supernatural world. What starts out as Lorenza’s quest to locate two missing children […]

Scientific American: In Seth Dickinson’s 2015 debut novel, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, a fiercely willful woman from a colonized island plots her revenge against a brutal empire. This fascination with weighing the value of specific lives against a greater good also powers his new book, a mind-shredding first-contact epic. A spaceship or weapon or something has appeared in Kurdistan, where its mysteries get puzzled over by a sprawling cast. There are nukes, alien brain locks, intergalactic warfare and a scope that […]

Author of LONG PAST DUES, James J. Butcher sold two new novels in the Unorthodox Chronicles, continuing the misadventures of Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby. To be released in 2025 and 2026. Executive Editor Anne Sowards at Penguin Random House / Ace acquired world rights in a six-figure deal negotiated by Jennifer Jackson.

Kirkus: For three teen competitors at the exclusive Bastille Invitational tennis tournament in Florida, there’s more at stake than the winner’s trophy. Taiwanese American Alice Wu arrives still reeling from the loss of her father, who was also her coach. Mixed with her grief is the betrayal she feels toward the rest of her family, who hid Baba’s illness so she could have a “normal” life as long as possible. Alice receives another shock when she discovers that she’s rooming […]

Shelf Awareness: A secret superweapon capable of wiping out entire populations tips a world into full warfare in the action-packed The Olympian Affair, second in the steampunk Cinder Spires series from Jim Butcher (The Aeronaut’s Windlass). Humanity has long lived in the Spires, high above the dangers of the planet’s surface. Fleets of airships sail among them, powered by ether and carrying out trade–and, of course, war. The Spire of Aurora’s armada has unleashed a new weapon that has completely destroyed […]