What's Sparkling Now
The ten books setting the trade alight this fortnight.
Chart dated 19 August 2026
- 1
A treasure hunt brave enough to keep going after the treasure is found.
- 2
Saltglass and Sorrow
Still the best-written grief in the genre, still four hundred pages too long.
- 3
The Ashfall Market
Fantasy economics done properly: nobody in this book can afford the plot.
- 4
The fortieth-anniversary edition has sent a whole generation back underground.
- 5
The Tin Cartographer
A clockwork mapmaker, a border that keeps moving, and the year's best last line.
- 6
A Crown of Monsoons
Court intrigue in the rain. Wetter and meaner than its cover suggests.
- 7
The Drowned Library
Divers salvage books from a sunken city. The books object.
- 8
Brass and Bone
A siege told entirely from the surgeons' tent. Not for the faint of stomach.
- 9
The Long Tide Home
The gentlest book on this list, and the one most likely to ambush you.
- 10
What the River Kept
Folk horror at the edge of an empire, with a map you should not trust.
The chart is compiled by the Neo-Fantastica desk from booksellers’ reports, guild gossip and the honest weight of our own reading piles. It turns over every fortnight.