Very pleased to have The Saint of Bright Doors be one of seven fantasy novels listed in the Goodreads Big Books of Summer roundup as a highly anticipated title, as well as one of a larger selection of genre novels in their companion list, The Big Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror Books of Summer. As I understand it, this is based on how many people have added books to their “Want to read” shelf on Goodreads, so it’s a measure of buzz. Did not really expect to have buzz, so this is a very pleasant surprise. You can add Saint to your shelf here, if that is a sort of thing you do on Goodreads and you wish to be part of the buzz. The hive is all; I have eaten of the tainted jelly and become monstrous. As of this evening, about 9,700 people have added Saint to their to-read lists, which I think is pretty good for a debut that’s still nearly two months from launch. I mean, it’s my first time at the rodeo, I don’t know if that’s good or more like typical for a book that gets the Tor upper-midlist promo package, but either way, it’s fantastic as far as I’m concerned because a decade of writing short fiction has made me hungry for readers.

Other books in the buzzy lists include many, many books that I am also anticipating with pleasure, including (but by no means comprehensively) Witch King by Martha Wells, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig, Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs, The First Bright Thing by J.R. Dawson, The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw; The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang, The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao, and The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon, along with new work by Colson Whitehead, Paul Tremblay, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Catriona Ward. And many more books new or new-ish to me, which is the whole point of these lists as far as I’m concerned, finding things people are excited about that you hadn’t already heard of. I’m very used to browsing these things to find new books to read, but it’s so strange to be wandering the aisles and meet yourself on the shelf. Perhaps at some point authors get used to that, but for me it’s still very much a delightful novelty, and I think I would like it to remain so.