As a reader, I tend to be drawn to books that look as if they’ll take me somewhere new, and I’m glad to report that I was taken to a great many new places this year. This has been a particularly good year for innovative, fresh-feeling horror, which seems like an excellent place to start.

Leech by Hiron Ennes was a highlight. If I were to describe it as The Thing from the perspective of the parasite, then I wouldn’t be doing it justice; this book burrowed in my skull and refused to leave. I loved And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin, too – a post-truth psychological zombie thriller that will keep you guessing even after you’ve finished reading it.

I also had a great time with Cassandra Khaw’s Nothing But Blackened Teeth, which is a short, sharp, spiky novella that feels as if it might bite your eyes, and mention also must be made of Lucy Elizabeth Allan’s Skin Grows Over, a richly atmospheric novella filled with gravel and grit.

Fantasy is also in a good place at the margins – indie publishers are publishing some very interesting stuff right now. One to watch out for is Rym Kechacha’s To Catch a Moon, a surreal, dreamy carnival of a book, inspired by the paintings of Remedios Varo. And I would also strongly recommend Never the Wind by Francesco Dimitri – a masterfully written account of a young man who has recently lost his sight, newly navigating his life and the local landscape; buzzing with fantasy.

 A couple of other fantasy novels worth mentioning are Josh Winning’s thrilling The Shadow Glass, which gripped me both with nostalgia and the swift twist and turns of its plot, and Tom Beckerlegge’s Carnival of Ash, which paints a picture of a fictional city so viscerally that I still feel as if I might have lived there for a while.

Science fiction continues to be in a tricky place, struggling to find innovation (though I am so glad to see Harry Josephine Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia win the Clarke Award – the first verse-novel to do so!), but I still absolutely adored Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquillity, a novel about what we owe each other, even across the vast expanse of time, and Brian Baker’s Argo-0: a visual science fiction erasure poem that takes H.G Wells’ ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ and turns it into something completely different and beautifully compelling.

I also had a terrific time with Joma West’s Face, a touch-starved dystopia that feels very prescient, and Cassandra Khaw’s The All-Consuming World, a high-tempo techno-thriller that feels like the science fiction equivalent of listening to a death metal album at high volume.

I didn’t read as much short fiction as I would like, but I did manage to read The Best of World SF (Volume 1), edited by Lavie Tidhar (released this year in paperback): an extremely important release showcasing not only a whole world of speculative fiction, but a clear picture of just how badly SF publishers have been doing when it comes to highlighting or even buying up the work of international voices. And I had a great time with Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny – a surreal set of SFF stories that shift genre with every turn of the page.

I have yet to look too far ahead into 2023, because I feel as if I still have so much to catch up on from this year! I can’t wait to get stuck into Ever Dundas’s HellSans, which has such a brilliant concept, and I desperately need to get started on The Best of World SF (Volume II), which, I already know, will be every bit as excellent as Volume I. I do know that an advance copy of Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange is on its way to me right now, though, and it sounds right up my street…

Here's hoping that 2023 is filled with even more excellence, and a lot more innovation.